À propos of nothing at all

One of the reasons why Market Research is often misleading is that people's opinions on "what is a good idea" are often heavily conditioned by what they are expected to say.

No-one, when approached by a market researcher from Eurostar, and asked the question "would you be more likely to travel on Eurostar if journey times were reduced" is likely to risk a raised eyebrow by replying "no". Even though, in truth, there are a hundred better ways you could have used a £6bn budget than by knocking a few trivial minutes off the journey time. Supermodels serving you Chateau Petrus throughout the journey, perhaps? Or wifi in the carriages? Or lower prices? Or all three. In truth, I choose Eurostar over the plane (when I do) because of where I starting from or going to, and because it offers me a long, relaxing, expansive trip rather than a stressful fragmented one. A few minutes one way or another don't really sway it for me.

So the overall bias of research is towards "like now but more so". Make mobile handsets smaller; make trains faster, make functionality greater. By contrast, research has a rather poor record of prompting real innovation: the Walkman, the Xerox machine, SMS, Starbucks.... no-one ever asked for these (can you imagine any of your friends ten years ago saying that "what they really wanted was to be able to pay $6 for a really good cup of coffee"?).

I mentioned Eurostar, above. I believe they made a mistake by concentrating on incremental improvements in speed rather than by innovating in onboard service. By contrast with one other group of companies, however, I believe Eurostar is a paragon of sensible innovation: at least the faster trains do benefit most of the passengers in some degree.

This other group of companies has succeeded in providing the worst of both worlds - ignoring very real, simple improvements that their customers ask for while at the same time spending billions on speculative technology that fails to take off.

You've guessed it: the mobile phone operators.

To me, £5-10 billion spent on 3G licences largely so that a three youths in hoodies sitting at a Colchester bus-shelter can download pictures of breasts seems a truly peculiar investment. But the picture becomes even worse when you consider where the money could be spent. Still, overwhelmingly, their revenue comes from voice calls (plus a bit of gloriously low-bandwidth SMS). Overwhelmingly again, user opinion states there is one improvement they would like to see - better network coverage and better audio quality in calls. Clearly audio quality is so poor that the public's calls have been inaudible to the network operators.

Yet if just one network had followed this obvious path to improvement it could have carved out a competitive advantage. Instead the guys in the hoodies reap all the benefits of a multi-billion investment.

Meanwhile sensational ideas like http://www.loc8tor.com are probably left underfunded.

The public, eh? Can't listen to them, can't ignore them.