They say the art of story telling is dead, but in terms of getting you closer to strong consumer insights, a story can still be a very powerful tool to use in concert with all the other consumer understanding tools such as observation, focus groups discussion, video diaries, pathmapping, protostorming etc. If you believe that in this era of video ethnography, one-to-one interviewing of consumers is still relevant (and I do), then getting your consumer to tell you a story about a subject is a great way to reveal their deepest feeling on the topic. Life’s experiences are remembered through stories and reviewing your consumers stories in a one-to-one interview can quickly and simply connect you with unmet and unarticulated consumer needs. If you get your consumer to prepare their story as a story board before your one-to-one interview, as the interviewer you also get an easy way to navigate the story and to track back to areas of particular interest.

A story board usually consists of an A3 sheet of paper onto which the consumer can stick cut-out pictures from a magazine or can draw pictures to illustrate their story. It doesn’t have to look fantastic (although some do) but it needs to support the story. Depending on the subject you want to research, you can start the storytelling task by asking the consumers to describe “the best” (e.g. the best shopping experience I ever had), “the last time” (e.g. the last time I had an indulgent hot drink), “the first time” (e.g. the first time I bought a TV), “Compare your ideal..with” (e.g. compare your ideal healthy food with the snacks you get in your vending machine), “the worst time” (e.g. the worst time I went to the cinema) or simply “tell me a one picture story about” (e.g. tell me a one picture story about a typical family mealtime). Usually, the story itself should be relatively quick to tell, but the interviewer will need to expand and explore interesting areas of the story. The story format can also be set around various time formats, such as, cyclical (e.g. daily, seasonal), event (e.g. holiday, birthday, weddings, special occasions) or stages (e.g. beginning, middle and end). During the interview, the interviewer (and obsever) should pay particular attention to the follow:

1. look out for conflicts, sacrifices or tensions that the consumer is experiencing, sometimes this will require probing

2. The visual layout of the story, look at the flow of the story and importantly, look for what is not shown. This can often be as important as what the consumer has chosen to show

3. the emotions in the story and delivery. Does the delivery match the emotional content, key into the emotions and probe areas which are particularly emotive

4. let the consumer go through the entire story first without interruption. Once the first cycle through the story is complete, you can go back to areas of particular interest.

I’m definitely not trying to put down other forms of research by focusing on story telling. What I’m doing is sharing a tool which I believe has significant value in the task of identifying powerful insights. In future posts, I’m planning to go through how you can take the outputs from your consumer research and condense and amplify the most important elements of it to create key consumer themes.

I’ve picked up some more from James Dyson on TechCruch. This time he seems to have fewer anger issues but in the video clip it’s a bit hard to hear him at times. I did make out that he is worried by the mismatch in engineering graduates in the West vs. the East. He said there are now 600,000 new engineering graduates in China and 400,000 in India per year. Both these figures are on the increase while there are only 70,000 new engineering graduates in the US and the number is going down. James reckons we need engineers if we are going to stand any chance of increasing prosperity and solving some of the big issues we face such as global warming and energy shortages.

James was also interviewed about the iPhone and the Blackberry. He loved the look of the iPhone but disliked the screen functions and he hated the Blackberry look but loved it’s function. If you could somehow combine the two devices you might have a really good product.

I’ve just been reading in the MIT Sloan management review (here is a summary article) about the rise of Virtual Customer Environments (VCEs) as a means of forging closer links with customers in the areas of innovation and value creation. Microsoft, Cisco, Nokia, Volvo and Nike are mentioned as being pioneers in this area. A VCE can be as simple as an on-line discussion forum or a sophisticated product prototyping centre. By interacting with customers, Nokia have been able to tap into innovative design concepts. AB Volvo were able to accelerate product development by incorporating customers in virtual product concept labs. At present, VCEs are being used in five different (but in my view fairly close) roles in customer value co-creation: product conceptualizer, product designer, product tester, product support and product marketer. Here’s a little more on each of these:

Product conceptualizer:

This is where companies encourage customers to interact among themselves to generate and develop product improvement ideas. An example of this is Ducati Motor Holding SpA, the Italian motorcycle company with their Tech Cafe, where customers share design ideas (even including detailed engineering drawings) to customise and improve their bikes.

Product Design

Customers can design their idel product using virtual prototyping tools in the VCE. For example BMWs Customer Innovation Lab (see related article in European Business Forum) gives customers the tools to create their own designs. PSA also do something similar.

Product Tester

Companies are starting to harness virtual product technologies to engage their customers in testing concepts. Volvo and Audi have both implemented this capability

Product Support Specialist

Basically getting your expert users to support other users. Not quite so relevant to my innovation theme, so I’ll move through this one quickly. Perhaps not surprisingly, Microsoft and Cisco seem to be the main companies pushing this.

Product Marketer

Some companies have used customer expertise in product marketing activities carried out on VCEs. Both Korea’s Samsung and Japan’s Suzuki have experimented with virtual product launch centres, employing interactive product simulations and in the process engaging customers in product marketing.

All in all, these technologies, seem to offer innovative companies many opportunities in future: better engagement of customers, reduced time to market, potential for viral marketing and ability to derive input from lead users (see my previous post on this subject). My only concern with these technologies is that used blindly, they could become a tool for averaging and “group think”. There still needs to be room in tomorrow’s innovation processes for the sort of visionary connections and insights which can create true breakthrough product.  

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I’ve just received an e-mail inviting me to subscribe to a new vlog set up by Siamack Salari of Everyday Lives. I’ve had a look and I reckon it promises to be an entertaining watch. Already posted is a disturbing video diary of Siamacks globetrotting travels which gave me jet lag just watching it. The new Ethnosnacker vlog is aimed at “exposing, breaking down and reconstructing ethnographic research or commerical anthropology for those who want to understand it better”. Knowing Siamack it will be well worth checking out regularly. I’m looking forwards to learning some new stuff too.

We’re all being told to get closer to our consumers, to listen to our consumers, to get under our consumers skin, but is this enough to generate truly breakthrough ideas and future product concepts. Sometimes, you will strike it lucky but I believe if you really want to expose your self to strong innovation directions you need to go far broader. Say you’ve done your market analysis and you’ve got a target group of consumers. Standard industry practice says you should use tools such as storytelling, observation and focus groups with this target group. I say you should still do this but you should also cast your innovation net far wider. Here is a useful model to help you broaden your search for innovative concepts:

 

Step 1. Go ahead and research your target customer group, which can be done using standard tools such as 1 to 1 interviews, focus groups and basic observation. More sophisiticated tools such as story-telling where you get customers to prepare a story related to the subject matter you wish to research can pull out further insights. Other powerful approaches are accompanied shopping or direct observation. Allow maybe 40-50% of your total research time for this activity.

Step 2. Indentify stakeholders who are likely to observe and interact with your target customers as they use the product and interview them about how they see your customers behave. Potential candidates as stakeholders could be service engineers for users of office equipment, doctors in the case of patients in hospital or catering managers or shop keepers for snack consumers. Allow maybe 10-20% of your research time for this step.

Step 3. Put yourself in the shoes of your consumers, in short, be your consumer. Spend a day in the life of your consumer. If you are an engineer working on a new family car design, spend a day using the car with your family. Notice the things which are frustrating and the things which you like as a customer and user would. I understand Nissan used this approach when they asked their engineers, 5 at a time, to sit, with writing pads at the ready, in the Nissan Micra for 30 minutes collecting insights about their experience. Allow 10% of your research time for this.

Step 4. When I say deep users, what I mean here are extreme, passionate users of your product. So if you want to research coffee, talk to the consumers who prepare their own coffee blend, maybe even roasting it themselves. These consumers are likely to value product elements which can help you identify true stand-out products of the future, Purple Cow products, you might say. Allow 10-20% of your time here.

Step 5. Study parallel indutries and markets. Many powerful insights can be derived from practices which may well be common in other industries. Tools such as TRIZ can play a role during this stage to help identify suitable candidate industries. An interesting cross over industry that immediately comes to mind is human food and pet food, where trends in the first industry quickly transition into the second. Another example is the transition of ideas from pharmaceutical to food in the area of functional food. Allow 10% of your time here.

This process can help you get deeper insights which can help you create real breakthrough concepts

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One book which really got me thinking earlier this year was Wikinomics. Although this book, in my view, perhaps exaggerated the situation a bit, there is a really clear movement, through use of new technology, to including the consumer or end customer more fully in decisions about future products they might like. The whole topic of consumer co-creation is beginning to attract players such as Starbuck, Pepsi and even Chrysler. However, according to a very interesting article in Business Week a software company called Daptiv are taking things a bit further with a new package called Greenhouse. The Greenhouse package is provided free to Daptiv clients and allows product improvement suggestions from users to be logged, voted on and tracked. Users of the package can explore various sections such as “plant”, “cultivate”, “germinated”, “watered” and finally when the idea is implemented, “harvested”. Customers can track their ideas and vote on ideas which they really like. To date, well over 200 ideas have been planted and 6 have been implemented. The overall goal, says Tim Low, vice-president of marketing at Daptiv, is for Greenhouse to drive the company’s innovation process “by creating a closer, more intimate dialogue with customers.”

OK so this is a software product, so it’s easier to implement some of the suggestions than say for an FMCG company or another company with large capital investments. I would seriously challenge this sort of thinking. Why can’t you change the way you engage with the consumer just as deeply for an FMCG product? After all, a large part of your product offer, whatever product it is you sell, doesn’t directly relate to the product at all, remember the impact of the diamond shreddies campaign, for example. Why not start there and engage your consumers in co-creating your message?

Incidentally the Wikinomics Blog is worth a look

I came across an interesting article this week in New Scientist, an interview with a guy who does in-depth ethnographic research at Nokia.

Jan Chipchase a Design Researcher from Nokia spends his time traveling the world to find out how Nokia phones are really being used. In some countries, the mobile phone number is actually written above the door of a person’s home to identify where they live. In other situations, people will share phones or even  use them as a money transfer system.

Jan uses a number of tools to get inside usage of mobile phones, including - shadowing, capturing a day in the life of a user, home and contextual interviews, usage observation, wallet mapping, uncovering motivations and looking for differences between what people say they do and what they do. In short, they are using the full range of ethnographic tools and techniques. The insights Jan derives from this work will show up in future Nokia products.

I’ve added a link to a summary slide show which helps to illustate some of the key learnings (as far as Nokia can share) from this work. Clearly a very powerful and insightful set of tools for innovation. Interestingly some of the extreme users that Nokia are learning from are in what we somewhat condescending call the “emerging markets”. Just goes to show that in innovation you really can’t make assumptions about your customers.

I just found this article from the LA Times about how to make social networking technologies work for you. As I see social networking tools as having quite a role to play in engaging consumers in product co-creation in future, I had a good read through. However, the part of the article which caught my attention described how consumers had complained repeatedly about the packaging on the Tide.com message board and yet didn’t seem to have been listened to. I might be being a bit niaive but this is P&G we are talking about here and I was shocked that the Tide message board didn’t contain any response from the company. I thought P&G was supposed to be good at listening to it’s customers. I thought the consumer was their boss. I’ve had a look on Tide.com myself and it seems to be full of unanswered complaints and customers “itching and switching” (just made up that phrase – perhaps a career in advertising awaits) away from Tide. If you look carefully there is an occasional positive comment but in the ratio of about 1 in 30. I’m not quite sure what the P&G plan is for the site but it doesn’t seem to have worked in terms of engaing consumers in the Tide brand. As an innovator, I couldn’t help myself so I started to pick out some potential breakthrough areas which might resonate for a lot of consumers (what about a Tide product which avoided animal testing for example?). I think P&G actually could have a very useful innovation and brand building resource here with their website but only when they start to show the world that they can listen.�

I was reminded of a conversation I had with a Mountain Bike Design Engineer at Specialized bikes a couple of years ago. Some of you who know me will know that I’m a bit of a bikey and I wanted to find out about how they innovated as part of a programme to learn from innovative organisations. When I asked him how he got to consumer/rider insights, he replied that every weekend he would meet up with his friends who were all mountain bikers and they would discuss all the latest coolest pieces of kit. He would get their views about his latest designs and their suggestions for other improvements when they were actually riding the trails. He lived and breathed his business area. In fact, Specialized took the whole thing further and had a policy that anyone they employed had to be a cyclist. Their bonus scheme was also pretty clever but that’s another tale.