Guess what? Listening matters
Perhaps the biggest insight we uncovered from our market research work came from our participants’ reactions to the sessions themselves. Everyone expressed gratitude for the opportunity to talk about these issues. They acknowledged the power of dialogue and conversation. People who began with diametrically opposed views left the rooms with a deeper understanding and empathy for each other's points of view.
Conversations are hard. They can be contentious, create conflict, infuriate, but they have power to do amazing things. All valued the respect shown for their perspective and the dignity that comes with feeling that you have been heard.
What this means for our work at HP
At its core, the HP brand story is what the American Dream is all about. It is the idealized promise that every American has the opportunity through hard work and determination to achieve success and upward mobility, and to build a life of prosperity and peace for themselves and their family.
With the learnings we’ve captured over the last year, we believe our brand can represent these ideals by reinforcing the idea of reinvention in the areas that are unifiers for our consumers.
Practically, this means changing how we define our target audiences to include political identity as an element. We are treating it the same way we treat demographic breaks like age, income and ethnicity. Minimally, we will be intentionally inclusive to ensure we represent our customers broadly, and in some cases, we will create work specifically against one group or the other.
We are also changing our research methodology to ensure we are covering both groups and will continue doing work that digs even deeper into the insights that drive each. This means pushing ourselves on how we gather data. Understanding customers at a human level by putting them in real situations was a major breakthrough for us in this work. The more we can understand the reality of people in their everyday lives, not only in their joyous and uplifting moments, but in the chaos and conflict that sometimes comes, we will be better able to build the emotional connections for the brand that will stand the test of time.
But in addition to developing new approaches for our brand marketing (some of which was already evident in our recent holiday campaign), our deep dive into our shared national concerns, values and hopes has left us with a renewed sense of purpose.
We remain optimistic about the future, and look forward to continuing these conversations with our customers and clients for many decades to come.
—with research led by Rob Leonhardt, Americas Customer and Market Insights Manager at HP Inc.