Example to illustrate my point: Focus groups over the past 15 years or so have consistently told car mfrs that consumers want larger cars - larger cars are assumed to be more luxurious and associated with financial success, and thus are desirable. The end result is that previous small, manoeuvrable, city cars are now bigger and harder to park. Consumers or small cars are generally unhappy with this trend, as they wanted a small car for the ease of parking etc, but focus groups are frequently insufficiently well tuned to pick up up on this nuance.
My experience in this industry over many years is that users often don't have a clear idea of what they want, and in the cases when they do a non-trivial amount of time it's a so tightly tethered to one special-snowflake usecase that virtually noone else finds value in it.
Want vs Need
We want fancy stuff, or at least stuff that look fancy/luxurious/desirable.
If we were rational, small cars is actually what we need (or no car at all in fact, but that's another matter).
However I'm wondering if when it came to buying the actual car, people will tend to follow the "need" or the "want" or something in between.
Unless you're detached from your customer, they should be in similar ballparks, but getting the words they actually use out of them, and then ranking what you had in mind can be powerful for clarifying their thought process (and gives your marketing team the messaging from the horse's mouth).
https://www.surveyking.com/help/ranking-question.php
It’s a very simple but effective way to gauge levels of reaction without losing the interest of the audience.
We slapped together a quick tool that lets you create pairwise surveys and then aggregates their results using the Schulze method (as if it were a preferential election).
We've released it for free: https://decidedly.so