Should Customer Clinics Guide Design Decisions?

Wolfgang Philipp: Imagine you’re invited to a customer clinic. As the owner of a BMW 3 Series, you’ve been selected as the perfect participant. A new car brand you’ve never heard of wants to challenge BMW. And you’re exactly the customer they’re trying to win. You’re led into a room where three full-scale models stand under bright lights.

One after another, the cover comes off. You’re asked to rate them. Which front do you prefer? Which rear? Which headlights feel more premium? Which one would you buy? The problem is you’re not really sure. You like the front of version B, the rear of version C, the proportions of version A. Eventually, you tick a few boxes and move on. A few weeks later, those results become part of the decision for a production car.

Felix, should customer clinics really decide the future direction of automotive design?

Felix Kilbertus: Hi Wolfgang. Interesting question, isn’t it? So you could, of course, say from a creative perspective, of course not, because who else would have such brilliant taste than us designers. But you could also say very rationally, well, we need to test things. You know, maybe we’re suffering from groupthink. Maybe an outsider’s view is good. So the truth is somewhere in between.

I would say if a company is very deeply convinced about what they do, if there’s people that act out of conviction, a customer clinic isn’t necessarily the best tool to make design decisions. I think the design decisions need to be made by the qualified and responsible people in the company, the CEO, people that have a direct responsibility for the sales success, and of course should be strongly recommended by the design department because it is a professional job that needs professional responsibility.

So that would be my short answer. Of course, the long answer, this is what this episode is all about. Let’s pick it apart.

Wolfgang Philipp: My first question is, is there anybody without conviction or at least admitting that they don’t have any conviction? I mean, it’s their job to have some direction.

And if you have three routes and you don’t really have a clear preference, what do you do as a design leader?

Felix Kilbertus: So I think the smaller your operation, the smaller your brand, the easier it is to do these things. Not to go into big customer groups, not to ask too many people involved. The problem might be if you have a lot of markets, a lot of sub-brands, a lot of models, you might want to use groups to help you judge market reactions a little bit. So you can make these cases. I think you need to understand what you want from these groups as a company. If you want help to pick the best design, I think they’re useless. That’s not the job. If you want help maybe positioning certain features or certain aspects where you say, okay, let’s test a few things. You mentioned, for example, the premiumness of the headlamps. You can get some useful information out of it because let’s use a concrete example.

So for example, BMW a few years ago introduced these crystal elements in their headlamps – these Swarovski co-branded – and they’re quite lovely. And these things you can probably test against a standard headlamp or a headlamp that uses a similar technology that is maybe cheaper to make. And then you can get relatively concrete information out of it. Do people really perceive this as more premium? Do some people say, oh, no, actually, it’s too much. Actually, it’s too cheap. Actually, I expect something else from a German brand. And you might get different results in different markets. And that might then also help you understand whether people are willing to pay for it. Because these headlamps were not a standard feature, but are an optional that you need to pay for. And therefore, a clinic can help you with these very precise questions. Does it work to bring more luxury feel to the car? And at what price premium is the customer willing to purchase it? And is it then still profitable for the organization? For that, clinics are actually quite useful.

Wolfgang Philipp: And how did it work out? I mean, what is the problem of this episode? So you want to generate as much profit as possible. And that’s why you want to create some certainty around additional packages. Why do we have a clinic in the first place?

Felix Kilbertus: It’s a complicated question. So let’s go back into your scene. There’s a participant who’s been selected because he’s a current customer of a specific segment. In this case, the 3 Series, which is a benchmark for the dynamic sports sort of sedan. And it earned its reputation over a couple of generations.

So that’s the first thing. If you have a focus group, you need to make sure that you have the right people in. So the first thing is the quality of participants, the quality of the panel, which means that you need to work with a great agency that actually has enough people on file that they can call and recruit at more or less short notice so that the right people are in there. If you’ve never bought a car in your whole life and you’re in this panel, your opinion is maybe completely irrelevant. But if they’re already buyers off the category, considering a next generation purchase, at least it’s the right people in the room in general.

The other thing is that in this scenario, what’s also good is that there’s a clear problem in the room. There’s a new brand that wants to challenge an incumbent product. And that is also part of a good question. Is our product good enough to go head to head with a benchmark product?

And then it’s very often about how do you ask actual questions? So first of all, what do you show? Do you show models, which makes it very realistic? In this case, you’re describing exterior models. As you know, exterior models are very expensive. So you already need to have made those, made the investment to put alternatives in there. You have the security risk to show that to people roughly three to four years before production when you have these high quality models. Because you need the time to develop and refine things if you ask people their opinion. So you can see how many ifs and whats and whens and thens and therefores there in this scenario to make it work.

And then the biggest problem is what questions do you ask? If you ask the wrong questions, if you ask for people’s opinion, they will give you their opinion on how they feel today in 2026, looking at something that was designed four, five, six years ago that will define something that will be on the market in four, five, six, ten years time. So you see that the biggest problem with clinics is the delta in time. The context is relatively speaking old and the future is relatively speaking new. There’s about ten years between what the customer knows and what is under development at the moment. So that’s the biggest risk for a customer group and therefore So I think the more detailed your question is, the more precise the thing you want to find out, the more useful a classic focus group like you described that can be as a tool.

Wolfgang Philipp: I think the biggest fallacy of these clinics is that we put them on a pedestal, the participants, and really ask them as if they would know more than the people who are really working 24-7 on something. And they don’t know the context of this brand. They have never heard of this brand.

It’s not just the design that is relevant to me as a customer. So we see this now with the newcomer brands when you see a car in the street and it looks good, but you don’t know what car brand it is and you cannot really associate it with anything. It’s just a complete black box. You don’t know what it is. And it’s just this anonymous product. And just because it’s a big SUV doesn’t automatically mean it’s a Bentley Bentayga competitor. It can be anything really. And when you ask a participant in this group, do you like the design? Is it more premium? What do I know as a participant? What is premium? And I cannot really differentiate between the versions that are shown to me. And I don’t even know the context of what the competitors are doing.

I think the problem we try to solve with this clinic is often too complicated for a participant to solve. So it’s probably the right question, but to the wrong person.

I think where clinics can be really strong is when you do some sort of reality check. Does a certain participant, after the function is hidden behind three touch layers, is he still able to turn the radio on? Can they turn the indicators on while being distracted and the like? But they cannot give you the direction for the future of the brand.

Felix Kilbertus: Of course, the scene that you related in the beginning, that’s kind of like the most stereotypical of all situations. Of course, the car is not just an exterior. Of course, it’s not about the taste. So we need to talk about the methodology of these tests. I mean, ideally, we would invite someone who actually does use research and really has the methodology and the vocabulary and the right questions and defining the criteria and what outcomes need to be measured. How consistent you need to measure them. What do you measure them against? What other things do you test with the same questions so that you have significant data on what people say about competitive product A, B and C? What did they say two years ago about the same category of product? How do they react to relevant products, but from a different brand?

Because it’s like science, you know, you need to filter for disturbing factors like brand perception, like color, like light and shadow and so on. And that’s just the exterior, which is relatively speaking subjective, because the shape overall is dictated in terms of its functionality much more by homologation than, say, the interiors or the UX UI that you just mentioned. So if it’s well done, if you have methodology, then it’s a useful thing.

And as I said before, for me, it’s either useful if you ask very specific things. How much can I charge for this feature? How much are people willing to pay for something? That’s a great question to ask that you don’t know from your in-house experts. Of course, you can say we need to charge at least this to break even. That’s what the customer doesn’t know. But that’s when it hits the reality of saying, OK, think of things like the night vision features that some luxury cars had a few years ago. Extremely complex, extremely futuristic, extremely expensive. Customers didn’t care. So you could have tested these things and maybe not developed them if you had the balls to do that.

So there can be a clear delta between how expensive something is, how complex something is, and how much people are willing to pay for it. Some people love a feature but would never dream of paying for it. So those things are really efficient.

The second thing that these clinics I think are great at is that sort of reality check, you know the fable of the emperor’s new clothes, where if the emperor convinces himself that he’s wearing the most amazing, super transparent, lightweight clothes, but as we all know, he walks around the street naked. That’s what a customer clinic also reveals. It really cuts the bullshit because there’s no one whispering in the testant’s ear, oh, this is great because. No, you really judge it as you would as a customer, someone with hopefully an intention to buy something similar. So it does have these two functions, precise questions and eliminate bullshit.

Wolfgang Philipp: I’m just thinking about what I would say if I was asked how much are you willing to pay for night vision or another feature that is abstract to you, because you don’t know it yet. And I don’t know what I would answer, to be honest.

Felix Kilbertus: This is what I’m saying. It’s easy to imagine these scenes when you just have three exterior models standing in a room. But sometimes these focus groups are focusing on something very specific. You show maybe three photographs of dashboards, one with – I don’t know, I’m inventing things, this is not an example – but one has two small screens, one has a big screen, and one has just no screens, but just regular dials. And then this could allow you to have a discussion with people saying like, okay, in your experience, which one would suit your lifestyle better?

So you need to ask the right questions, have the right material. And once you have people in that sort of mindset that they’re in a certain space and they focused on a couple of features, they’ve done some control questions where you filter once again in the methodology. Some people might just, because these participants get paid quite simply, some of them might just select all multiple choice C possibilities. So you also need to check in your methodology. You repeat certain questions in different wordings. You need to evaluate whether the person is consistent in their opinion.

But once you get to that point, when you have a high quality methodology, and you then get to, let’s say, the night vision feature, the person is already quite deeply involved. You know you’re in a luxury car. You know you’ve paid 90,000 euros for this. You know, this is a feature that could save life when you’re tired and so on. And then you have this quality discussion that could help you say in a certain panel that enough people will say, „Okay, this is so great. I’m convinced now I would pay 1200 euros for it.“ That’s it. But it needs a methodology to get to that. It’s not just asking people, would you like to see at night and how much would you pay for it? It’s not that simple.

Wolfgang Philipp: What is the problem of our episode here with our tried and trusted structure of problem, consequence and then some proper insights?

Felix Kilbertus: I think the real problem is when you rely on people’s opinion and you don’t have the frame of reference to take your own decisions. Because of course, at no point in a business like the car business should your customers dictate what you do. The responsibility is not with your future customers. The responsibility is with the leadership of the company. That’s very clear. So you need to make decisions. As soon as you start delegating because you’re insecure, you’re not doing your job. No customer group can bring back that sort of company culture if you don’t have it. So there’s a fallacy there.

The other thing is you need to be very clear about when you get results. Let’s imagine the study is done well. Let’s imagine we have the right models, the right panel, the right questions asked, the right people who evaluate, and you have a super good complex sheet, a report coming back. Let’s imagine Model B is 60% people like it, 20% don’t like it. What do you do with this sort of information? One person could naively say like, oh, well, 60% of people really like it. Only 20% don’t like it. Now you need to read into what does that mean. It could mean that in three years time when this comes out, if already 60% of people like it without being particularly convinced about it, only 60%, maybe it’s not strong enough in three years time. Maybe the fact that only 20% of people dislike it means it’s generic. Maybe it doesn’t have enough character. So you need to also understand what is an appropriate result for your brand.

If you’re a strong brand that needs to lead the market by doing something that has never done before, maybe a result that is more evenly split between people who strongly like it and people who strongly reject it because it breaks with tradition is the result you’re looking for. So you need to think about many factors when you do a proper clinic that gives you relevant data to base your future decisions on.

Wolfgang Philipp: What are we doing with the customer clinic? We are doing it because we are not sure. So we need an additional opinion or we basically hope to get some sort of clarity out of people who might be relevant for our brand.

And the longer I think about it, the more it becomes clear to me that we cannot do this with questions we are responsible of. So when it comes to the direction of the design, it’s the responsibility of the design team or the decision makers to have a clear picture in mind what they want. Because you cannot ask potential consumers who just happen to be in some cluster to outsource the decision – because this is what’s happening in the end.

You just said you get back the 60% result. And what does it mean? Does it have enough character? What do I know as a participant if it has enough character? We are talking about things you cannot really verbalize in the first place. There’s so many factors and then you just try to boil it down to a simple phrase because you cannot really make it more complex. Otherwise, these people will not know what you’re talking about. They’re not designers. They’re not brand strategists. They have no idea about brand image or design aesthetics, whatever. And now we ask them, do you prefer version B and imply, does it have a strong enough character? Because our previous model, we think the character wasn’t strong enough and now we want to double down on the character. But some intention like this can only be solved internally, I guess.

The other point you said, which was important to me, is that the culture of the team, if you have only people around you who say, „Yes, you’re doing great, this is awesome, fantastic, of course it’s great“, then you have a culture problem and you cannot solve it with customer clinics because when they say, okay, 60% prefer that, they didn’t say we hate the other two versions. They just said we take version B or whatever.

Felix Kilbertus: So the problem is you can’t delegate decisions. However, what many companies and R&D organizations in general, they need to test things. The testing culture is something that is deeply ingrained, I guess, in humans, in engineers, in the broader sense. So you always need to test. You need to safety test, you need to process a quality test and so on. So testing for taste and future desirability seems very logical.

The problem is that it’s not as straightforward and not as objective as, say, testing for weather resistance of a top coat or for handling dynamics around the closed circuit, because it’s not repeatable. Your customers are not the same objective customers in December 2026 as they will be in February 2031. The world always moves on. And something that is a great design for today, but if it comes out in four years time, it might not be good enough anymore. So it is a dynamic world. That’s what I’m saying.

The biggest problem is really the delta in time, because you can’t travel to the future. The best thing you can do is find high quality participants, ask them questions that cannot be answered on the inside, and then deal with the results in a responsible way.

Now, in my experience, I also suspect that sometimes there is an element of politics involved. As you know, large organizations have political dynamics, let’s say marketing, communications, engineering, finance, design, R&D. They all have a different logic, a different mindset. Now, imagine, as you described it before, the design team is completely convinced about something. And maybe the marketing team is also completely convinced of quite the same direction. But there’s maybe other powerful players who are like, well, what do these two guys know? We don’t trust these two teams. Let’s force a clinic and see where that really holds.

So sometimes these clinics are also political power games where you actually challenge other people’s opinions. But once again, that’s a sign of a weak organization. That’s a sign of power plays that are usually not healthy for the quality of the product. They’re not necessarily fostering better products in the long run.

Wolfgang Philipp: Yeah, I think that’s the key point why you do clinics, because there are too many opinions involved in the first place. And especially with a car, you have so many people involved and so many departments involved. And what is the direction?

If you have no clear direction, and this is the case in many organizations, because you don’t have like a super-leader who can decide on his own like Elon Musk. So you have like this parity decision making and now you have to find direction or decide on direction. But direction is not democratic. You have to have a clear direction to move so many opinions forward, to align these teams.

And to me, this is the brand. If you don’t have a strong brand, you don’t have this direction. So it’s either one powerful leader who knows, who can decide on his own and say, this is what I’m doing. I don’t care about clinics. I know exactly what I want. And he aligns the team, all the people, and they know what is requested. And then we have this coherency. Or you need some other way to find and verify this direction. And I don’t think that clinic is the real tool. Clinics are a great tool for certain questions. And I’m sure that clinics help a lot when it comes down to these reality checks where you really say, „Hold on, probably we are all too young to really say how does it feel for a 70-year-old person to interact with the user interface we thought of and think this is a seamless experience. Is it really seamless for our key customers?“ But they cannot give you the direction. They cannot say, „Hey, guys, my picture is super clear. This is the right solution.“

Felix Kilbertus: How do you use a clinic properly? How do you give evidence or give additional certainty to taking a decision? Because in the best possible way, this is what you’re asking when you do a focus group or a customer group.

So the most banal one is to cover your back in a sense that you’ve already taken the decision, but you need some objective numbers to back it up. That is a very human thing to do as well. But I agree with you. The right way to do it is to take the decision, we want to be a disruptive brand. We are on a path to reinventing ourselves. We will be polarizing because we need to be polarizing. We are convinced. And then you test whether your products are as polarizing as you want them to be, for example. You test whether people react in a way that you hope that you react. Or your strategy is a different strategy where you say, well, we are a brand that is about craftsmanship and classicism. And then you test whether the products that come out are classicist and craft-based enough for customers to react to it.

But as you said, you need to have a very clear decision what you want to achieve. And then you test things against that vision. At no point is the question open. Do you think our brand should become A or should become B? That’s the wrong question. That is not a question you can ask a focus group.

Wolfgang Philipp: The idea to test a concept, I don’t know if a customer or participant can really decode what you mean. So when you say we are this craftsmanship driven brand, can they decode that this is what the brand is about? And what does it mean to them? What if it’s not relevant to them? And they say, „OK, I decode it, but I don’t care.“

Felix Kilbertus: That’s where the quality of your panels comes in. These things only make sense when you have real potentially relevant customers. And that’s by the way, you mentioned something else. So if for example, you specifically asking, let’s say Asian male customers in their seventies that are in a conservative brand space and your brand is in a conservative brand space, do you consider buying this product in that sort of price category? Then the data can be quite relevant. If you ask the random Joe on the streets, aged 15 to 95, do you like it or do you not? You don’t get any quality information out of that.

Wolfgang Philipp: I would challenge everything regarding price questions because I’m convinced that people just lie. Because what do you say when someone says, are you willing to pay 1,000 or 1,500 euros? And you don’t understand the question. You just say probably zero because I don’t even know the feature and I have no use for it in my…

Felix Kilbertus: Here in a well-made test, there is a possibility for the participant to say, I don’t understand, I don’t care, it’s not relevant to me. If you don’t have that case, then people will do like, well, then I’ll just select one of them and you get bad data. So it depends really on how well made your test is.

And that brings me to my second point about methodology and the difficulty of this. Because if you test, let’s say, graphical interfaces, interfaces for a navigation system or interfaces of a website and so on, it’s relatively easy to run it on screens. It’s relatively easy to find customers. It’s relatively easy to test them. Also because your turnover cycles are fast. You ask people, you can react to it. Two weeks later, you have the corrected product out in the world. It’s easy to launch. If you get it wrong one more time, if there’s another bug, you test it again, you can correct it.

The problem with something as complex and as big and as multifaceted and inside-out and long life cycle as a car is you can’t do it so easily. We now talk about over-the-air upgrades and so on on the software side. To a certain degree, you can compensate things. But the car industry and cars in general, they need to work from day one. Otherwise, you risk your reputation, you risk people’s lives. So for cars and hardware in general, there is no minimal viable product that you can launch and ship three upgrades per week. There is no BMW 3 Series 2.1.3 upgrade. No.

Wolfgang Philipp: We’ll do it in the facelift.

Felix Kilbertus: Of course, the facelifts do serve to modernize and ideally improve and bring new features on. but the basis needs to be bug-free and worked out and relevant.

Wolfgang Philipp: What is the consequence of this? So we have this customer clinic with best intentions, professional questions, hopefully the right Audience. To me, it’s always a big question mark, if you want to have these highly attractive customers, if they’re really willing to spend the time for some minimum money to tell you everything about their lives.

Okay, let’s say everything is perfectly set up. So we have this clinic, it worked, we have the results. What are the consequences? We have now these 60% preference results for version B. We have some strong opinions about some details. What does it do now to us, to our decision-making? How does it help us build a better car?

Felix Kilbertus: As they say, the path to hell is paved with good intentions. You can get into a lot of trouble when these numbers are back. Let’s imagine a couple of scenarios. One is the results come back and they’re all more or less the same. Then the biggest consequence is people will then go into the details and say like, oh, but this one is 27.8% more successful than the other one, which is only 27.1%. That is irrelevant. That doesn’t give you any quality of data because it’s based on not a lot of people. So that’s a big risk. A clever organization would say, well, we have a problem because all of these designs, they score so similarly that maybe we don’t have enough bandwidth in our design process. That could be one conclusion.

But let’s imagine you have very different results. Then you need to understand what was the intention between these very different ones. Was one proposal clearly the progressive one? Was one proposal very mainstream? Was one proposal very cheap to make? Then you can correlate it to what is behind the scenes, what the testants didn’t know. And if you have clever people and a good collaborative culture, you can then sit down and say, well, actually, interestingly, the test results for the model that is the cheapest to make actually scores the highest of modernity. Who would have thought? Maybe we can learn something from this. But it’s always the quality of the discussion and the people in the room to take apart these results.

The biggest problem is that with statistics in general, people need to have an understanding of statistics. What does it mean? What is significant? What is not significant? What does it compare to? Like if you tested other cars that are on the street, would that be better, worse? Do we know? If you don’t know, maybe even that number is irrelevant for your future decision making. So it’s hard to say. The tricky thing with numbers and tests in customer groups is what do you do with information?

Wolfgang Philipp: Yeah, I think the biggest fallacy here is that, I don’t know the English word for this, but the „Stille Post“ game. You know, you have the participant and they say something and then some professional psychologist interprets it and puts it into some words and then they deliver it to you in a nicely designed PDF. And then you see, okay, this is the to-do list basically.

But what I think is really helpful for the clinics is not so much the percentage results, but these opinions. And when you see who is saying it, when you really see the person saying this and you know what to make out of this opinion – but then really the involved people have to be there. So when the design director sees, okay, this guy is saying his original remark is this, and they get some idea what people think with the original statements. When I see some guy who’s really driving the previous model and he’s saying „This is for me a no-go because that’s what I really like about my current model or the brand in particular and what have you done?“ Then I see he knows what he’s talking about. Then this has a higher weight for me, this opinion, than some random person who’s just not so sure, „I tend to do this.“

If we talk about these kind of questions at all. Because for me, the most powerful strength of clinics is when you can see, okay, this group of our key customers, they simply can’t use the user interface. So 90% fail to do it within 10 seconds. They don’t find their way out of the menu again. They cannot use it without manual. So this is a fail from a usability perspective. We have to change it and we know what we have to change. And this is not some opinion. This is a fact. We see it that it’s too complicated for them.

Felix Kilbertus: Before you were referring to this game of „Stille Post“, Chinese Whispers, the game where one person whispers something into another person’s ear, that person whispers it again. And once you’ve done a circle, something potentially completely different comes back. And yes, there’s that phenomenon as well, that information gets lost on its way. That is one risk.

The other risk is that the information goes unfiltered into reports as you said some random guy saying like „Oh I think this is a terrible idea“ – yes, what do you do with that opinion? Like how is it contextualized? What does it mean? But once again, if the methodology of the test is good, if the question, the big questions that are asked are correct then you can contextualize these information bits by saying, well, this is a customer in terms of age group, income, mindset that represents a rejecter profile. This one represents a progressive profile. This one is a mainstream customer profile. And these are some of the typical statements that we’ve collected. And some of them are like, „I like it, but it’s not for me.“ If it’s well curated, you can get some information out of it.

Wolfgang Philipp: I hate it, but I will buy it.

Felix Kilbertus: Maybe. That would be an interesting podcast. What products do you buy, even though you hate them? There are some that come to mind.

So, but once again, The consequence is that even the best focus groups, at best, they’re a tool that can inform the decision-making process. At no point can you hand over things in autopilot mode and things come out. And everyone knows that basically.

I think pop culture is always a good indicator for this. We have all of these expressions, death by committee, designed by committee, mediocrity, Homer Simpson’s Focus Group Car. People know that this is a process that is deeply flawed and very complex. So at no point can you say, yeah, this is designed by the customer. If that would be the slogan in the marketing communications, it is designed by the customer, I would walk away immediately. It’s too dangerous.

Wolfgang Philipp: Yeah, so what is a potential solution to customer clinics now? Because my perspective is that we do a customer clinic because we need some clarity. We hope for more clarity. And this can only be the case if I don’t have it in the first place. I’m not really sure if this is the right direction for the brand.

And when I don’t know if it’s the right direction for the brand, I’m not really sure about the brand in the first place. I don’t know what the brand is about. And then I’m in this open space where every opinion has weight. So if one department has a particularly strong opinion and they say we hate it, hopefully more respectfully, but when they say something like this, then they get their attention and then they get more weight. And there’s no way out of this if you don’t have this direction. To me, that direction can only be provided by the brand – by its meaning.

Felix Kilbertus: Basically, you can only check your hypotheses. For me, it’s very similar to a scientific experiment. You don’t go into your laboratory and say like, „What are God’s thoughts? Tell me.“ No, your experiment needs to be very specific. And you verify your theory. It tests like, okay, there’s two different ways of using the navigation system. Is theory A better than theory B? That’s a clear question and you can test it. And then you can test it specifically. You can test it with digital natives who know interfaces better than people in a different age group, in a different geography. And then you get meaningful data. And then you can adopt or maybe change the technology.

As an organization, you also need to be ready to implement findings from a clinic. So what happens if a disastrous clinic result comes in and they say like, well, „Are you guys crazy for your brand, this sort of car? No one will buy it.“ But you’ve already decided that you as a brand want to go there. So with that sort of result, will you then stop the project after you’ve decided to go into this?

Or for example, you test a certain user interface that is based on technological decisions you can’t change anymore. Let’s say you test screens and buttons and you can’t go back to buttons because you’re convinced that screens are in. But customers tell you it’s buttons. Do you then go all the way back to all the decisions that you’ve already made, all the tools you’ve already bought, all the pieces you’ve already committed to, and change all of that because people tell you it’s not good enough? So it’s complex. There’s no straightforward answer in my question.

So I agree with you fundamentally. You need to go in, test the things that you need, proof of concept and things that your internal organization can provide you. Your internal organization might not have enough 20 year olds in northern China available. Your internal team might not have enough billionaires interested in buying that sort of supercar. That’s simply not who you are as a company. So it can be useful, but you need to really understand what it’s good for.

Wolfgang Philipp: Yes, and this hypothesis needs to be much stronger than any uninformed opinion of the participants. And the key to this is that you have this culture, this alignment within the brand.

The brand to me is the aligner because it attracts the people. We’ve been to this in previous episodes. To me, a brand cannot really be something else than its people are. So ultimately, the brand is what the people are about.

And when you have a team that is not really aligned because everyone has a different opinion and this department has this tendency and the other department has another tendency and the forces phase each other out, then you cannot have a clear direction and you have a weak brand.

And then even the next customer clinic cannot help you bring clarity to this, because you cannot change the direction into a direction that is strong enough to convince someone from the heart.

Felix Kilbertus: The way you described it, I was almost thinking you’re talking about political parties and elections and opinion polls. Because in a way, it’s the same problem. Let’s say you ask 100,000 people in a country, what should the tax rate be? Should it be 59%? Should it be 32%? Or any other number you throw out there, you get certain reactions to it. But does that help you?

You need to probably ask a more sophisticated question. If you pay 31%, you get this and this. If you pay 51%, you get this and that. So you get something, but you need to ask a very clever and a very clear question with just enough context to be able to ask a lot of people to produce enough data to have any meaning. And the further away your question is located in time, the trickier it becomes. If you ask them very complicated questions, how would you want the next generation of our society to grow up? And what sort of education do we want to have? That’s a very difficult question to answer.

And that’s the same thing with products. If you ask something very concrete, very matter-of-factly, very tomorrow, how much do you want to pay for this feature, as opposed to what is the future of our brand, it’s the same thing with these opinion polls. If it’s too fluffy, too complex, you will not get any meaningful data out of it.

Wolfgang Philipp: People don’t want to pay anything.

Felix Kilbertus: I disagree with this, because I think some people are really eager to spend money. Some of them even enjoy the idea of spending money. The psychology of money is always interesting.

But yes, we take also a lot of things for granted. We expect things for free and we’re willing to pay for it in other ways. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, as you know. But even that could be an interesting thing.

When you select certain features, people do not want to pay for it. However, the feature is something we want to have in our car. How do we finance it? Do we bundle it with something else that people are willing to pay for? Do we have another revenue stream that comes out of it? So we offer Google Maps for free, but we force businesses to pay for being featured on it. All of these things are relevant questions that you need to answer as an organization.

Wolfgang Philipp: Yeah, I have a problem with this question to say, „How do we get people to pay as much money?“ Because people know what you want out of this question. And to me, it’s the wrong question in the first place.

Because when I have to think about how do I get the money back that I need to build this car, this thinking comes from the wrong end. This is like the thinking we had in one of the previous episodes. And you say, okay, this is the segment. We want to have this kind of market share because we want to get this kind of profit. The profit is the ultimate goal for the whole endeavor we are doing here. This is a weak brand. It’s only in the business to make money. That’s the only goal. And people see that they smell it and they answer with, if this is your goal, then my goal is to pay as little as possible.

So this is the, „I don’t want to pay for anything. I want to have all the features the market has as a standard and I want to have all the warranty.“ And it’s only a money question. It’s a zero sum game. „What do you want to spend? How can I get you to spend more money than before?“

Felix Kilbertus: The reason why money is an interesting factor is because it makes things a bit more serious. I agree, if you only ask money questions, if your objective is only getting people to pay as much as possible, you always feel like you’re being ripped off. That’s the experience when you buy your airplane ticket nowadays. That’s the price. But, oh, do you want to choose your seat? Well, that’s extra. Do you actually want to have access to the toilets? Well, sorry, that’s extra. It is a terrible experience when everything is transactional and money-based.

That said, why is the money question important? It’s because you react differently to objects when you know their price points. There are some famous experiments when people get the same glass of wine, one is being told this is a standard wine and this one is an expensive wine. The expensive one, even though it’s the same, tastes better. So you bring more value to something you know is expensive, ironically.

At the same time, when something has a high asking price, and then the quality, the visual quality, the actual quality is not there, your promise is also not kept. So it’s not an easy thing. But the real reason why I use the money question sometimes, even in a design process, is it lets people forget everything else and brings it back to my own money, my own bank account, my pain point, my hard work.

So I sometimes really ask my creatives if they present two or three cars, saying, „Wolfgang, you’ve drawn these three beautiful cars. With your own money, which one would you buy and drive every day?“ And then all of a sudden you’ll notice that people argue slightly differently because they’re like, „Oh, I need to commit that amount of money.“ And it’s no longer, „Oh, it could be, it would be, it might be.“ No, it makes it concrete. That’s why the money question has weight sometimes.

Wolfgang Philipp: I agree with this, but still it’s hypothetical. So there is no skin in the game. I say, yes, I’m willing to pay 100,000 for Model B, all in. I take all the features, give it to me, leather seats. It’s as good as bought. And then I don’t have to pay anything and I just walk away with a strong opinion and that’s it.

Felix Kilbertus: I see what you mean, but I think even that needs to be qualified. You know, like if you have too many people who are like, „Yeah, fine, I’ll take it. Everything, sure, 200,000, no problem.“

You need to check the background of these people. Is it because they can’t be bothered, they want to go home, they just say yes to everything? Is it because they’re that rich that that sort of money doesn’t register? So once again, you need to select your people wisely.

Maybe the best way of looking at it, in my opinion, is to see whether there’s strong rejections. Like say there’s a feature and people consistently say like, „Well, I’d love to take it for 200, but no way I would consider it for 3,000.“ Then you know you have a problem. When you know that you need to sell the feature for 3,000 to make it worthwhile. And that’s reality. That happens, of course.

Wolfgang Philipp: Then you say, „Okay, now pay me the 200.“

Felix Kilbertus: That would be an interesting challenge. You get a strong feature, people love the feature, but they only are willing to pay 10% of what you need. How do you deal with it? Do you go back to purchasing saying, listen, guys, you need to make the costs go down by 90%. Can we do that? Is there something else we can do about it? Then a clinic has some meaning and your R&D org and your communications org has something to work with.

Wolfgang Philipp: I have a serious problem with the price question because the car purchase process is not like that some ideal customer comes to the dealer and pays full price and then adds X amount for feature Y, and I’m the happiest, most loyal customer.

People compare online, they’re in the market for months and they know exactly the prices. Dealers try to differentiate themselves by including packages, there’s no single question about „Are you willing to pay X for feature C?“ – it’s already included to bring you in as a customer.

And this is an abstract question to me as a customer, who is only potentially in the market. I have a car right now, I said I’m willing to buy a new one within the six months. I don’t know what happens in the next six months. I have no idea and this is not a contract I signed. Then a new model comes along and then the prices drop.

Felix Kilbertus: The only thing I would say to defend it and to contradict you, to play devil’s advocate, is that I think most people in these settings are somehow happy to tell the truth because you place them in an environment where they have nothing to gain or to lose. There’s an incentive to be authentic.

The only problem is that sometimes you have group dynamics you need to control for. Sometimes you have the stereotypical person who finds everything terrible and then other people chime in and then the whole group goes negative because there’s this one person who has this opinion. Or maybe there’s another group dynamic where no one wants to speak out and everyone’s like, yeah, it’s not bad. That can also destroy it. But once again, it depends on the quality of the panel, quality of methodology, quality of the moderators. All of these things need to be considered.

Wolfgang Philipp: So we are coming to an end, but I have an additional question that just comes to mind. If the clinics are so great and are working so perfectly fine – we’ve had some remarkable car launches in the last months. And I’m sure that there were a lot of clinics for these cars and that no clinic would have projected the backfiring or the shitstorm for these launches, right?

So starting with Jaguar, end of last year, then the Ferrari Luce. This is also like a clinic feedback to me. So you have this enormous feedback now by so many people. You have this big data almost. You see who is saying what, who is watching your profile, who is watching your content. We’re in this digital era, so there’s no anonymous profile really. They can see where you are, what age group you are, what gender, and so on. And you have these strong opinions.

What do we make out of these open customer clinics for these major car launches? And what does it say about the clinics that were used to come to these models in the first place?

Felix Kilbertus: The Ferrari is in my opinion a car that was not clinic tested. It’s an example of decisions made that it has to be this way, without asking internal opinion, controlled consultancy opinions – it is a top-down decision, the car has to be this way.

And the result is actually one of the rare cases where there’s honest outrage out there, professional and and non-professional alike, about how the quality of the execution of the car doesn’t fit the brand expectation.

I think the Luce will be a textbook example of, ah, if you had done a customer clinic, you would not have done that car. And I think in this case, as much as I dislike clinics, this car would have benefited from a clinic or two.

But then looking at other polarizing cars, I think the Jaguar for me is not so clear. The Jaguar launch is maybe a botched communications launch, and maybe there’s some unnecessary details in what colors and what logos and so on. But the overall message was extremely successful. A brand really reinventing itself, and everyone is expecting something quite powerful now. And opinion is slowly starting to shift, because there seems to be real conviction behind this.

What it shows is that if you have something that is quite bold and you’re committed enough and you bring it to the market, your chances of success are still high if it’s interesting enough and engaging enough. So in the olden days, you could have said there’s no such thing as bad publicity. And then maybe in a more modern way, you could say like, well, if there’s enough engagement, it means that there’s enough interest and there’s enough potential for the future of a product.

Wolfgang Philipp: I think the Jaguar example and the Ferrari example, they might be first trials of a new approach to really go all in on something without focusing too much on what commentators are saying on the sides.

But if you’re doing something like this, you really need to know what you want, what your direction is.

Felix Kilbertus: Exactly. Because you’re provoking for it a lot. And the provocation only works when you back it up.

Wolfgang Philipp: And this direction is not just, „I want to change a brand or I want to bring in a new direction.“ This is not direction. This is like taking the steering wheel at 200 kilometers per hour and I’m hoping I’m changing something and this is not working.

We will see what this will mean for the brands. It might not be the worst approach because it could have also been designed by comitee or some other unremarkable result that gets no attention at all and it’s just another car. So we will see what this is about, and I doubt actually that there was no clinic. Are you convinced that there were no clinics?

Felix Kilbertus: I do not know for sure, but I have a strong feeling that these cars were not necessarily cliniced.

And I’m also speculating about Audi now. I always look at these things in terms of timelines. How long does a team need to produce this result? So in the case of Audi, new design director comes in and a first concept car comes out and you kind of do your math. Okay. So if that is something that the new design director already started, he only would have had, what, six months to do it. In these six months, you don’t have time to do seven clinics. Absolutely not.

And concepts are usually not clinic anyway. If you clinic them, you don’t need to make them public because you have the information you need anyway. And in a way, what you described, the sort of public engagement of product launches that you said, that used to be the role of concept cars, by the way. So you do something very bold, very provocative. It was a fun game. Like people went to car shows to see provocative new concepts and be shocked and taken into the future and dream and react and maybe be angry or disappointed. But that was the very role why you did studies and prototypes and concept cars to test without spending too much money.

A concept car, yes, it costs money to build. You invest a few hundred thousand, a few million maybe, but it’s nowhere near the one billion dollar investment that any production car would require as a minimum. And I think in the case of the Audi, Audi has not shown mass production cars with the new design language yet. So they’ve shown a concept car, they’ve shown a limited production car that is heavily based on a known architecture, so very low risk, very low numbers.

And I think that is a good way of thinking of a sort of a clinic leading people into a direction that you want the brand to go in. But it gives you maybe enough resonance and enough feedback so that you can maybe twist a few things, maybe try a few things before going all in.

Wolfgang Philipp: And that’s the way you build brands anyway. It’s like this iterative process. You don’t have this one big step change and then you have this new brand image and everyone likes it and you get fantastic results out of it and make tons of profits.

Felix Kilbertus: That’s the interesting thing with brands in general, but with cars in particular, it works because it’s living in millions and millions of people’s minds. You know, it’s like the sum of a lifetime of experiences with this brand, with competitor brands, with racing on TV, with TV series featuring this character driving that car, your taxi experience, your rental car, like cars are everywhere. Like you cannot go anywhere on the planet, basically, without seeing car brands and car logos and cars parked in the streets and people using cars. So in that sense, it’s really unlike any other product because of its size, because of its global nature. I like to think about it as really 10 million people on the planet sharing an idea about what a brand does.

And as you say, it takes time to shift perception of a brand. It might take a generation or two in certain cases. And all the other laws of psychology also apply. Like a first impression is hard to change once you introduce something quite shocking. But you can also lose a lot of credit by doing the wrong thing as a brand. So it’s a constantly dynamic situation and there’s no standing still and there’s no turning on one new chapter and everything is happy. No, you have a strong inertia in your brand perception as well to deal with.

Wolfgang Philipp: Okay, I think we’ve done our clinic today.

Felix Kilbertus: Tested it properly.

Wolfgang Philipp: I’m 30% tending towards answer B now. And I like the back of the study A better. But the interior of C is my favorite.

Felix Kilbertus: Yes. So you would recommend to just make it pretty please and mix it all together.

Wolfgang Philipp: Make it pretty please, and make it cheap, and do it now.

Felix Kilbertus: I was thinking about yesterday, so thank you for the extra day. Very good.

Wolfgang Philipp: Very good. See you in the next episode. Thank you.

Felix Kilbertus: Thank you, Wolfgang. Good to speak.