Why won’t customers tell you the real reason?
Because they cannot. People are reliable reporters of what they do, and unreliable explainers of why they did it. Ask why and you get a plausible story invented after the fact. Ask what, then go and watch, and you get the truth.
Empathy is how you get close enough for the real reason to surface.
Not warmth, and not sympathy. It is the capacity to get close enough to somebody’s actual life, for long enough, that the truth underneath their behaviour turns up on its own.
Empathy is not being nice about your audience
Think, do, be. Empathy here is not warmth and it is not sympathy. It is the capacity to get close enough to somebody’s actual life, for long enough, that the real reason surfaces without you having to ask for it.
That cannot be a technique, because the moment it becomes a technique it becomes a question, and the question is the thing that breaks it. The second you ask somebody to explain themselves they start performing an explanation, and they will do it sincerely, and it will be wrong.
So it has to be something you are. Somebody who goes and stands in it.
An insight is not an opinion
An insight is a simple truth about people that you personally believe.
Most things presented as insights are opinions with a chart behind them. Consumers are time poor. Shoppers want convenience. Younger audiences care about authenticity. All true, all useless, and all writable without leaving the building.
The test is whether it is specific enough to be wrong, and whether you would defend it in a room. If you would not, it is not yours, and it will not survive the first note.
What it looks like when it’s missing
The debrief where nothing surprises anybody.
Forty slides, a good agency, a decent sample, and at the end of it the room nods, because every finding confirms what everyone already assumed on the way in. Somebody says it is a really useful validation of our thinking.
That is the sound of an expensive process producing the first answer. Nothing new went in, so nothing new came out, and the proposition that follows will be the one that was already in the deck.
Fonterra, 2025.
The proposition was locked. Craft. Craft milk, for craft baristas, in the craft coffee category. Everyone in the room agreed, and it was a perfectly good answer.
So I went and stood in cafes.
And what came back was not craft.
They come back for the taste.
And the commercial consequence is the whole thing. Craft keeps you inside barista land, professionals talking to professionals. Taste opens the door to everyone who has ever said I like the taste of that, which is a very much larger room, and it was sitting there behind a single word. Zero Lacto is in market on the other side of that door.
What the science says.
Two findings, and between them they shut the two doors most people walk through instead.
People cannot tell you why.
Nisbett and Wilson (Psychological Review, 1977) laid out four pairs of nylon stockings on a table in a shopping centre. Identical stockings. Shoppers chose the pair on the right nearly four times more often than the pair on the left. Asked why they chose it, not one person mentioned position. Asked directly whether the position had influenced them, almost everybody denied it, and the researchers noted people looked worried, as though the question itself were absurd.
And you cannot imagine your way in either.
Eyal, Steffel and Epley (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2018) ran twenty five experiments on this. People told to take another person’s perspective, to put themselves in their shoes, were no more accurate at predicting that person’s feelings, preferences and beliefs than people given no instruction at all. Sometimes they were worse.
So both of the usual moves fail.
Asking why gives you a confident answer that is not the reason. Imagining gives you yourself in a costume. What is left is the unglamorous one, which is going and being there, and it happens to be the only one with the evidence behind it.
What to do on Monday.
Pick one place your customer actually is. Not a room you booked. The place where the thing happens.
Then write the truth underneath it in one plain sentence you personally believe. If you can, you have an insight. If you cannot, you have an opinion, and you will find out the hard way in about six weeks.
Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.84.3.231
Eyal, T., Steffel, M., & Epley, N. (2018). Perspective mistaking: accurately understanding the mind of another requires getting perspective, not taking perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(4), 547-571. doi:10.1037/pspa0000115
Anchor Zero Lacto is a live Anchor product. The consumer campaign that launched 19 August 2025 was created by TBWA NZ for Fonterra Oceania.
BIF source: Matt Hart on the Fonterra work, 2025. Insight definition from the BIF People Program Q and A.
The full evidence for Empathy, with the room it came from and the citations with DOIs.