Customers Can't Predict Themselves

From Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony (E.P. Dutton, 1986), pp. 79-82 in Chapter 3, “Selling to the World.” Morita’s autobiography written with Edwin M. Reingold and Mitsuko Shimomura. The Walkman shipped in July 1979 against the advice of Sony’s product team; Morita made the call himself.

Lifted out of the book, the line reads as a general indictment of market research. Three pages earlier Morita names the alternative: “Our plan is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want. The public does not know what is possible, but we do.” Around the Walkman story Morita describes what convinced him: Ibuka complaining that the standard headphones were too heavy, his daughter Naoko running upstairs to put on a cassette before greeting her mother, young people in New York and Tokyo with tape players perched on their shoulders.

The year after Morita’s book came out, Johansson and Nonaka’s “Market Research the Japanese Way” (Harvard Business Review, May 1987) opened with the Walkman episode itself: Sony’s research on a recorder-less player came back negative, and Morita shipped it anyway. They named the broader Japanese pattern “soft data”: dealer visits and channel observation, treated as primary evidence rather than as input to be checked against surveys. Two decades on, Clayton Christensen’s “Marketing Malpractice” (Harvard Business Review, December 2005) turned the same instinct into a question marketers could ask: not would you buy this? but what work does this need to do, and what is the customer hiring instead? Rob Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test (2013) reduced the question further, to a single interview rule: “Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future.”