This is all very true. I always try to push for customer interviews to be as much about formulating new hypotheses as they are about validating existing hypotheses.
There is no room for my feelings or free expression. It is inconvenient to the agenda of whoever created the survey.
If companies are so desperate to know what customers want, how come no one, in the past 25 years of my life as a consumer, has ever had any time to ask me a single real question?
[1] At least that's how I would feel if I hadn't numbed myself to this decades ago. Now I just escape. I hang up, I click the X, I think of nothing but getting away from this thing that, no matter what its motivation, no matter what product or cause it's selling, has exactly the same agenda: "would you like to dehumanize yourself for five minutes, so that I can make a data table that I was paid to make by someone who doesn't know what they're doing or why?"
There's a lot of shit marketers, is my short answer.
Like, a lot.
Do you use any products from a one-person shop? They will be so much more likely to ask you real questions. Not guaranteed, of course, as some people are just clueless. Those usually don't last long as business owners though.
Is it possible that all real product ideas come from the mind of a single person, understanding and interacting with other people as actual people? And corporations are some sort of Thing that takes humanity and squishes it into a Box, a Box with one very narrow goal: to freeze the product idea from the single person and mass-produce it, "scale it up" so that millions of people are aware of its existence and are able to use it?
I mean, Google didn't even invent Google Docs. Some random little startup did. Google just bought it, then made it discoverable and usable to millions.
Which is not a small thing, I guess. But I don't know what the marketing department is for. Other than putting Google Docs on billboards, maybe, or their digital equivalent.
As for the marketing department - depends on definition, but assuming you mean (as it mostly is nowdays) comms, it's two things:
1. Making sure that potential future customers know you exist, so when they enter the market to buy, they know you're relevant and can purchase from you.
2. Making sure that when someone is in the market to buy now, that they're more likely to buy from you, because you have a compelling reason for people to pick you, and not the other brands in the space that they can think of.
Mostly 1, some of 2, if the marketing team is good. Ratios vary as to how much though by more than you'd think, depending on industry, customer lifecycle, brand maturity and so on.
At least in most of the modern world. I think this effect is a _little_ weaker in China. It definitely used to be much weaker in the West too, at some point in time. But individualism, cultural capture by big capital, yaddah yaddah.
But honestly, I think the biggest issue is that leaders don't even realize they have this problem. I don't think it's the lower level employee being lazy. I think it's the leader not realizing how important customer and market empathy is, and not baking it into the company culture and processes. I agree wholeheartedly with the op comment at the top of this thread.
It's one of the reasons why monopolies lead to such bad experiences and products because there's no competitive pressure to empathize with the customer.
I would start out my interviews with things like " in your own words, what is the purpose of what you do?" And then engage in an open conversation stopping by at questions like what do you enjoy the most about what you do, what do you find the most difficult, what do you find the most tedious, what's the most important thing that you need to get done that you're the least satisfied with?
Most of my questions would be follow-up questions. I would also do a lot of active listening.
What I find funny is that people would often be a bit resistant to doing these interviews, but almost every single interview went long because the interviewee was clearly enjoying it so much. I tended not to ask whether they had a hard stop at the start of the interview, but instead would ask if they had a hard stop about 15 minutes before the scheduled end time. Of course, when interviewees truly did have a hard stop we would end on time, but I swear about 80% of the time. Interviews went long, sometimes 2 hours long. I started to realize that part of what I was doing was providing therapy.
Often the clients hypotheses wouldn't be validated, but I could almost always point to what the interviewees would value and what opportunities were there.
I don't do this anymore because most of the clients I worked with couldn't see the value in it, and I'm sure for very similar reasons that you were lamenting in your comment.
I'm grateful for the experience. I performed over 500 of interviews like this across many different industries from Frontline workers to c-suite of Fortune 500 companies. The experience was so valuable. Now I build product firsthand and exercise the skills I developed with my own customers and the market I serve, and being in a tight feedback loop is working really well so far. It's fun to build things people want.
And why didn't your clients see value in this? Was it because these insights didn't make its way to their service or product?
What's the current demand for JTBD and ODI consulting?