Asking For Trouble by jon cohen (Ebook)
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Asking For Trouble

Praise for Asking For Trouble

"Asking For Trouble is a super book. I enjoyed every word. If I'd read this book sooner, I could have wasted so much less of my life failing to understand a very simple truth. So much of what we do in marketing simply starts from the wrong place."

Rory Sutherland. Vice Chair of Ogilvy, Ted Global speaker and author of The Alchemist

"Asking for Trouble is inspiring and funny. I found myself nodding along in agreement to Jon’s wisdom and wit. Bravo! I thoroughly recommend this book."

Rita Clifton CBE. Chair and portfolio non-executive director, writer and keynote speaker

"An incredibly usable guide that is also wonderfully readable and intellectually stimulating. Quite a coup! Asking For Trouble gives the reader powerful insight. I enjoyed every moment of it."

Adam Martin. Managing Director Tesco Hospitality

"Asking For Trouble is an extraordinarily easy read. It is very human. I found myself thinking more about how to best conduct good conversations around the dinner table or figuring out my sons and my relationship to them than about my last ad campaign."

Charles Cadell. Ex President and CEO McCann Asia Pacific & Japan

"Asking For Trouble should be compulsory for anyone daft enough to think research is about asking questions. I nodded manically and laughed out loud reading Jon’s brilliant, often hilarious, tales of encounters with research respondents whilst in the pursuit of truth. It’s an original and a total joy. I loved it."

Suzanne Lugthart. Award winning research and insight strategist

The author's entertaining and jargon-free writing makes this insightful and thought-provoking book very easy to read.

Dr Jenny Mindell. Professor of Public Health, University College London

If you are even remotely interested in asking questions and/or finding answers, Jon will take you on a fabulous journey. He is a warm, witty and insightful guide.

Antony Tasgal. Author of the Story Telling Book

"Asking For Trouble, a fantastic book by one of the UK’s smartest marketers and an expert in what makes people tick. This book takes the complicated subject of the study of humans and ideas, and makes it digestible, useful and incredibly inspiring."

Steve Lacey. Founder of 'The Outsiders'

Asking For Trouble

Understanding what people think when you can’t trust what they say

Jon Cohen

Wonder Wheel Publishing

Contents

Introduction

I. Understanding

1. The Illusion of Interest

2. Response and Responsibility

3. The Wonder Wheel

4. Appeal

5. Purpose

6. Relevance

7. Listen Little

8. Impact

9. Clarity

10. Belief

11. Personality

12. Desire

13. The Illusion Index

A Quick Break

II. Truth

14. Marrakesh Syndrome

15. Making Demands

16. Hidden Forces

17. Compose Yourself

18. The ACID Test

19. No Guts No Glory

III. Good Asking Guide

Introduction to the Guide

1: Back to Basics

2: The Good Traveller

3: What to Pack

4: Where to Stay

5: Learning the Language

6: Keeping Out of Trouble

7: The Golden Triangle

Epilogue: The Art of Asking

Image Credits

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright © Jon Cohen 2021

The author has asserted the rights to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Cover Design by Jack Smyth

ISBN: 978-1-8381199-1-1

To my sons

It can be done

Introduction

It all started with a picture of a dead cat. My first task as a market researcher was to ask people what they thought about a black and white image of a scrawny cat with a bolt through its head. The question was simple: Did the image cross the line? Would the advertising shock people into connecting with the cause, or was it a picture of cruelty so disturbing as to turn the public off? Some twenty-five years on, I’ve asked over ten thousand people what they think about almost every challenge we face as a society and every product we consume. From teenage pregnancy to tissues and from cars to cancer, you name it, I’ve researched it. Through it all, one constant theme has dominated my working life:

Asking is easy. The hard part is knowing what to do with the answer.

These are the questions I’ve been grappling with since my lunch with a dead cat. When you ask people for their thoughts and feelings:

How do you choose who to listen to and who to ignore?

How do you resolve conflicting and contradictory responses?

How do you even know if the people you are asking are telling you the truth?

How do you use the answers to make good decisions rather than bad?

It’s only natural to ask people what they think. It is not possible to create, build, launch or do something of value without asking your intended audience for their opinion. And yet, in both our personal and professional lives, we regularly receive confusing feedback, mixed messages and unreliable responses, and then we’re confronted with the challenge of working out what to do next.

The ability to interpret response has never been more important than it is today. As we begin to develop ideas in a post-Covid world, we cannot presume to know what people want, feel and think. The most successful businesses are invariably those best able to satisfy the changing needs of their customers. The finest marketing campaigns perfectly capture the prevailing mood of their target audience. Now is the time to invest in insight, empathy and understanding. Fortunately, we are blessed with instant access to more feedback than we have ever had before. Social media platforms have dramatically increased the opportunities for the public to share their opinions. The inseparable relationship people have with their mobile phones makes it possible for them to record their instinctive in-the-moment reactions to ideas as they go about their daily lives. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of video calling as the new home for conversation, making it significantly more convenient for businesses to connect with their consumers across the globe. And yet, despite the wealth of feedback at our fingertips, it doesn’t get any easier to work out what to do with the response. In an increasingly opinion-rich digital world, it becomes ever harder to understand what people truly think of our ideas and make good decisions as a result.

Let Asking for Trouble be your guide as you travel through a land that is both enlightening and disorientating, in equal measure. It is a tale of three parts:

Understanding

Truth

A Guide to Good Asking

Part One introduces an analytical framework designed to help you better interpret response. Part Two describes an approach to asking that will get you closer to the truth. And Part Three provides practical advice, hints and tips on how to get the most out of the experience of asking.

There is another part to the story. And that part is you. You are the golden thread that runs through every page of this book. My aim is not only to demonstrate the vital role you play in understanding response and getting closer to the truth, but also, to encourage you to better balance your own instincts with other people’s opinions, and ultimately, empower you to have more confidence in yourself and the decisions you make.

Whether you’re a marketing director striving to grow your brands, an entrepreneur nurturing a new concept, a policymaker hoping to build a brighter world, an eager market researcher foisting images of emaciated animals on an unsuspecting public, or you’ve got a good idea and you want to know what people think; this book is for you.

Part I

Understanding

‘Words are illusions’

Bodhidharma: Founder of Zen Buddhism

1

The Illusion of Interest

Some years ago, I spent the summer talking to troubled teenagers about sex. I needed to get their opinions on a range of ideas designed to encourage young men and women to consider contraception, and to think carefully about the consequences of unprotected sex.

Everything was set fair. I was perched on a leather footstool in the living room of a small two-up two-down, in a forgotten housing estate at the heart of a broken seaside town. It was a warm summer’s afternoon, and the open patio doors welcomed a gentle sea breeze into the modest room that served as my place of work for the day.

My first four boys turned up, a tight-knit group of friends who lived in care. There’s an inextricable link between poverty and teenage pregnancy, and these lads were from tough backgrounds. Welcoming the boys into the living room, I sat them down on the sofas, handed over their financial incentive and introduced myself. The boys looked at each other, they looked at me, then back at each other – and they were gone. Through the open patio doors, clambering over the six-foot garden wall and away with the cash. Never to be seen again.

Lesson one: Asking people what they think of an idea relies heavily on having people to ask.

My next session was more successful. I met Finn.

Finn was seventeen, and he was a dad. Kaylie, his daughter, was two, but he didn’t have much to do with her. Finn still saw his own father, lying by the bins as you turned left out of the lifts, a life destroyed by hard memories and harder drugs. Chatting together on that warm summer’s afternoon, it wasn’t hard to ask Finn what he thought. He was one of the smartest young men I had ever met and he had plenty to say. Asking was easy.

So, here’s the question:

Which of the two experiences of asking better reflects how people engage with ideas in the real world? The desperate leap over the garden wall or the conscientious living-room conversation? It’s no contest. Leaping lads beat friendly Finn every time. That is the trouble with asking. The interest shown in our ideas is an illusion.

Ask people what they think, and they focus. It makes no difference whether you’re talking to a friend over a cup of coffee, seeking advice from a highly qualified team of experts, thoughtfully exploring the pros and cons of your idea in depth interviews, discussing alternative creative concepts with potential customers in research groups, or questioning one thousand anonymous souls online; the act of asking encourages people to pay attention to your idea in a way that is totally out of sync with how they would behave in the real world.

Whatever the nature of your idea, be it an app or an advert, a product or policy, business or book, successful asking starts with the acceptance of this simple principle:

When we ask people what they think, the focus on our idea creates an illusion of interest. They have only engaged because we have asked them to.

The illusion of interest is an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of asking people what they think. To make good decisions based on other people’s opinions, we must first acknowledge that the world of asking is a land of make-believe. Think of it like this. When we ask people for feedback, we’re having a nice, intelligent chat with Finn. But the conversation is an illusion. In the real world, our intended audience has jumped over the garden wall and is legging it down the street. And that makes all the difference.

The Disappearing Robot

Leaning on a cardboard cut-out of a digital robot with an oversized head, Abdi smokes a quick cigarette before our chat. He searches for an ashtray, but all he can find is a plastic cup resting precariously on a small pouch – packed with information leaflets – that protrudes from the cardboard robot’s tiny waist. It’ll do. Abdi drops his cigarette into the pool of coffee lying at the bottom of the cup and ambles over to join the group.

You might recognise the happy robot stood by the double doors, welcoming all comers to the Selby Centre: a multicultural community hub in the bustling heart of Tottenham, North London.

DigitAl

His name is DigitAl (Digit Al, get it?), and he was the centrepiece of an enormous multimedia campaign that accompanied the UK’s switch to digital TV, finally completed in October 2012. For years, Al was everywhere: on TV, social media, posters, newspapers, bus sides and bus stops. You couldn’t miss him.

Al did a good job of communicating the information the public required for a smooth switchover, with one exception. For some reason, critical messages didn’t seem to be getting through to poorer, immigrant communities around the UK. Something wasn’t working. Digital UK, the government body set up to manage the switchover, held countless research groups to try and understand why. Abdi and his friends gathered around large, life-size cardboard cut-outs of Al before the start of the group, sharing with him their stories, cigarettes and empty coffee cups.

Yet moments later, when asked what they thought of the advertising featuring DigitAl, they didn’t recognise him. More than that, they were certain they had