How to interview customers who don't have vocabulary for what they want.

The hardest part of customer research is that customers are experts in their experience and amateurs in describing it. They know exactly what happened and how it felt. They do not have your category's vocabulary for it, and if you hand them that vocabulary, they will politely use it, and your data is now contaminated.

This is the structural failure of surveys. A survey supplies the words. Rate our professionalism. How important is innovation to you. The customer picks from the frames you offered, you tabulate the confirmations of your own assumptions, and the report tells you what you already believed, now with percentages.

Interviews done properly work the other way. The customer supplies the words, and the words are the data. Here is how I actually run them.

Ask about the last time, not the general case

Never ask what someone generally values or usually does. General questions produce their self-image. Ask about the most recent specific instance. Walk me through the last time you attended. What was happening the day you decided to call someone like us. Specific memories contain the real sequence of events and the real feelings, in the words they naturally use for them.

Ask what they almost did instead

The alternative they nearly chose tells you what category they think you're in, and it is regularly not the category you think you're in. An organization that believes it competes with other consultants may discover it competes with doing nothing. Those are entirely different positioning problems.

Follow the energy, not the script

You need a handful of planned questions and the discipline to abandon them. When a customer's tone shifts, when they speed up, laugh, or hesitate, the interview is happening right there. Say more about that is the most valuable sentence in the method. The scripted question can wait.

Never correct their language. Collect it.

When a customer describes your flagship offering in words your team would never use, the instinct is to gently reframe. Resist it. Their phrasing is not a misunderstanding of your positioning. It is your positioning, as received. Write it down exactly. The gap between their words and your words is the finding.

Handle the answers as evidence, not verdicts

One customer's phrasing is an anecdote. The same phrasing appearing in the fifth and eighth interviews, from people who have never met, is a pattern, and patterns are what you position on. You are not looking for the most articulate customer. You are looking for the words that keep independently recurring.

The payoff of doing this properly is that the positioning work stops being creative writing. The language that will actually land with your next hundred customers is sitting in the transcripts of your last ten, verbatim. Your job was never to invent it. Your job was to notice it.