All the marketing research technologies in the world cannot overcome the disadvantages of poor research planning.

As marketers we get excited about the potential of advanced tools like neuromarketing and predictive analytics but they are rendered worthless when coupled with a poor design of experiment. The design of experiment (or DOE) helps us to structure our research questions to maximize the relevance of the results. In short: are we asking the right question and are we asking the right people? If the answer to either is no, then it really doesn’t matter what confidence level our research returns; the results are pointed in the wrong direction. As a statistics mentor of mine once said, significance without relevance is simply a way to go wrong with confidence.

In the 1970s, one company’s research team had struck gold in the fledgling personal computer industry. They had a phenomenal product and they were asking the right question. But, arguably due to a sexist view of a woman’s role in the workplace of the future, they asked the wrong people. They failed in design of experiment.

Birth of the Personal Computer Age

The personal computer, the mouse, email, word processing, the first paint program, the Ethernet and the laser printer were all created and introduced by one company in 1977. That company was Xerox. But a marketing blunder fueled in part by 1970s sexism sent each of these products out to be development by other companies.

In 1969, at Rochester, NY-based Xerox Corporation, CEO Peter McColough and his chief scientist Jacob Goldman had the foresight to steer the world’s leading copier maker directly into the computer age. They purchased a computer company in Palo Alto, CA and created a pure research facility filled with high tech equipment, bean bags, sodas and some of the brightest minds in the still young computer industry. The facility would become known as Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, and it would develop for Xerox a modern personal computing paradise. And it would be lost.

A Stellar Nursery

When McColough and Goldman developed PARC they did everything right. They picked the right people, they made available the right resources and they gave it an almost unlimited budget for research and development. Its staff list was a veritable Who’s Who of the computing world: George Pake, Robert Taylor, Butler Lampson, Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, Lynn Conway and many others.

Their directive was simple: Use your imagination and skills to determine where this company needs to go with computers. And that they did. Within seven years they had developed—or perfected—all the components of the modern personal computer. They had created for their Xerox bosses a desktop computer called the Alto featuring the first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) display. The software package included the first word processing program. It could send email to other computers via the Ethernet, a new network protocol they developed just for that purpose. Documents could be printed out on a lightning-fast laser-driven printer. And the system could be controlled by a revolutionary pointing device they called a mouse.

Excitedly, they prepared to present their new system to the Xerox bosses.

Paradise Lost

The PARC team spent weeks preparing for their executive presentation. Believing that a live demonstration would make the most impact, they got several of the Xerox secretaries to help them train a handful of the executives for a live show. It was the 70s, and female secretaries did most of the real office work—typing, filing, communicating and scheduling. Who better to help train the male executives?

On November 10, 1977, the revolutionary system was presented to the Xerox brass at an aptly named event called Futures Day during a conference in Boca Raton, FL. The top executives watched as some of their counterparts took the stage, writing documents, sending messages back and forth to connected computers, controlling software with the space age pointing device and printing at the speed of light. But the dramatically staged presentation closed to the sound of crickets.

The executives were largely underwhelmed. Most of them were former copier salesmen who were used to rating their business success on the volume of a copier’s clicks—the copy counter, the currency of the old Xerox world that told the company how successful the machine was. The executives looked on this new hardware the way a 15th century sail maker might stare confusedly at a jet engine. They could not understand how to make use of this new world of digital connectivity and productivity.

But the people who could understand it were the executives’ wives. In that 1970s world of Xerox the salesmen’s wives were mostly former secretaries, the backbone of the office, the job description that included the tasks of typing, filing, scheduling, communications and planning that kept the office running, the very tasks this new system was designed to revolutionize. While the executives largely avoided the elaborate demonstration suites the engineers had set up to entertain post-demonstration interest, their wives flocked to it. They wanted to see the machine, the software, the new pointing device, and the laser printer. Their praise was effusive and on point. They knew this would be big stuff.

But, Xerox being a corporation of the era, listened to the silence of its executives. While top management hesitated, wondering what to do next with all this stuff, its architects quietly left to work for—or, in a few cases, found—such companies as Apple, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and Adobe Systems. The revolution would take place elsewhere.

The Responsibility of Marketers

The failure of Xerox to exploit the fruits of PARC’s labor can’t be blamed entirely on myopic sexism; given the era, there surely were many companies with the same malady. What seems to have been missing was a voice of reason that could have helped top management and the engineers overcome their prejudices and direct their critical questions to the people who would best know the product’s potential.

As marketers, we are very rarely the innovators in our companies. But we generally are the best communicators, and we often understand better than most the complexity in the relationship between our products and our stakeholders. We have a responsibility to the innovators on our teams to help them understand the markets they are focused on, to see through the prejudices in the market place and to properly define the battle spaces where future revolutions will be taking place.

Helping talented engineers solve the right problem is a small part to play in a revolution. But it is no less critical.

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Further Reading:

The definitive book on the Xerox PARC story is Michael Hiltzik’s Dealers of Lightning: XEROX PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. It is a highly entertaining read with critical lessons for anyone in the fields of engineering or marketing.