The public wants what it doesn’t know it wants

The view from Hollywood by writer and producer Rob Long.

The new Apple Watch: Rob Long doesn't need one, but like many of us he is going to buy one. Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP

‘If I had asked people what they wanted,” car-making pioneer Henry Ford is reported to have said, “they would have told me they wanted faster horses.”

His point is: don’t be too quick to believe what your customer is telling you. Don’t listen too closely to market research. People, when you ask them, will tell you which products they wish they had a few months or years ago. They’ll rarely tell you – because they can’t possibly know – what they’ll want next year.

Apple Inc, the company that informed us all, a few years ago, that what we really wanted was a larger iPhone, a pointless gadget they called an iPad – even though that was pretty much the last thing anyone on Earth either needed or wanted – conducted an enormous media event last week to announce another gratuitous product that we’ve all been commanded to covet: a clunky-looking watch with a small blocky screen and a weird-looking twisty thing on the side to control it.

It’s complicated and expensive and odd-looking and has no clear utility and, of course, I want one.

Apple doesn’t ask its customers what they want. Apple comes up with something cool and interesting and expects – no, insists – that Apple fanatics will line up outside its sleek and glittering stores to buy the first available versions of the Next New Thing. Which they do, setting off a cascade of buying by everyone else, until the very people who scoffed at the hype and rolled their eyes at the latest Apple gadget are seen in offices and boardrooms and airports with a MacBook Air synching with their iPad Mini while charging up their iPhone 5s.

Apple doesn’t trouble itself to investigate or measure its customers’ wants or desires. The hipster nerds who run the company assume, with justifiable arrogance, that the awesomeness of their products will just invent their own reasons for being.

If the secret to being a successful company is tossing out the marketing surveys and operating on instinct, why isn’t that a more popular business model?

Hollywood, which just suffered another lacklustre summer box-office season, with the number of moviegoers again drifting down, spends millions each year carefully testing themes, storylines and even different versions of the same movie.

It’s not unusual, for instance, for a studio to cut and recut a movie a dozen times – each time with a different opening sequence, a happier (or sadder) ending, more (or fewer) jokes, louder (or bloodier) explosions – and test it in front of audiences across the country in an effort to fine-tune the product and give the people what they want. This, as Henry Ford noted, is almost always “faster horses” and almost never “an iPad”. It explains why movie audiences are bored and unimpressed by what’s playing at the local cinema, and why movie studio executives are baffled because what’s playing at the local cinema is exactly what millions of dollars of market research told them would be popular.

The TV business, which is where I’ve worked for the past 24 years, has been throwing vast sums of money at this problem in much the same way. Broadcast television networks around the world do extensive market research on audience preferences, produce shows at enormous cost to match as closely as possible the scientifically measured audience tastes, and are then astonished when most of these offerings fail.

You can go broke giving people what they say they want. And you can get rich giving people what they don’t know they want yet. Audiences want to be surprised and delighted.

This is news to studio and network executives, perhaps, but anyone who has ever been married is familiar with the concept. As is anyone who has ever watched a presentation of new products by Apple – as I have, countless times – and wondered who the idiot is who is going to line up to buy the newest iPhone or the flatter iPad only to discover – as I have, countless times – that the idiot is me.

I’m not going to make the same mistake with the new Apple Watch. Its usefulness eludes me. I have no interest in a gadget that vibrates every time someone I know Tweets or sends a text message. I’m not concerned with my minute-by-minute heart rate, the phases of the moon, or three-dimensional emoticons. I can see zero practical value in the Apple Watch, but I’m not going to waste any time resisting it. Resistance is futile when it comes to Apple products.

Unfortunately, audiences find most of what comes out of Hollywood totally resistible.

Rob Long is a writer and television producer in Hollywood