Hi, it's from the Institute for Analysis. Could you answer some questions? You answer yes, and spend 2 minutes taking a survey. The rest is a scam.

You're lying. I don't think YOU are lying. I'm just saying that people do in surveys.

50% of Fakta customers say they go organic.

But only 8% of Fakta's sales consist of organic products.

When parents are asked if their children get enough exercise, the majority answer positively. The truth is that fewer kids are playing sports and more kids are obese.

Author Pernille Hornum, who wrote the book "Truths about lies and deception", says that in the past 30 years we have started to lie more.

People answer politically correct surveys and tend to lie better than they are.

We have a high awareness of the right answers, and exaggerate ourselves, for example, healthier or greener than we are.

What does it have to do with innovation, you ask

Everything. Everything. Much product development takes place in dark and closed development departments, where the very future of the company is shaped by the development people's idea of ....

Yeah, notion of what?

Companies have long since embraced the reality of the consumer, with the desire to develop products that better fit into their customers' world.

But what good is it if customers lie when companies investigate what their customers' world looks like? The right products cannot possibly come out of that.

With the the award-winning Q113 loudspeaker project in Ingeniøren, I have tried to move the design process closer to the customers than the silly surveys manage.

Here we invited Ingeniørens readers (Denmark's sharpest minds) to join us in an open project to develop a loudspeaker.

A great experience (for everyone).

Rarely have I seen people with such an exuberant desire to share knowledge. But even an open project has a downside, because it only attracts people who understand the project.

The initiates. The ones you're already on the same wavelength as. Everybody else is in a big circle.

The way to understand people, and the way we make decisions (when we buy something, for example), is through a series of exciting discoveries about our psychology.

I'll come back to that in a moment.

I need to develop a new wireless speaker

Today's talk about innovation and understanding people is about wireless speakers.

I am the founder of the loudspeaker factory System Audio A/S. We are a company with more than 30 years of experience and our products are sold in 41 countries.

After 4 years of development, we have presented a wireless speaker, and it should be no secret that our new wonder sells well and beats the competition when compared in industry test magazines.

That's why we're about to develop another wireless speaker model.

The question is, how do we get inspired to move forward? The focus of the project is on technology that works in close interaction with people.

So we went to the experts

 Bro are some of the country's leading experts on exactly the insights I'm after.

Their speciality is to look beyond the nonsense that exists in every company, and they get to the things that really make a difference.

They have a deep knowledge of human behaviour, and our (often) irrational reasons for acting as we do.

They know the psychological mechanisms that make people experience the values I want to express with the new product.

It's product development from the outside in. It doesn't start with the product, but with the customer.

How we avoided people's opinions

The experts' mantra is absolutely clear. We don't learn anything about our customers by putting them in a focus group and asking them what they like, have heard of, would like or what they can rank on a scale from 1 to 10.

We can't count on the answers anyway. People exaggerate better than they are.

Instead, we need to put the product in people's hands and see how they use it. That way we can find out what works and what causes problems in the real world.

So we gave away a bunch of wireless speakers to various uninformed people, but without telling them why.

They couldn't know they were test pilots, because that would make them unrealistically critical. Two months later, we asked them to describe what it's like to live with the speakers.

The test consisted of

I'll give it to you one more time. We gave a bunch of our award-winning wireless speakers as gifts to some technically ignorant people. They weren't told about the idea of the gift and weren't introduced to the speakers.

After two months, we returned to hear about the beneficiaries' experiences of having the speakers at home.

The result is really instructive

The test subjects' feedback was quite unexpected. None of the thousands of customers who have bought the speakers themselves have ever given us this feedback.

No shops and no trade magazines have taught us what these users have told us. It was unexpected.

Their first point is that the manual does not help them. The manual, which is made in the same way as all other manuals, confuses them.

They don't understand the explanations and they fail to use features that they would otherwise have greatly benefited from.

The instructions lull them to sleep long before they get to the point of the product.

It's not just embarrassing. It's also an adventurous waste of effort, so we immediately rewrote the instructions.

Our project has made a discovery

The experts at Bro make it very clear that most of the world's marketing campaigns approach human psychology in reverse.

We assume that attitudes create behaviour. That a sufficient number of rational reasons for buying, say, X product will eventually sell the product. It's just not so, say the experts.

It is a gross overestimation that people should be so easily influenced by advertising messages. We are far more irrational than we think.

If we were rational, we would give up sugar and white bread, stop smoking and drink immediately. But that's not how humans work.

We nod in agreement every time a study on TV shows that healthier lifestyles improve quality of life.

And we like to lie on the sofa with our mouths full of biscuits, cheering on all the others who need to pull themselves together if they're not to go completely wrong.

Because we have no qualms about thinking one thing and acting another.

And that's where the crazy interesting wireless speakers study (and innovation) comes in.

If you ask people in a survey what speakers they want, the answer is often: Something small and cheap. And preferably invisible.

But we didn't ask them for their opinions. Instead, we looked at their behaviour.

Here the arrow points only one way.

Test subjects listen to more music than before.

Good speakers make people listen to more music.

That way I can move forward with my innovation.

To create a speaker that moves something, I don't need to invent something small and cheap that can stand side by side with humming fridges and hissing hairdryers down in one of the mega-stores.

It has to be more exciting than that.