Seth's Blog : Surprising insights

Surprising insights

People like that, like this.

When we can build connections between demographics and psychographics, it’s easier to surprise, delight and serve our customers.

Mail order catalogs have been doing this for years out of necessity. They know something about a person’s geography, income and other demographics, and they make assertions about what they dream about and seek out.

Psychographics are what people choose and believe. Preferring dark chocolate is a choice.

Demographics are what we can tell about someone from their census form. Height, family size and zip code and other easy classifications are easily discovered and fairly fixed data points.

Creating useful assumptions about the connections used to require significant time and money, plus a huge dataset. AI changes that.

You can run a survey of 100 people attending an upcoming conference. Send them all to a free Google form, ask questions about background and preferences, leaving plenty of space for people to write and brainstorm about what they’d like.

Now, simply give the spreadsheet of responses to chatGPT and ask it for surprising insights and correlations.

Humans are terrible at this, because we anchor on extreme responses or gloss over small trends.

Nine years ago, I wrote about the difference between a survey and a census. That distinction is more important than ever. But once we have an AI to dive deep into the surveys we create, they’re no longer bureaucratic defense measures, designed to sit in a drawer. Instead, they give us a chance to be of service.

Continue iterating until you’re no longer surprised.