by
for Harvard Business ReviewEvery marketer wants to better understand their consumers — their preferences, pain points, and perspectives — to establish a better product-consumer fit. Today, there’s more data available than ever before, yet marketers still struggle with this practice. How can that be? More data should lead to better understanding; yet contemporary marketers find themselves extracting comparatively marginal insight about who these people truly are.
That’s because today’s marketers have mistaken information for intimacy. Information — think traffic, engagement on social networking platforms, purchases, and search queries — consists of the factual representations of events that have taken place. This data can reveal quite a bit about a consumer’s interests, intentions, and desires, and we’ve seen an increasing demand for more data analytics in the marketing function over the past decade. But search behavior, purchase history, and site traffic are not who people are, they are merely byproducts of what people do because of who they are.
To understand who people are, you have to get much closer. You have to establish intimacy.
Consider this example: Before an important meeting, you might go to LinkedIn to learn about the person(s) with whom you will be speaking — their current company and position, previous work experience, where they went to school, and perhaps mutual connections. While you walk into the meeting armed with data, you don’t get to know the person until you’ve interacted with them, exchanged ideas, or observed their mannerisms. Similarly, someone might look like the perfect catch on their dating profile, but it’s not until you’ve met them that you get a better sense of who they are. The more intimate we become, the more about them gets revealed.
Intimacy in Practice
McDonald’s had a similar revelation when the brand decided to focus its marketing efforts on activating fans instead of appeasing its detractors. For years, the company had become the target of health-conscious critics. The company tried enlisting new marketing campaigns and offering healthier menu options — to no avail.
Yet, despite the criticism, tens of millions of people eat at McDonald’s every single day. That’s a lot of love. So why not focus on them — the fans? The problem, however, was that McDonald’s didn’t know who these people were beyond their transactional data. They had information on them, but they didn’t have intimacy.
To get to know these fans, McDonald’s enlisted its advertising agency, Wieden+Kennedy, where I ran strategy, to conduct an ethnographic research study to understand the cultural characteristics of what it meant to be a McDonald’s fan. This sent us on a road trip throughout the U.S. heartland, where we observed and talked to real people in hopes of revealing real fan truths. We produced a cultural bible of sorts that chronicled a series of beliefs, artifacts, behavioral rituals, and language that constitute the McDonald’s fandom. We called this A Book of Fan Truths.
Here are a few details we uncovered that might sound familiar:
- Your friend will take a fry even after they saying they didn’t want any.
- Ordering tap water but filling your cup with soda is an act of living on the edge.
- Who doesn’t eat the cheese off the wrapper?
- No matter how many times you’ve been to McDonald’s, when you reach the counter and it’s time to order, your response is almost always, “Can I get uhhhhhh…”
These cultural practices illustrate the difference between data and intimacy. Despite all the data McDonald’s had on their customers, these truths were unknown until we sought them out in our study. When truths about cultural practices are identified and revealed to members of a community, people feel seen, especially when these practices are so subconscious that they happen unbeknownst to the members themselves. It’s like the moment when your significant other picks up on one of your habits and ask, “Have you ever noticed that you [fill in the blank: some behavior]?” You think to yourself: “Do I really do that? Yeah, I totally do. Wow, I’m surprised they even noticed.” And in that instant, you grow closer because you realize the intimacy required to understand your idiosyncrasies with such nuance.
Achieving this level of intimacy with their fans unlocked opportunities that McDonald’s would not have otherwise conceived. For instance, our research revealed that fans would often purchase multiple sandwiches and combine them as their meal of choice. They would order a Big Mac, a Filet-O-Fish, and a McChicken, then put them altogether — into what fans called the Land, Air, and Sea Burger — and consume it as a super sandwich. These behaviors were not disclosed in through transaction data but revealed through proximity. Once aware of these menu hacks, McDonald’s created a secret menu for fans to order their super sandwich of choice by name, signifying McDonald’s deep understanding of fandom.
From secret menus to adult Happy Meals, famous order campaigns to Grimace’s birthday celebration, McDonald’s has turned fan truths into a marketing goldmine, which has not only catapulted the brand from being “the most hated” to being “cool,” but also impacted the bottom line. According to its Q2 2023 earnings report, McDonald’s experienced a 10.3% sales growth in the U.S. and 11.7% sales growth globally. Over the past two years, McDonald’s has been recognized as #1 Most Effective Brand and the #2 Most Effective Marketers according to the global Effie Index, which ranks the companies behind the most effective marketing campaigns in the world.
How to Establish More Intimacy with Your Customers
Establishing intimacy with consumers requires more than just observing them and talking with them. You must see the world through their lens. This requires setting aside our biases and ethnocentrisms, if only for a moment. We all have a set of beliefs and behaviors that might seem displeasing to some but feel just right to us. For you, the idea of combining multiple sandwiches into one might be unappealing, but to other people, it makes complete sense. Approaching the research with this level of cultural empathy for our consumers helps us see them as people and better understand them as the social actors that we all are.
When I observe people participating in their cultural practices, as in the McDonald’s research project, I ask myself three questions before drawing any conclusions about what’s happening. The first question I ask is: Why? Why are these people behaving in this manner, or why do they see things a certain way? When you ask why, the answer typically brings your biases to the surface. It’s important to get those out in the open so that you can move past them.
To go beyond your biases, consider asking yourself the second question: What? What are these people feeling that provokes them to act in this manner or see things a certain way? This will help you begin to move outside yourself and stand in their shoes.
Finally, ask yourself: How? How do they see themselves in the story of life? How do they view the world around them? This is not about what is factual; it’s about what is perceived. This will help you see the world through your customers’ eyes. You don’t have to agree with it; the aim is to understand it because the better you understand it, the better equipped you are to leverage in your marketing activity.
. . .
It’s through intimacy that we get understanding, not the data alone. Intimacy drives connection, and connection drives behavior. This perspective has completely changed McDonald’s marketing and the place the brand holds in the cultural zeitgeist. Perhaps if marketers invested as much time in getting to know people as we have in scaling our data stacks, we might have much more intimacy to accompany all that information. But we must first be curious enough to get closer.
