People spend a lot of time debating what customers might want, what they might pay for, or how they might react. When many of those questions could simply be tested.
“I don’t think anyone would pay for that.”
“I think people would prefer this.”
“Do you think this price is too high?”
“Would you use something like this?”
Sometimes the most useful response is simply:
Why are we thinking about something we can test?
Thinking is useful for generating possibilities. You need it to notice problems, come up with explanations, design offers and decide what experiments are worth running.
But thinking is a poor substitute for evidence.
If the question is ultimately about how real people will behave, you usually cannot answer it from inside your head.
You can make an educated guess. Someone with twenty years of experience can probably make a better guess than someone who started yesterday. Experience produces intuition, and good intuition is valuable.
But intuition is still a hypothesis.
A good example comes from A&W in the 1980s.
The company was trying to compete with McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. A&W introduced a one-third-pound burger: more meat than a quarter-pound burger, offered at the same price. According to A&W’s then-owner A. Alfred Taubman in his memoir Threshold Resistance, competitive testing suggested customers preferred A&W’s burger, yet it still wasn’t selling. A&W brought in a market-research firm to understand why.
The answer was not something an experienced restaurant executive would necessarily have predicted.
Many participants thought ⅓ was smaller than ¼.
They saw a three and a four and concluded that the Quarter Pounder contained more meat. In the focus groups Taubman described, more than half questioned why they should pay the same price for what they believed was the smaller burger.
Think about how strange that problem is from inside the company.
You could have excellent executives.
You could understand restaurants.
You could understand pricing.
You could understand food.
You could make a burger people prefer.
You could give them more of it for the same money.
And you could still lose because customers misunderstand a fraction.
Nobody sitting in a meeting needs to be stupid for that to happen. The problem is that reality contains variables you did not know you needed to think about.
That is why expertise should make your tests better, not make you believe you no longer need to test.
An expert might be better at saying:
“I think customers care most about X, so let’s test X first.”
That is useful.
The mistake is turning it into:
“Customers care most about X.”
Now an assumption has quietly become a fact.
The same thing happens when you ask other people what they think.
You tell five friends about an idea and they say it sounds expensive.
So what?
Are they the customer? Do they have the problem? Do they control the budget? Are they currently paying for alternatives? Have they experienced the situation in which your offer would be useful?
Their opinion may give you another hypothesis to test. It does not settle the question.
Even asking potential customers what they would do has limits.
“I’d definitely buy that.”
Great.
Put the buy button in front of them.
“I’d sign up for something like this.”
Great.
Here’s the signup form.
“I think €500 sounds reasonable.”
Great.
Here’s the €500 offer.
Move from hypothetical behavior toward actual behavior whenever you can.
This does not mean you should stop thinking.
It means you should understand what thinking is for.
Thinking generates hypotheses.
Testing eliminates bad ones.
Evidence changes your beliefs.
Then you think again with better information.
So whenever you catch yourself spending too long saying “I think people will…”, “I don’t think anyone would…”, or “What do you think customers would…”, ask a different question:
How could we find out?
Sometimes the test takes months.
Sometimes it costs money.
But surprisingly often, the thing people are debating for hours; days, or weeks; could be tested in minutes.
You do not need to correctly predict the market.
You need to build a process that allows the market to correct you.
Don’t think your way to certainty when you can test your way toward evidence.