There are two competing ice cream trucks in a park. One has a line of people queuing up, the other does not.
The less successful ice cream vendor decides to take a look at his competitor to figure out what it is that makes them so attractive.
It’s fast and easy to point to observable traits, to what you can see, to the ‘what’. The location, the price of the ice cream, the branding on the side of the truck.
But fast and easy does not always tell us the story we need to hear.
It’s time-consuming and difficult to unpack ‘why’ what we observed is important. The beliefs, motivations, frames and values.
What about the location is meaningful? Are people unconsciously attributing higher quality because it’s situated near the grand old building?
Are people buying because it’s more expensive? Using price as a heuristic for quality in the absence of expert information?
What in the branding is attractive, is it outstanding or just better than the next closest alternative?
Or is merely the fact that there is a line drawing more people through the mechanism of social proof?
Most likely it’s a combination of all of the above.
It might be more expensive to get to the bottom of people motivations, but it’s probably cheaper than rolling the dice on changes based only on your surface level assumptions.