IDEA GENERATION AND CUSTOMERS
Do you know what your customer doesn't want?
Introduction
Innovation and growth start from a point of inspiration, but finding the inspiration for the great ideas that add value to the business is difficult; you can’t just instruct a team to be innovative and expect innovation to happen.
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The most effective idea generation steps for inspiring innovative ideas either increase the amount of information you have about your customer or look at the information you have in a new way. Or both.
We spend a lot of time looking at our customers and describing who they are and what they want. We can find inspiration by actively considering the opposite: what is it that the customers don’t want, who are the customers that we don’t reach.
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“I don’t know what I want, but it’s not that….”
Often, when we can’t express what we want exactly, it can be helpful to have options presented that help us consider what we don’t want. This can be used to explore the decisions we are making and what is important to us. You may have been with a group of friends trying to decide what to do. No one has any strong feelings on what they want, but as suggestions are made you all know when they don’t feel right.
Taking the time to consider why some suggestions feel wrong will define a shape of what you feel is right. It’s the same with customer needs, exploring what they don’t want and why can create a clearer outline of what they do want.
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“That’s not what I asked for….”
Another reason for considering what a customer doesn’t want is that it defines boundaries on which features add value to a product. Too often development teams start with the intent of developing a product for the customer but end up developing a product for themselves: they add features because they can, not because they add value to the customer. Having clearly defined boundaries is useful for ensuring that development teams focus on what adds value to the customer.
In this article, we will walk through a framework on how to consider what the customer wants, what they don’t what and what influences those decisions. You will be able to build an idea generation session around this framework, exploring each of the sections as a trigger for inspiration.
As with any idea generation session, there are no fixed directions. These are general guidelines; how you apply these tools is flexible and should be adapted to your specific situation and the problems you are trying to resolve.
Who is/isn’t the customer?
The first step is to consider your customers in terms of shared characteristics that relate to your products. Your aim is to describe a segment for each type of customer based on who they are and who they are not and which distinct features define this difference. This will improve your understanding of their needs and preferences and focusses your product development.
It is easy to misjudge the amount of information you should have to describe your customers. Too little and you may either miss an important feature or combine two customer types and lose definition. Too much information will overwhelm your idea generation efforts.
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You and your team should check that as information generated it is accurate, adds something new, and is relevant to interaction between you and your customer in terms of profitability, growth or alignment with business goals.
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The characteristics that you use to create customer segments within your market will be specific to your product, but some key considerations are:
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Demographic segmentation
You can divide customers based on demographic characteristics such as age, gender, income, education level and geographic location to create an understanding of who they are. The image your have for each customer type will be more descriptive if you build on each characteristic with an explanation of who they aren’t. The boundary that describes the difference between who the customers are and who they are not can be explored for what implications it has for the product.
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For example, you may have developed an app that works in one country, but not another. This may lead to a discussion of whether this is this driven by a language barrier or cultural differences, understating the difference may avoid a costly language translation and launch for a product that won’t work culturally.
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If you decide that you cannot define a clear boundary between who your customer is and isn’t, then perhaps you can divide further to create an adjacent segment that you can pursue; denim jeans transitioned from being work wear to fashion items for customers of all income levels. An unclear boundary could be causing you to lose customers if they are turned away by associations with another segment: it is not uncommon for teenagers to move away from a product as soon as they see it linked to their parents.
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Psychographic segmentation
You may choose to divide customers based on shared attitudes, values, and interests. This type of segmentation is more subjective and can be more difficult to measure than demographic segmentation.
This subjectivity can lead to a lack of clarity with definitions and increases the value of taking time to consider what the customer isn’t: defining a boundary on who the customer isn’t can create an outline of who they are: knowing that a customer may not be a professional sportsperson but does not want to be associated with people they see as being too casual may lead you to performance rather than fashion features.
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Behavioral segmentation
Segments can also be defined based on customer behaviours, such as their purchasing habits, level of brand loyalty, or response to marketing messages.
A customer who shops online and does not go into physical stores is unlikely to discover a free sample in a store. Some customers may have high levels loyalty to a competitor brand or image that it will be ineffective to try to change.
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You may find that there is a potential in situations where the customer does not have a technical preference between products but can build on your brand. For example, Airpods may not have the best technical performance, but they carry a strong brand association.
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Business customer segmentation
If your customers are other businesses, there are different sets of characteristics you can consider such as industry, size, and location.
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You may find that you have a customer whose volume or stability of supply expectations are not compatible with your business. You may decide that you do not want to supply components to military use or into manufactured products where the overall quality would be damaging to your reputation. The ability to describe which customers you are not targeting and why, will help focus your teams.
One of the most effective ways to explore these concepts in an idea generation session is to build an Affinity Diagram. In this approach, simple statements are captured on cards so that they can be grouped together in common themes.
The benefit of this type of exercise comes from the conversations that it provokes in the teams - discussing the concepts are on the cards and the reasons for each grouping.
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What is/isn’t your customer trying to achieve?
Once you have a clear image of who your customer is, and what defines the boundary between who they are and who they aren’t, you should explore what they are trying to achieve with your product.
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To paraphrase Levitt: customers don’t want a drill, they want a hole. Your first actions will examine how well do you understand what they are trying to achieve. The inverse of this is to understand what they are trying to avoid.
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You may find that some of these drawbacks are explicitly stated: a customer who is buying clothing to fit in with a serious sports club may have functional requirements but may also be actively trying to avoid any features that associate with fashion or casual users.
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Often, these detrimental features are obvious in hindsight following a loss of customers. An effective exercise is to role play events that can lead to a negative sentiment toward your product. Your customers may not have a stated ESG requirement, but if there is a publicised controversy over the environmental or social impact of your operations you may find that they are no longer willing to be associated with your brand.
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Some of the characteristics that the customers are trying to avoid can be inferred from their stated preferences. If you take each of the preferences that you are aware of, map their opposites and follow through the customer experience you will discover any features that cause dissatisfaction. You may have a search engine for example, where simplicity of the landing page is a key feature. This should lead you to understanding that your customers will want to avoid having their search results obscured by adverts.
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Why do/don’t the customers want to do this?
You can build from the understanding of what the customer is trying to achieve by exploring why they want to achieve it. The inverse is also true, understanding why a customer is looking to avoid an outcome will develop your knowledge of how your product can fit with them.
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There are two approaches to this. The first is to start from the outcome that the customer is looking to avoid, and understanding why they want to avoid it. A customer that is buying a fashion item may be looking to be admired by their peers. While they may be hoping to achieve more than going unnoticed, they will be actively trying to avoid the embarrassment of being noticed for the wrong reasons. If they feel that your product has features that are distinctly unfashionable, they will want to avoid it at a fundamental level.
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The second approach is to consider positive motivations that your customer has, determine their opposites, and project those back to the outcome that the customer is looking to avoid. A customer may be looking for a sense of security from their health insurance policy. The opposite of this is a sense of insecurity and doubt. Applying this to the policy will inform choices such as using simple language or easy to navigate claims processes.
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Which tasks do/don’t your customers use your product for?
You have built up an understanding of what they customer is trying to achieve and why; you have added definition to this with an understanding of what they are trying to avoid and their reasons.
This is only a high-level view of what the customer is trying to achieve that describes the overall context that your product exists in. You can now focus in on the detail and examine which specific tasks your customer uses your product for.
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Framing these tasks with those that the product is not used for, and what drives that choice will give a clear indication of the value that each product feature brings to the customer.
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For example, the success of different social networking apps is related to the specific tasks that they are used for. You may set up a temporary chat group for a social gathering on one app, but would set up a project team chat room in another. The value of product features such as mobile functionality, tagging locations, or the ability to index and recover old messages change relative to each use case.
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Why do/don’t customers choose your product?
Customers, unfortunately, have a habit of selecting competitor products, regardless of how well you have mapped their tasks, goals and the context that they use your product in.
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We often find that our understanding of customer behaviour is biased to those that have already chosen our products. We can reach them with satisfaction surveys or will have feedback mechanisms built into our product aftercare.
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It is much more difficult to understand why customers have not chosen the product in the first place.
Many industries now have the benefit of widespread online reviews. The relative value and success of features, performance, and consumer sentiment can be a little easier to find. Marketing departments have long held focus groups and side by side customer reviews discussing points of parity and differentiation. Product Development teams perform benchmarking exercises, and sales teams may interact with competitors’ customers.
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The reality is that there is often no easy way to know for sure why a customer does not choose your product. If you consciously take the time to consider the reasons in a systematic way, it will go a long way to improving your customer knowledge, particularly if used alongside the other methods discussed in this article.
The Affinity Diagram can be extended to capture these discussions, with each concept summarised and grouped into relevant themes to provoke conversations and inspire ideas.
While the concepts are being captured and arranged, you will find it useful to map relationships, potentially adding new concepts as these are discussed.
What influences these choices?
You should now have a map of what the customer wants and what they don’t, with a boundary described between the two.
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You can explore this boundary to learn more about the influences that direct the customers’ choices. Examining these in a systematic way will drive discussions that will provide further points of inspiration for the idea generation sessions, either to identify features to add to your products or to reassess features that do not hold any value for the customer.
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Each influence will have a direction that it pushes the customer and a magnitude for how much weight it carries in the decision. These factors can be represented graphically to help prioritise discussions. Grouping together similar influences, or showing links between different influences can also help identify significant themes for consideration.
Summary
The effectiveness of any idea generation session is determined by the approach you take to foster inspiration. The techniques shown here won’t provide any answers for your product development, but they do provide a framework that you can walk your team through. As they move through the framework, it will act as a prompt, helping the team uncover new information or looking at what they already know in a new way.
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Many teams focus on who their customer is and what those customers are looking for in their products. In this framework, we extend that to consider what the customers want to avoid. This then provides a basis for exploring the influences between what the customers want, and what they don’t.
