In
a recent article, I provided an overview of Customer Anthropology, one
of the hottest research and innovation tools in business today. The
essence of this approach is that customers often don't know what they
need, so by spending time observing them using your products (and your
competitors' products) you can often identify many business
opportunities (and threats) that sales analysis, interviews and
customer satisfaction surveys won't reveal.
If you're an
aspiring entrepreneur, your first important task is to find an unmet
need, understand why it is not currently being met, and assess whether
you and your partners have the capabilities and resources to meet it.
Customer Anthropology provides a terrific means to do this task. It
allows you to see, first hand, what people need that isn't being
provided by current products (users cursing, complaining, and working
around deficiencies in the existing products is a great clue). And it
enables you to see why the current products aren't meeting the need,
which can help you determine why the very smart incumbent producers are
missing the mark. Of course, you also need to understand the production
economics and the technology limitations, but observing customers will
get you off on the right foot.
Most of the examples of Customer
Anthropology in the literature are business-to-business. Steelcase uses
this approach to design effective workspaces for its customers, which
are, at least directly, other corporations. Medical technology
companies use this approach by visiting hospitals and medical
facilities, and they're observing the doctors and staff, not the
patients.
Once corporate customers appreciate the benefits of
Customer Anthropology, they're often more than willing to allow their
suppliers to observe their people at work. And they're curious to learn
about how to use the technique with their
customers. But what do you do when your customer is the public, or
when, although you may sell your product through intermediaries, it is
the public's use and satisfaction with the product you want to observe,
not the intermediary's?
In one sense, because you don't need to
get permission to access corporate offices, Customer Anthropology with
the public is easier than with corporate customers. But there are a
number of issues to address:
- Respecting Privacy: The public's right to privacy, and not to be 'spied on' by anthropologists
- Gaining Access: Access to observe the public using your product, when it's used inside the home rather than in public places.
- Defining Your 'Customers': Determining which of the 6.5 billion customers and potential customers of your product to observe.
Let's take each of these issues in turn.
Respecting Privacy
On the privacy
issue, it's important that you be honest and open with those you are
observing, even though to some degree that may compromise the accuracy
of your observations. If the customer knows you are observing them
using their product, they're less likely to throw it across the room in
frustration.
This is an issue that anthropologists deal with
all the time. They need to gain the trust of the people they are
observing. That trust requires absolute honesty. If they're using your
product (or a product similar to something you're thinking of
producing) for dubious purposes, or if they're awkward using it, they
need to know you won't rat them out or ridicule them. They need to know you're
observing them solely to help you design a better product for them to
use, and they need to have given their consent to be observed. And you,
as the anthropologist, need to have the judgement skills to know when
what you're observing is bona fide behaviour, and when it's a
performance for your benefit. As observer, you need to make yourself as
inconspicuous as possible.
If the use of the product you're
studying occurs in public places, you can of course do some observation
without the knowledge or consent of the people you're observing. But
there are serious limits to such opportunities. One of the key elements
of Customer Anthropology is the follow-up interview with those you're
observing to clarify behaviours that you didn't understand simply from
watching. You can't go up to a stranger and say "I've been observing
you trying to use that cigarette lighter to start your barbecue. Can I
ask you a few questions about why you're doing that?"
It can be
useful, if you can afford it, to offer some incentives to those you are
observing, to encourage them to allow you to let you eavesdrop on them.
The Nielsen company did this for years to get the right to monitor
exactly what parts of what programs and commercials customers were
watching on TV. The customer got various gifts and monetary rewards,
and Nielsen got the unvarnished truth, which turned out to be a lot
different from what people said they were and weren't watching in surveys.
One
of the cleverest incentives I've heard of was providing the customers
under observation with digital cameras or even movie cameras, and
inviting the customers to use the cameras to film themselves and their
friends using the product in question (I believe it was a sports shoe).
That way, the observer and the observation were less obtrusive, and the
customer got to use the cameras for other, personal purposes during the
observation period, and to keep the resultant footage. The
possibilities for getting around the privacy issue and getting
cooperation from those you are observing are limited only by your
imagination (and your research budget).
Gaining Access
So
what do you do when the usage of your product occurs inside personal
homes? The Nielsen approach, and the use of cameras and self-filming
instead of third-party observation can also address this issue. But
let's consider a specific example:
Suppose you're a great admirer of Interface Carpets
(full disclosure: I'm a great admirer, and I have a few shares in this
company). You like the fact that they make cradle-to-cradle carpet
products (no virgin material, everything 100% recycled) for the
industrial/commercial market, but feel that there is a need for
something similar but customized to the residential market. One of the
advantages of the Interface model is that their carpet comes in 1'
square pieces, like tile, so that the carpet in areas of heavy wear and
with unremovable stains can be replaced without having to replace the
entire carpet. You want to see if this model might work in private
homes, but how to get inside? Do people still buy carpet for their
homes, or is everyone going to hardwood, composites and tile?
You
might settle for just visiting the homes of people you know. You might
hang out at carpet stores and eavesdrop until you wore out your
welcome. You might buy data from an insurance company on what
percentage of residential floors have each different kind of flooring
(they do compile this data). Now, use a bit more imagination. Who sees
the carpet in thousands of people's homes? Carpet and flooring installers.
So you might offer some incentive to an installer to do your
observation for you. Even better, you might volunteer to 'apprentice'
with an installer for free for a couple of months on a part-time basis
-- the first day on each new job. You help with the grunt work --
removing the old carpet, carrying in the supplies etc., and in return
you get to gather first-hand information about all the flooring in the
homes of people who are replacing their existing flooring -- precisely
your potential customers. And as 'apprentice' you can chat with the
homeowner and the installer and ask some questions to feel out the market for your idea.
Defining Your 'Customers'
Imagination
may help you solve the privacy and access issues, but how do you decide
which of the millions of potential customers in the 'public' to observe?
Here's where the need/affinity matrix pictured above comes in. There are three steps to sussing out unmet needs to fill:
- Identifying unmet needs, and understanding why they aren't being met by incumbent suppliers.
- Reorganizing those needs as 'jobs to be done' [and hence clarifying what is needed]
- Assessing
which groups, communities, affinities (what the people in these groups
have in common) need these 'jobs to be done' [and hence clarifying who needs these things and why -- in what context]
This is a complex
process, and one that is often poorly done by researchers and marketers
and designers and advertisers who try to reduce this to a merely complicated
process. They're content to know the 'demographics' of their users, a
very rough cut at segmenting the market for a product. But such
demographics leave out or bury the most valuable information,
information on why certain
groups have this need. Market surveys are inadequate to unearth this
information, or even to identify the precise affinity groups that share
a particular need. They don't fit within the parameters of
simple/complicated 'choose one answer' survey questions.
Observation and one-on-one interviews provide a much richer mine of information about needs. Since your brain, unlike surveys, is
capable of embracing complexity, interpreting Customer Anthropology and
follow-up interview data can allow you to put together a much more
precise need/affinity matrix than most of the big players in any
industry would have either the ability or the patience for (what may be
a very comfortable and lucrative niche for your business is likely too
small and too risky for big competitors stretching for huge,
high-margin growth every year).
The graphic above shows an
example of this process, the plastic decking (like Eon or Trex) and
fencing materials that are eating into the market of outdoor wood decks
and wood and metal fences.
A number of years ago, some
enterprising individuals identified several unmet needs in this area:
Outdoor decks and fences that didn't need a lot of regular maintenance
(painting and repair), were relatively simple to install, and did not
use creosote or other preservatives shown to be hazardous to health.
The 'job to be done' was a safe (to human health) surface for summer
recreation or privacy fence that would last a lifetime with no
maintenance. None of the existing wood products did this precise job.
Two companies in particular, Eon (a 100% recycled plastic product) and
Trex (a recycled plastic/wood composite product), developed products
that did this job.
They succeeded where others failed because they accurately assessed not only what the 'job to be done' was that existing products didn't do, but precisely who needed that 'job to be done' and why.
The buying affinity groups weren't defined by traditional demographics
but by (a) their concern for health and safety of their personal
recreation and entertainment area (and, to some extent, for the
environment) and (b) their lack of time and/or skill for carpentry
work. These products were designed, developed and marketed to these
specific affinity groups, not to the traditional home-handyman types,
as their successful differential strategy canvases, shown below,
demonstrates:
As
an entrepreneur, deciding which of the millions of potential customers
to observe is part of the iterative process of finding the sweet spot
where you and your entrepreneurial partners' talents and passions (your
Collective Genius) intersects with what there is an unmet need for. The
trick is not getting so enamoured with what your Collective Genius could
produce that you don't ensure there is a real, unmet need for it. And
not getting so enthusiastic about finding a solution for a real, unmet
need you have uncovered through your research and observation that you
end up trying to do something outside your Collective Genius (something
you're not especially good at, or which you don't really relish the
thought of spending a lot of your waking hours doing).
Trust
your instincts to know who might have needs that your Collective Genius
could address, and therefore who to observe and interview. Trust your
instincts, too, to know when your Customer Anthropology is not working,
and to try something, or someone,
else. And always pay attention: Good anthropologists don't turn off
their observational and listening skills when they go home at night.
Some of the world's greatest ideas have been serendipitous.
And,
as I keep emphasizing, I think it's essential that you not try to do
this alone. Collectively you have a lot more Genius than any one person
alone can muster. Collectively you have different passions, that allow
you and each of your partners to do exclusively what they love. And
between you, you have a lot more eyes and ears to observe and research
what is needed, and to assess those observations and that research
objectively. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
