The best-known quote from former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld is, paradoxically, the one about the unknowns: “As we know, there are known knowns: there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns: that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

For businesses, I might add the unknown knowns, but more of that shortly.

In plainer English, there are three concerns I would raise here. First, we now have an embarrassment of data riches. We measure everything, we model and predict with ever greater confidence, potentially leading to our first mistake: a false sense of certainty, thinking we know everything. Second, businesses forget that they have a poor memory – knowledge gets forgotten. Third, and closer to my research roots, we regularly ask consumers for their opinions on things they don’t know (or haven’t ever thought) about.

 

With hitherto unimagined amounts of data at our disposal, we can create super-sophisticated segmentations, putting our customers into highly targeted boxes. And yet, surely the more precisely defined the box, the greater the likelihood that a consumer will not conform to type – because one thing predictable about human beings is their unpredictability. 

Tesco’s data-driven capability enables them to send me a coupon for a specific brand of yogurt in a certain size, because I bought it before. But in its large stores, whose distinction is their wide range (maybe 250 yogurt SKUs), do I (or indeed does Tesco) really want my choice to be made for me? To steal a pertinent tweet from a recent Future Foundation event, “great algorithms don’t create brand loyalty”. Or as the American retail futurist Doug Stephens recently observed, “An overly data-centric approach to retail will have an anesthetising effect” robbing customers of “the exhilaration of accidental discovery.” Before his new world fell in, Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis’s very watchable interview on You Tube encouragingly endorsed the customer value of unexpected spontaneous surprises, delivered by people not systems.

On a broader level, the media has been fascinated by the rapid and widespread adoption of Aldi and Lidl by the most affluent social groups, not conforming to stereotype. The Telegraph recently quoted Kantar data showing that 24% of Aldi and Lidl shoppers now come from AB socio‑economic groups, a figure almost in line with Tesco, and higher than at Morrisons or Asda. The article declared: “Loyalty is dead.” In reality it is the stereotypes that are dead.

A third example comes from a recent Forbes report on the Panera Bread brand in the United States, specifically its investment in “Panera 2.0”, its new mobile-based ordering system. This is said to enable the brand to segment its market into “to go” and “eat in” guests, in its own words, “further personalising and differentiating guest experience.” But, surely, the same person will buy both ways according to their occasion needs? No one, your customers included, likes a know-it-all.

 

Many a market research practitioner, if they have been fortunate to retain business with the same client for long enough, will know they get asked to do work on a subject that has been covered before, by long-gone brand manager(s). Consumer research is often expensive and yet, with a typically quick turnover in marketing teams, historic knowledge of consumer insight often disappears as fast as the people do. So, although it might seem glaringly obvious, before you spend your precious budget, reboot the corporate memory and check to see if the information already exists. You might know more than you realise.

 

Most days, a silly survey achieves its real aim of securing a mention for its brand-sponsor on the morning news shows. On rare occasions, they combine light news value with insight, and kudos is due here to Nestlé Professional, for its recent pub gravy story.

But most times, consumers are asked to imagine what they might do, often on a subject they have never even thought of, or perhaps know nothing about. Sometimes they are even asked what they would not do: a recent example asserted that nearly half of people said they wouldn’t complain about mobile phone use in a restaurant. It duly got coverage, but I have no idea what we can do with the findings.

Maybe you should just not ask the question at all. A recent Economist piece reported on the California cult craft brewer Stone Brewing Co, and its impending move into Germany, to open a $25m brewery, restaurant, event space and shop in a former Berlin gasworks. It will be the first brewery in Europe owned and run by a US craft brewer, and it will tackle head-on the highly traditional German brewing sector and its Reinheitsgebot “beer purity law”. The report noted that Stone’s founder, Greg Koch, has prepared for this big adventure by doing “the same amount of market research he had done previously in America: zero”, because, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, often customers do not know what they want until you show it to them. Meanwhile we can only speculate on the German beer drinkers’ reaction to Stone’s Arrogant Bastard Ale – not in research, but in real life.

I have observed for Propel readers before that we increasingly abuse consumers’ willingness to give honest feedback, by survey overkill. It therefore behoves us (and our brand reputations) to only ask questions that we do not already have the answers to, questions that mean something to the consumer, and questions that mean something to you when you get the answers. 

Decision science is here to stay. But as much as we might like to think, we cannot explain and predict everything, because we consumers do not know what we think about many things, and our behaviour is inherently unpredictable.

 

Above all we love pleasant surprises – perhaps even those Stone-faced Germans will, too.

 

One of the items of news that may have shot by you in the past week is that Molson Coors is pumping enough money into the Cornish economy to boost capacity at Sharp’s brewery to a potential 350,000 barrels a year of Doom Bar ale. There is no guarantee it will be able to shift that amount of what is already the UK’s biggest-selling cask ale, of course. But if it did, that would mean Doom Bar had become a brand one-tenth the size of Carling lager.

 

It’s an interesting question as to whether any other cask ale brand, even with the weight of Molson Coors behind it, could ever have contemplated looking at potential sales that recall the heyday of Draught Bass, even in an era when cask ale drinkers may be entitled to feel more optimistic than they have been able to be for almost two decades. Has Doom Bar’s popularity any connection with it coming from the village of Rock, described by the Daily Telegraph as “the Kensington of Cornwall”, populated during the summer by affluent teenagers staying at their friends’ multi-million-pound holiday homes, and surrounded by expensive Michelin-starred restaurants owned by big-name chefs? Plenty of Rock’s affluent young visitors will be drinking in the Mariners, the pub owned jointly by Sharp’s and the chef Nathan Outlaw, and Doom Bar is likely to be the tipple for many. Does that at all put a halo on the beer that helps it rise to sales levels effectively unheard of in recent times for a single cask beer brand?

 

Well, probably not, but it is certainly the case that you are indeed much more likely to find the young and affluent drinkers who flock to Rock to meet mates (and mate) drinking cask ale than you would have even ten years ago. As the latest Cask Report revealed, a third of all 18-34 year-olds have tried cask. And it’s not that they have tried it and walked away back to Carling or Peroni vowing “never again” – of all those who have ever tried real ale, 86% still drink it to some extent. Nor is it just young men trying out real ale. A third of all female alcohol drinkers have tried cask – and, again, 75% of women who have tried cask still drink it.

 

Sadly, this fact seems not to have penetrated deeply into the trade. Even among licensees who stock cask ale, two out of five think women don’t like cask ale. Male cask ale drinkers are considerably more liberated: four out of five think women DO, indeed, enjoy a hand-pulled pint.

 

I’m pulling these plums from the 2014/5 Cask Report because they tend to be overlooked in the rush to plaster up the headline items, like the call to raise the price of cask ale to bring it more in line with the prices being charged for craft keg beers, which we highlighted here last week. There are plenty of other important findings in the report. For example, landlords and drinkers are still in disagreement over how often the line-up of beers on the bar-top should be changed, with drinkers much more conservative than the trade. The report repeated the findings from last year, that among all drinkers who have ever tried real ale, 56% want to see a selection that changes every month, and only 20% want a selection that changes every week, while 15% want to see the same beers on the bar all the time. Publicans, however, believe they should be rotating guest beers once a week, to the annoyance of those drinkers who come in one week, find a guest beer on that they try and like, and then go back the next week to find that beer has disappeared.

 

The report also found that the cliched image of cask ale drinkers is commoner among licensees than among cask ale drinkers themselves: two in five publicans actually stocking cask ale still think that most cask ale drinkers are middle-aged men with beards and sandals. Only one in five of male cask ale drinkers think that.

 

Drinkers and publicans also disagree about what promotional activities work for particular beers: 81% of cask ale publicans back staff recommendations as useful, against just 58% of cask ale drinkers, while 51% of drinkers are attracted by seeing brands at local beer festivals, which only 24% of landlords think is effective. More than a quarter – 28% – of drinkers like seeing food matching suggestions on menus, while only 10% of landlords go for what is surely a no-brainer: food matching suggestions encourage trial, and make the pub look knowledgeable. Nobody likes beer mats: just 5% of drinkers and 9% of landlords think they are an effective promotion.

 

Another interesting difference in perceptions is that among cask-stocking publicans, 74% think serving beer in the right branded glasswear is “quite important” or “very important”. Only 53% of cask ale drinkers feel the same, while 47% couldn’t give a stuff. Half the number of drinkers, just one in five, think branded glasswear “very important” compared to publicans who feel the same.

 

On the often heated subject of the definition of “craft beer”, among both cask ale drinkers and publicans stocking cask ale, six out of ten say it means “beer from a small brewer”, and half of each thought craft beer had to be “a beer you don’t find in many places”. Only one in five of cask ale drinkers thought it meant “very hoppy, American-style ales”, against a third of cask ale-stocking landlords, and just one in 20 cask ale drinkers and one in 13 cask ale-stocking landlords thought it meant “any cask ale”. Whatever the definition, incidentally, according to the Cask Report, while cask ale has a 16% market share of total on-trade beer, “craft beer” in other, formats (keg, bottle, can) scores only 2% –the rise of “craft keg” seems to be in the eyes of the commentariat, rather than on the bars of Britain.

 

The report is also interesting in what it reveals about attitudes to the Campaign for Real Ale. Among cask ale drinkers, 6% said they were Camra members: all of 37% of cask ale-selling publicans carry a Camra membership card. Only 2% of cask drinkers said they didn’t like Camra, against 5% of cask ale-selling landlords. Almost half – 47% – of cask ale drinkers said that while not members, they admired what the organisation did, against 36% of cask-selling licensees who felt the same. Nearly as many cask beer drinkers, however, 45%, said they had not strong feelings one way or the other about Camra, a feeling shared with almost a quarter, 23%, of landlords.

 

Have you ever had an argument with a blockhead? If you have you will know the sort of person I mean. The sort who assumes that those who disagree with them just haven’t understood their explanation of something, so they repeat what they have previously said over and over again, while ignoring all known facts and arguments to the contrary, leaving you feeling that you are banging your head against a brick wall! Such is their unassailable sense of self-righteousness it never occurs to them that they might just be wrong. I am referring here to the latest propaganda from Sheffield University’s “researchers” lamenting the government’s failure to implement minimum unit pricing (MUP) for alcohol.

 

In the Independent newspaper the story appeared under a headline that read “Hundreds of lives lost over failure to bring in minimum alcohol pricing – says study”. The gist of this story is that the Sheffield researchers are the guys who first created a deeply flawed mathematical model that purported to show that a MUP for alcohol would result in a fall in alcohol consumption, leading in turn to a fall in mortality related to drinking harmful amounts of alcohol. So, the original research and its various reiterations is predictive: it predicts how many lives might be saved annually if a MUP is introduced at various levels, say, 45p or 50p per unit. The new study simply assumes its original predictions were correct and then works the figures retrospectively. A “failure” to implement MUP is then said to be responsible for the failure to save these lives – so the politicians have blood on their hands! This has been picked up by the BBC and, predictably, by Alcohol Concern and the Institute of Alcohol Studies, which is the money-making arm of the International Order of Good Templars.

 

The “research” compares the effects of the government’s ban on below cost selling with the introduction of MUP and asserts that MUP would be “50 times more effective” than a ban on below-cost selling, ie, it would reduce consumption 50 times more. The ban on below-cost selling, the study says, only saves 14 lives a year, whereas a MUP of 50p, had it been introduced, would have saved 700 lives a year – 50 times more effective! What the researchers do not address is the fact that over the past decade alcohol consumption has fallen by nearly a fifth, far more than they say would have been achieved by introducing minimum pricing. So, have lives been saved? Er, no … alcohol-related mortality has actually increased. So does this cause them to revisit their predictions? Nope. In true blockhead style they simply recycle the same old rubbish.

 

What is interesting is that when the government first mooted a ban on below-cost selling back in 2011 the health lobby said that it would have “no effect at all” on the nation’s health. Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, head of the Alcohol Health Alliance was quoted in the Daily Mail on 19 January 2011 as saying: “To bring in a measure that we know in practice will have no effect at all on the health of this nation I think is disappointing.” In the same article Professor Petra Meier, professor of health at Sheffield University said: “We predict to see about 21 deaths saved (by below-cost selling ban) and about 2,400 hospital admissions saved, compared with a 50p unit price, where you would save around 3,000 deaths and 39,000 hospital admissions.”

 

So why have the figures been revised downwards – from 21 deaths saved to 14 saved as a result of the ban on below-cost selling, and from 3,000 deaths saved to 700 saved as a result of a 50p unit price? Wasn’t all this meant to be the “scientific proof” that underpinned the “evidence-based” policy of minimum pricing? I guess if you want a headline that your preferred measure is 50 times better than what the government ends up doing you have to massage the figures accordingly. The fact is, the Sheffield minimum pricing model is based on absurd assumptions, such as the belief that heavy drinkers are much more price-sensitive than moderate drinkers, and assumptions made about the price-elasticity of demand for alcohol that are at odds with what economic research and common sense tell us about the relationship between price and consumption.

 

Recycled rubbish is still rubbish, and no less toxic for the fact that it is repeated by a gullible and lazy media that jumps on anything that bashes alcohol.