With each newly publicized innovation, your company will build trust that it is aware of customer problems and needs that competitors ignore, and will clearly demonstrate its focus on creatively solving those problems and fulfilling those needs.
Although there are lots of techniques for determining genuine market needs, here’s one noteworthy approach that offers the benefit of identifying what customers are longing to accomplish while avoiding over-fixation on what they are currently doing:
- Select a particular market or product;
- Identify an exemplary customer;
- Identify an important task the customer wants to accomplish and why;
- De-construct that task into a series of discrete process steps or activities;
- Identify the metrics the customer uses to measure success in completing each of those activities;
- Analyze the biggest challenges the customer faces in successfully completing each activity; and
- Innovate solutions to those challenges.
Take a closer look at item 3, task identification and analysis, which tends to set the tone for the entire process. This item encourages a pronounced focus on not only what the customer is actually doing, but importantly, the customer’s fundamental objective in doing so. This is a very meaningful difference from typical market research because it creates a climate for stepping back and thinking more abstractly, setting the stage for considering alternative activities, techniques, and tools that might accomplish the same fundamental objective.
It’s in exactly that sort of climate that highly customer-valued innovations can arise.