Sometimes, the best question to ask is the obvious one. And sometimes, analysts can be no fun.
Last week, I was entertaining a former colleague and his family, and my friend’s aunt was asking me what I do. When I said industry analyst, she asked if it was the same as a “systems analyst”, and I said no. I said something about how we’re surrounded by answers, and our job is to figure out which questions to ask…and when. Then the conversation went elsewhere.
Later on, my friend started telling a story about how he’d bought a gift for his aunt, how it was perfect for her, and how funny it was. The gift was a t-shirt, and I took one look at this woman. She’s clearly someone who cares about the way she looks, and I was having a hard time seeing her wearing a t-shirt anywhere in public. So I asked her the question, “Do you wear t-shirts?” To which she responded with a simple, “no.”
My apologies to my friend. He’s in the analyst community as well, and I had answered his aunt’s question about what we do at his expense.
And there you have it. Sometimes, the simple question is the one that everyone forgets. We get into debates about markets and product strategies, and everyone is an expert about Google’s acquisition path and Microsoft’s gaming strategy. Companies invest billions of dollars into new markets, and nobody appears to ask if the opportunity is big enough…or even profitable.
But — at some point — researchers and analysts are called in to explain why things are the way they are. As I note in this other post about mobile music, the research industry gets co-opted in this process. Surely, there is plenty of budget for the kinds of pro forma answers we see from analysts at firms of all sizes. The research is designed by committed and steered by group-think, vendor inquiry, briefings and aggressive analyst relations professionals. On the rare occasion, analysts get to ask their own questions on their own terms and within the context of the industry they’re studying.
But many questions come down to simple answers. Consumers don’t spend their money that way. __(name the exec)___ must be smoking crack. And even — the market just isn’t big enough.
In a world of experts, the obvious answers seem to get missed quite a bit. Our job as analysts is to work within that world, present the types of answers that people expect to see…and to use personal dialogue as a way to get to the deeper, simpler and more fundamental questions.