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Fast Company just released their 2010 report on the world’s most innovative companies. One of our clients, Frito-Lay, comes in at the 28th spot on the top 50 list for their commitment and advancement to sustainability technologies and processes. Congrats Frito-Lay!
A few weeks back I wrote about how I was feeling uncomfortable with a recent thread in the industry stating that the way to get ahead in the marketplace is to stop listening to your customer and to focus on your competition.
If you’ve taken any time to peruse our website, you can understand why I’m against this viewpoint, as it fundamentally goes against how we work and the value that we provide back to our clients on a daily basis. But saying that we provide value is one thing. Showing numbers to prove the value that we provide is quite another.
I was ecstatic this morning when I read a recent article in Forbes, called “Marketing in a Weak Economy.” The article makes reference to the return on investment that Shurline, a division of Newell Rubbermaid, has had after working with us.
In 2006, Sylver Consulting partnered with Cloverleaf on a aisle redesign initiative lead by Shurline and Lowes. Sylver Consulting supported the initiative by conducting in-store shop-alongs with people intending to paint their homes in the coming weeks. This research uncovered a host of problems that Shurline and other competitors had when appealing to the DYI customer at the point-of-purchase, all of which Cloverleaf leveraged as input into a 2-day innovation workshop led with members of Shurline and Cloverleaf’s extended team of partners, Brianna and Adriano of Sylver Consulting included.
A number of the product and packaging innovations resulting from that session have since come to market. Lisa Gunther, global director for marketing and brand management at Newell Rubbermaid, discusses one of them in the Forbes article, for which an excerpt is provided below.
Though Shurline operates in a decidedly non-sexy category–one where brand recognition is around 5%–research has shown that customers’ desire for more control included wanting to actually touch the paint applicators’ bristles before buying them. With a packaging redesign that allowed consumers to interact with the product, Shurline’s sales remained flat during the past year, even as the overall category fell by 30%, Gunther said.
In my opinion, the numbers speak for themselves. Shurline has been able to withstand the pressures of a down economy due to the efforts of Sylver Consulting, Cloverleaf and all the other folks participating in that 2-day innovation workshop back in August of 2007.
When time permits, I like to start my mornings reading all the daily newsletters, publications, etc. that have accumulated in my inbox from the day before. I had that time this morning and came across a few really interesting things. I thought I’d share…
1. Vicon Revue-A new camera that could revolutionize remote research
It’s worn around a person’s neck or clipped to their clothes. It can be set to take pictures at specific time intervals, such as every 30 seconds, or to respond to changes in body heat, external temperature or light. I’m excited about this as a research tool. The quality of what can be captured in remote research could go up ten-fold with a device like this!
2. Play Rethink-A board game that inches into the territory of open innovation
As pulled from the Jan. 27 Springwise newsletter:
Play Rethink (”The Eco-Design Game”) is an effort from London-based Rethink Games to help people think—or rethink—how to make everyday objects and services more socially and environmentally friendly. Each game includes a multicoloured wheel and 98 drawing cards along with an eco-strategies key card and an instruction sheet with activities. With each spin of the wheel, players get a card asking them to rethink a particular everyday object, such as a chair or a vacuum cleaner. They then describe their idea for a more sustainable approach by drawing it on the card. Ideas players are particularly proud of can be uploaded onto the Play Rethink website, where others can rate, comment and be inspired by them. What’s more, each month Rethink Games selects one idea to serve as the project of the month, and it’s currently working on setting up partnerships with organizations that can help develop those ideas further.
If the company is successful in creating some of the partnerships spoken of above, I could see the next evolution of this game to be something that could challenge open innovation services that companies, such as Imaginatik and InnoCentive, offer.
3. Why Google’s Nexus One launch was so underwhelming.
Author Carmine Gallo compares the launch of Nexus One to anything that Apple does. The presentation insights shared in the article are worth the read.
We’re excited to announce a new initiative that Brianna is involved in. On March 16, 2010, Brianna will kick off a class at the Institute of Design (ID), IIT called “Cross Cultural Research.” It’s a 7-week class, in which her students in Chicago, IL at ID will be collaborating virtually with a team of students at ESPM in São Paulo, Brazil.
The topic of discovery will be home security. Students will be broken into teams, each tasked with defining for the “company” that they are working for the cultural differences, barriers, etc. that they must be cognizant of when selling their services and products in the foreign market of Brazil or the US.
The class is an experiment, with a number of wild cards embedded in it, but nothing that’s not typical in any cross border research initiative conducted. Most importantly, the curriculum of the class drives home the philosophy that Sylver practices in their Cross Border consulting work. Local researchers who have the region’s culture imprinted into who they are–how they think, behave–will be partnered with “foreigners” who are largely unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the local culture. The duality of the “in-the-know” and “fresh perspective” is what will enable us to uncover the “truth” of what customers need, as it relates to each of the new markets.
Students will create cultural frameworks to show the differences in behaviors and assumptions across cultures, as the final deliverable for the class. They’ll also leverage these frameworks to make recommendations back to the “company” for whom they are working on how they should proceed based on the export strategy favored by the organization.
Brianna and Ellen Kiss, the professor from ESPM, are actively seeking articles on international research to provide as the reading list for the course. If you know of some excellent articles in this realm, please pass them along. You can reach Brianna directly at brianna@sylverconsulting.com.
A thread of discussion in the industry lately, stating that the way to get ahead is to stop listening to your customer, is leaving me a bit uncomfortable. The premise of this conversation is that reaching out to your customers is only allowing you to get to the next incremental improvement on an existing product or service, while the big innovation is being left on the table.
To be blunt, I think what we’re facing here is naivety about how to structure and leverage customer research effectively throughout the product development process. User research has become a bit like desktop publishing over the years. Anyone who can say the term “observation” automatically can become an ethnographer, just like anyone who had PageMaker on his or her computer years ago, overnight become a graphic designer. Sorry to break the news…it just doesn’t work that way. A tool does not make the professional. It aids in his or her creations.
This flippancy of saying “I’m a researcher,” I fear is the reason why this conversation questioning the value of knowing your customers is even occurring. Because, honestly, the idea of creating your products in a vacuum or only looking to your competition for inspiration just doesn’t make sense. You’re either taking shots in the dark, hoping that something might stick, or setting yourself up to forever be a follower versus a leader in the industry.
Designing, conducting, analyzing and synthesizing customer research is a science and requires skills and knowledge to ensure that the product emerging informs the goals set forth for the research to begin with. Each step of design, execution, analysis and synthesis must be considered in equal weight for a project to be successful. For instance, if you’re designing a study that’s suppose to define the next breakthrough product for a company, it doesn’t make much sense to focus on the current products in your portfolio as the focus of that research initiative. Rather, you’d have much better success taking a broader focus in your research and studying process instead. That’s what’s going to give you the insight on the latent needs that are rich territory for innovation.
Likewise, you need to have thought about your analysis plan/process before you’ve decided which tools and techniques are best to be leveraged to actually conduct the research. It makes no sense to randomly choose a set of techniques to use if you can’t explicitly state how the data that will be collected from each will ultimately inform the goals of the project.
I believe customer insight is critical to the long-term success of companies. Is it the only tool that should be leveraged for growth? Absolutely not. It’s one tool of many. But it is an important one. Because if you’re directed about how to solicit customer feedback and learn of and about customer needs, the development process becomes immensely less challenging with less uncertainty embedded in it. It saves money and makes your developers happier.
I believe this business of rethinking customer research is the result of a lot of bad research, which unfortunately is tarnishing the reputation of those that do know what they are doing. I guess the lesson that can be learned here is, ask questions before you buy. Do reference checks.
Design Feast is a go-to resource for students, professionals, educators and the design-curious—delivering relevant and diverse design content, creative voices and projects.
Brianna talks about her experience as a designer, her challenges and her passion for helping others through design. You can see the complete interview here.
To know more about Nate Burgos’ projects visit:
FEAST — http://www.designfeast.com
READ — http://designfeaster.blogspot.com
INSPIRE — http://www.designthoughtleader.com
ENGAGE — http://www.designengage.com
FOLLOW — http://twitter.com/designfeast
It’s with great pleasure that I get to share the success of a past project that we’ve worked on.
Three years ago, Hudson, an international staffing, recruitment and talent management company, started an initiative to redesign their intranet, believing that it should and could be a productivity tool for the organization. To help define which functionality should be embedded in the new site, they hired Sylver Consulting to support them in understanding the “sales” culture of the organization and identifying the unmet information needs of their employees.
Sylver Consulting used Innovation Research techniques, primarily ethnography, to understand the workflows and challenges of varied roles, functions and departments across the North American offices of the organization. We intentionally did not ask employees for feedback on Hudson’s existing intranet or ask them to hypothesize what they might like to see in the redesign. We simply watched them work, saw their real work challenges and then suggested ways that the intranet could help to fill those information gaps.
That upfront work has paid off! Hudson launched a Beta version of their intranet back in June 2009. It’s gotten such positive reviews from the North American division of the company that they’re beginning to introduce the new platform and functionality to their other Global regions this month.
To quote Kris Rzepkowski, Director of Interactive Marketing in North America at Hudson:
“The ethnographic research provided by Sylver Consulting on our employee behavior and work styles set a foundation for the success of our intranet launch. Everyone in the organization found it worthwhile to have a much deeper understanding of our “sales culture” and what that means to our intranet approach. For the entire development cycle of the 3-year project we were able to refer to the research every time we had questions on how to focus functionality, design and content around our user needs. The end result was a well-received intranet launch. To quote one user, ‘I thought this was the way our intranet should have been 3-years go’. Thanks to Brianna’s high-quality research, and our user-centered design principles, that’s all we need to prove success!”
With out question, Hudson’s new intranet is more engaging and provides employees with the tools to boost productivity. The highly customizable new platform encourages collaboration and makes searches fast and precise. Check out some of it’s key functionality in a video created to help with the launch of the Beta site this past June.
You can also read more about the site’s Beta launch and development on Kris’ blog here.
At Sylver Consulting we’ve always been committed to extracting deep insight from the research data that we collect. To do this, we leverage a number of analytic models and frameworks, in addition to putting considerable time into the up-front planning processes associated with any project. But recently, we’ve surprised even ourselves with how much deeper it’s possible to go with understanding who your customer is–their wants, needs, challenges, and motivations.
We’ve started doing linguistics analysis on qualitative data collected from audio diaries or interviews. Each sentence of customer commentary is analyzed individually for the need being expressed within it. Through multiple iterations of synthesis, we ladder up the insights gained to create Need States Frameworks, providing transparency into all the varied reasons why someone may engage in the activity being studied.
It’s the granularity of this approach that is empowering us to find new ways to categorize customer behavior. Instead of developing categorizations around the activities or environments for instance, the groups are based on the needs being fulfilled by the experience the customer is having, independent of the activity being engaged. By leveraging this technique we’ve been able to help our clients to reframe how they think of their categories in the marketplace. And it’s the Need States Framework that helps to convey this new frame of understanding to others within their organization.
The Need State Frameworks that we produce are highly visual, offering an executive summary of the research findings in a diagram that can fit on one page. The diagrams differ by project but the visual below gives an indication of their general fidelity. This graphic was created to define how different personas understand and interact with power (i.e. electric, gas).
We’re finding that these frameworks are great tools for new product development ideation and brand positioning efforts. The need categories are helping our clients to be more targeted when defining which characteristics or qualities of an experience they need to address in their new offerings.
If you’d like to learn more about this methodology and/ or its applicability on any projects that you’re thinking about for your organization, please reach out to us at info@sylverconsulting.com. We’d love to talk with you.
I love getting a deal. And when I score a product for $5 when it should be $7.99 for instance I’m elated and euphoric. So, needless to say, the idea of coupon cutting is a practice that I endorse and engage in avidly.
So, this morning when I read the NY Times article, “A Clip-and-Save Renaissance,” I could relate. Not only do I clip coupons for the obvious reasons of saving money. But, I also clip coupons because the practice is therapeutic. I enjoy it, as it gives me time to think and plan the meals that my family and I might enjoy over the coming week. I also get inspired to try new things that I might otherwise walk right past in the supermarket.
What I’ve described above is the feeling I get when I’m clipping coupons out of the Sunday paper or from fliers sent to my home direct from the retailer. In contrast, trying to “collect” and “clip” digital coupons is a huge pain in the neck. The number of steps you need to go through just to get to the darn coupon on these digital coupon sites is insane. And then half of the time once you get to the coupon you realize that it’s not exactly what you wanted and so all your effort is lost. Many times these sites require you to install special software on your computer (which most times is not Mac compatible…you can tell what type of machine I use). It’s no wonder that digital coupons still account for less than 0.5% of all coupons distributed in the nation.
These digital coupons sites are missing the boat, focusing all their efforts and attention on security, at the expense of the experience that people have with their sites. Their eye is on helping people save money, while they’re simultaneously ignoring all the other benefits that people gain from the practice of coupon clipping.
Digital coupons could be a “game charger,” if efforts were taken to infuse the experiential qualities of clipping paper coupons into the digital experience. Come on, who wouldn’t love to search for a coupon for their favorite ice cream or yogurt for instance instead of waiting patiently for it to show up in the paper 10 weeks from now? Or think about the alerts that you could create? There are endless possibilities, but before they can be realized the digital coupon sites need to start putting their customers front and center and focus on making the online experience as easy, serendipitous, and carefree as their direct competitor: the paper coupon.
Photo credit: grand grrl
Just read a great whitepaper by Vovici called “7 Habits of Highly Successful Surveys.” It’s a good read, offering a nice overview of the things that you should and shouldn’t do when conducting online surveys.
In summary, the 7 habits are:
The whitepaper is a quick read and I think will prove to be useful and of interest to anyone who does surveys frequently or plans to run a survey soon. Vovici gives some practical tips on how to execute each of these habits.
A big thanks to Marcio Santos for passing this whitepaper my way!
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