What customers need?
Many people believe that the process of developing new products is broken and, indeed, any activity between 70 and 90 by a bad performance would be considered out of control from all points of view.
And although there are many reasons attributed to this failure (organizational, cultural, technological, ...) some of them have a much greater weight. In "Winning at New Products" Robert Cooper cited as the two most important factors for the success of new products (due to their impact on profitability) to the following:
- Superior and differentiated product with unique benefits for the customer.
- Guidance to the market, incorporating the voice of the customer.
Similarly, the same author as the factor of failure of new products that companies most often cited is an inadequate market analysis.
It is therefore not surprising that the agendas of innovation approaches to market orientation and customer have acquired top priority. With this philosophy the inspiration for the development of new products does not come from intuition and ideas of the company directors as to identify and understand the needs of your target customers (not just current, but not consumers).
And while customer orientation can lead to problems encountered in making radical innovations, there is no doubt that the needs (both explicit and latent) of the customers and provide value to the main argument is that these open their wallets, especially in periods of the current recession.
However, detection of needs poses great challenges that make the most common research techniques (surveys, focus groups, concept testing ...) provide unreliable results. And among these the most important challenges is to define the concept of "necessity." Indeed, over time the notion of need has been identified with the requirement, with a product (or an attribute of it) or, more generally, with a solution to the customer. But customers who only know the products are in the market and are unaware of technological advances: a new design solution is to work for the company, not users.
Listen to customers with an incorrect approach, asking what they want, i.e. solution-instead of what they need to provide results (in particular, a tendency towards incremental improvements rather than radical) and often leads to product development type "me too" and harm's most visionary. As Henry Ford said, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, I would have replied that a faster horse." So some companies have chosen to give back to the research of customers, at least in its more traditional (as described, for example, in the classic "Ignore Your Customer").
Indeed, in certain types of innovations (e.g., services around the Web 2.0) can be cheaper to launch the product and go directly modified and adapted iteratively through successive interactions and feedback from users (in a process of co) instead of an a priori research clients long, costly and inconclusive.
However, where products are desirable development process more traditional (less evolutionary and interactive), the challenge is to identify any unmet needs of customers (not just the present and explicit, but also the latent, non-articulated, and future ) and from them to design solutions that bring the most value from the standpoint of the customer. But if the classic techniques of investigation are not reliable, what can we do?
An upcoming post will discuss other techniques to capture customer needs and optimize the innovation process.
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