The strawberry yoghurt principle

I’m standing in the dairy aisle. Someone next to me reaches for a high-protein strawberry yoghurt. No obvious hesitation. It’s the one next to the client I’m working on. I can’t help myself. “Why that one?”, I ask.

They glance sideways, a little surprised. “I like strawberry best and never tried this one before.”

That’s it. No deep brand love. No mention of product features. Just a flavour. And a flicker of curiosity. It’s not the kind of answer you’ll hear in a focus group.

Because research happens in places designed to make people behave. Rooms with two-way mirrors. Online surveys with sliders. Panels where people get rewarded for having time to care about a product  they’ve never bought before.

These aren’t the people rushing through a convenience store after work. They’re not juggling mental to-do lists while grabbing yoghurt. They’re sitting still, being helpful. And helpful often means: saying what sounds good. What sounds reasonable. What sounds like what a brand manager wants to hear.

But that’s not the truth. That’s the performance. And so much of what we call insight is just a more structured version of guessing. If you want to know why people buy what they buy, go to where they buy it. Be there. Watch. Ask. Listen.

It’s not always scalable. It won’t give you a pretty bar chart. But it will give you a sentence that makes you rethink your whole positioning. And sometimes, that conversation starts with: “I like strawberry best and never tried this one before.”

So get out of your comfort zone. Ask a stranger. Yes, it will feel weird. Yes, you’ll get the looks and the no’s. But you’ll also get that one answer that changes your perspective.

And that’s priceless.