From-Experience: the best projects start with the consumer

Experience
Originally uploaded by jeffmcneill

I am not apologising for repeating the definition of innovation that Kevin Roberts wrote in Lovemarks:

“Innovation is something that changes the life of the customer. It changes the life of the customer in some way or the world in which the customer experiences things. That’s innovation”

So an innovation is as great as the insights that inspire it and as poor as the weakest link that delivers it.

Reflecting on this a business group president observed:

“Understanding our consumer will of course produce product ideas. Good understanding, logically will generate good ideas. But in our battle for share at the margin good ideas alone are not enough. Success will come from something more than an idea. It will emerge from insight. And in my view insight derives from an intimacy of understanding. So we have to become expert in, indeed competitively the best in, sensitive observation of our consumer and his or her world.”

More pragmatically, we can define a consumer insight as the discovery of something interesting or enlightening about the consumer's needs, beliefs or behaviour. This penetrating understanding can provide hooks or clues to help us to identify opportunities to address the needs of consumers in new and competitively superior ways. 

One of the challenges is to observe our consumers through a new lens

Picture uploaded by MegElizabeth_. Used with thanks under CC.

What are they discussing? Is it relevant to our strategy of bringing new benefits to the cleaning task? If I am a surface chemist does it inform me in any way? If I am a tool designer? a marketer? Deconstructing the whole experience over time might be revealing! But what are they discussing?

In Insideout: Microsoft in our own words p.78, the author wrote

"Second-hand information has its charm, but gossip and expensive French cheese are about the only things that get better the farther you are from the source.

If you want to make sure that your customers are happy with your products, you have to communicate with them directly: get out of your office, go to the place where they use your software, watch them, and listen to them, and listen to them. Plus, there's nothing like a change of scenery to clear your head and make room for some astonishing new insights to move in and take over.......

Listening to customers is rewarding in so many ways. That's why we go to great lengths to do it."

But listening to customers mean thay talk of now which can limit our horizons if we are innovating for tomorrow.

Jane Fulton Suri, notes in her book Thoughtless Acts? :

"Directly witnessing and experiencing aspects of behaviour in the real world is a proven way of inspiring and informing [new] ideas. The insights that emerge from careful observation of people's behaviour . . . uncover all kinds of opportunities that were not previously evident."

So, ideas are potential ways to respond to a consumer insight.

The problem is that, in our highly pressured global environment, organisations find it too tempting to view a reflective way of working as time-wasting and so significant opportunities go unrecognised until an upstart organisation, suddenly destabilises the market with an offer that allows existing consumers to move their attention and purchases to something more exciting and in keeping with their aspirations.

"Everything you see and touch was once an invisible idea until someone chose to bring it into being. Any powerful ideas is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until we choose to use it." [Richard Bach]

Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the "things" that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.

[Bill Buxton] See here for more thoughts on this.

The academic, Mohan Sawhney, defined insight ans consumer insight in this fashion:

Insight – Conceptual definitions

• Grasping the inner nature of things intuitively

• Clear or deep perception of a situation

• Clear (and often sudden) understanding of a complex situation

• A feeling of understanding

Consumer insight

A customer insight is a fresh and not-yet obvious understanding of consumer beliefs, values, habits, desires, motives, emotions or needs that can become the basis for a competitive advantage.

– A not-yet obvious discovery

– A unique and fresh perspective

– A penetrating view of the obvious

– A competitively-advantaged idea

– Grounded in consumer understanding

– Not a number, a fact, or a quote from a consumer

A colleague once said "discovering insights is like fishing...

Picture uploaded by jurvetson. Used with thanks under CC.

you can sit there all day and not get a bite; or only land a tiddler. Another day you might catch a big one in a matter of minutes or after several hours. Insights are like those big fish... they are worth discovering but it can take time." But we need to find that time.