Qualitative Research
How do you innovate a breakthrough product? Stop asking customers what they want and start asking them what they want their products to do for them.
Value-based innovation is very much an outside-in, customer-oriented approach. But instead of the typical focus group approach, some clients prefer to develop deep, detailed, experiential interviews with individual customers.
These experiential interviews have several objectives:
• Capture the context and process of product usage,
• Understand a customer’s fears, emotions and frustrations, and
• Transcend opinion, understand motivation of behaviors and beliefs
Business Navigation Systems' experiential interviews are a new variation on the typical customer interview. Our approach is to engage with customers to understand the whole system or process within which the customer uses a product or service. The dialogue then focuses on latent issues or problems. Finally, we examine how problem areas are currently managed; this becomes the basis for exploring what complementary benefits might provide a complete system or solution.
The key insights generated during interviews are a powerful mechanism for communicating customer needs for new products. Understanding precisely how a customer manages his or her environment provides a much more fertile innovation space than mere incremental upgrades. It also increases the likelihood that innovation will not be quickly matched by competitors.