Do you know your customers?
To build successful products for them you need more than knowledge; you need insight. While knowledge feeds rational, it is insight that feeds intuition, a higher level of thinking that more often generates innovations.
We gain insight by putting ourselves (literally) in the customers' shoes, by immersing ourselves in their environments and by experiencing everything they experience.
We want to know as much as possible about customers: their habits, rituals, desires, aspirations, needs, wants; expressed and unexpressed.
We want to know why they buy certain products and why they don’t buy others.
We want to know what are the social, economical, fashion, political, and other trends that will impact the product's success.
We want it all. We want to think and feel like them, to almost be them.
We use variety of research tools and methods to meet our objectives and budget constraints: qualitative and quantitative, secondary and primary, our VOiCE of the Market™ and other frameworks, conjoint analysis, online surveys, whatever are the right tools to use.
There are many research methods and variations, and given objective and budgeted resources, it is extremely important to employ the right method and often adapt it to the situation creatively.
Some insight methods we use are:
- Observational methods/Ethnography
- Interviews
- Focus Groups
- Surveys
- Market and Technology Scans
- 'Eat your own dog food'
While gaining insight to the product context is extremely important at the first phase of the product development process, as it enables innovation and design, it does not stop there. Insight:360 is an on-going iterative effort throughout the project, and even beyond the product launch, facilitating continuous product improvements.
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