About this Author
Gwen Smith Ishmael, Sr. Vice President of Insights and Innovation at Decision Analyst in Arlington, TX, has led marketing and new product development activities in the CPG and technology industries since 1986. She also conceived and developed ground-breaking Web-based promotional vehicles, two of which are patent pending. Gwen holds an MBA in Marketing and is a featured speaker on insights and innovation around the world. Her writings have been featured in international text books, most recently in Managing 4 Ps of Marketing FMCG Sector, and Product Innovation: A Strategic Tool for Growth, by ICFAI Publications, 2006 and 2007, respectively.
Founding Author
Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is Director of Innovation Services at Decision Analyst in Arlington, Texas, is a former journalist who worked as an editor and reporter for The Dallas Morning News and the Nashville Tennessean, and was managing editor of D, the Dallas city magazine. She has a master's degree in rhetoric and has also taught college-level English and informal logic.
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Category Archives
January 7, 2008
Posted by Gwen Ishmael
Voice of the customer/consumer… I think I was first exposed to the term in the early ‘90s when TQM was the bandwagon of choice. Businesses large and small were worshipping at the altar of the consumer, the customer was king, and no one made a decision without first consulting a customer advisory panel. (I recall attending a planning session once where a sales colleague showed up in her old high school cheerleading outfit – complete with a megaphone labeled “VOC” hanging around her neck – and firmly announced, “I am the voice of the customer, and you should listen to me!”)
Companies launched countless strategies and initiatives designed to develop new products, improve quality, and enhance customer service – all based on what they believed customers and consumers were telling them. And most of those efforts failed or were discontinued because they fell far short of expectations. Over time, VOC went the way of most bandwagons, and people would roll their eyes at the very mention of the term. Not because the concept was invalid, but because it had been so poorly applied.
Well, VOC is back again, and possibly stronger than ever. And what I see is reminiscent of the past: organizations exerting great efforts to conduct focus groups and quantitative research to elicit input and guidance from its customers and consumers, and then not quite understanding how to use it once they have it.
Personally, I’ve found it useful to stop thinking about VOC and start thinking about MOC – Mind of the Customer/Consumer. It’s not enough for me to hear and see the words that customers use; I need to understand the myriad of drivers that underlie those words – emotions, rationale, motivators, fears, etc.
Here are some simple things I’ve found helpful to me in terms of trying to understand MOC and tapping into it as a source of innovation. I’d be interested in hearing what others are doing as well:
- Listening with more than the ear. What customers/consumers say is important, yet equally important are the things they offer that are not words – images, sounds, gestures, objects all have stories to tell, and they play a key role in better understanding MOC. If this sounds like Qualitative Research 101, it is! But it’s something that is seldom practiced successfully because it takes time and effort.
- Blur the lines. I’m finding there are times it’s helpful to use idea generation techniques when I’m conducting customer/consumer research, and vice versa. Introducing tools such as SCAMPER or mind mapping into a discussion can help consumers be more introspective and expressive. Also, I’ve begun to kick off innovation projects with traditional qualitative research as a way of identifying what I call “Innovation Springboards” – themes or areas of opportunity around which to ideate. It’s a great way of creating the parameters in which to do idea generation.
- Use of word association. Memetic analysis is my new favorite tool! It helps unveil how customers/consumers feel about brands, companies, products, etc. through the use of word associations and the analysis of the relationships between those associations. I’ll share more about memetic analysis in a later posting.
- Look at what they’re doing. I’ve taken what Clayton Christensen advocates to heart – it’s much more informative to examine what customers/consumers are trying to accomplish rather than simply listen to what they’re saying. Actions speak louder than words when it comes to understanding MOC.
- Pause and wonder, “Why?” Again, this seems simple, but when I continue to peel back the layers there’s almost always a discovery that can serve as a platform for great innovation and strategy.
So what do you think? Is MOC different from VOC? And how do you go about knowing what customers/consumers are saying?
Finally, on a different note… thank you very much to Renee Hopkins Callahan who very generously has transferred IdeaFlow to my care. I had the good fortune and honor of working with Renee for more than five years, and she truly is an amazing individual and a great friend.
Gwen Smith Ishmael
SVP Insights & Innovation
Decision Analyst, Inc.
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February 28, 2007
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Sami Viitamaki emailed me this model for crowdsourcing. He calls it the FLIRT model. I like this -- it offers a useful way of viewing many crowdsourcing efforts.
I think what would be fascinating would be some kind of meta-view of crowdsourcing in general. In the main it's not new. And some of the "old" methods have their places, still. And some of the old methods have undergone and will continue to undergo change. For example, marketing research is an "old" method that is scoffed at by many today, but it has its uses even in the crowdsourced world.
And crowdsourcing brokers, as Sami quite rightly calls Innocentive, are serving yet another purpose. I don't think there's any one way that's best for companies to open themselves to customer communities, but discovering all the ways to do this and all the ways Web 2.0 is changing this landscape is immensely helpful.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Crowdsourcing | Customer Co-Creation | Customer Viewpoint | Marketing | Marketing Research | New Products | Open Innovation
December 8, 2006
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Last summer I got involved in a big discussion at the Corante Innovative Marketing Conference about exactly where the responsibility should lie at companies for involving customers in innovation. Our consensus was in the marketing department. We are not the only ones – a new Forrester report on Customer-Driven Innovation concurs: “CMOs need to use their expertise in connecting with customers to lead the way in building bridges between customers and key parts of the organization.”
Customer-Driven Design and Development was prepared exclusively for the CMO Group at Forrester Research, so if you want the whole report, you’ll have to join the CMO group to buy it – however, you can get a free summary brief at this link.
The report includes six case studies of customer-driven design and development initiatives at various companies, as well as:
--Best practices
--Information on common objections CMOs may run into at their companies and how to overcome these
--Specific advice from 25 experts in this space, including both Gwen Ishmael and myself from Decision Analyst, who were interviewed as sources for the report.
--Information on a variety of tactics such as ethnography. online communities and consumer brainstorming (which is, of course, one of the things we do)
--An overview of 18 different vendors (including us!) who can help CMOs with customer-driven innovation initiatives
I have to offer kudoes to author Cindy Commander on this report. She's presented a wealth of information and some thoughtful analysis, including a Customer-Driven Design Maturity Model. Essentially, this is an illustration of how organization progress in their engagement with customers in the co-creation process, from minimal customer engagement through continuous customer engagement. The four stages start at a company-centric orientation and moving toward a customer-centric orientation:
--Stage 1: Customer-tested design and development
--Stage 2: Customer-involved design and development
--Stage 3: Customer-focused design and development
--Stage 4: Customer-driven design and development
If you looked at your company with just this one analytic in mind, what would you find? How far is your company from Stage 4? How close would your company like to be to Stage 4?
If you're serious about customer co-creation, this report would be a worthwhile read. Of course, I've already disclosed that we were sources, but even if we weren't, I would at least take a peek at the free brief!
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December 6, 2006
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
My favorite trendspotting source, trendwatching.com, reports on what they see as the latest facet in the consumer-generated content trend: Generation C (for content) turns to Generation C (for cash):
If consumers produce the content, if they are the content, and that content brings in money for aggregating brands, then revenue and profit-sharing is going to be one of 2007’s main themes in the online space. It’s not like brands will have a choice: talented consumers are going to be too sought after to remain satisfied with thank you notes. Get ready for an avalanche of revenue sharing deals, reward schemes and sumptuous gifts aimed at luring creative consumers." Of course this makes perfect sense. We offer incentives to our Imaginators(tm) panelists, and in marketing research offering an incentive for surveys is considered the most ethical and successful way to build and keep a panel from which to recruit respondents.
While you're at the trendwatching.com site, it's worth your while to check out 2007 Trend Report. You can buy it for $500, or the download the .PDF "peek" here.
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October 12, 2006
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
One of the strongest themes at BIF-2 was that of community -- building community and of things/ideas being built/created by communities. Community seems to be to be at the same time too big and not big enough of a word to describe what’s been called “customer co-creation,” “community marketing,” “wisdom of crowds” and “crowdsourcing.” To unpack this theme of “community,” I’ll talk about some of the specific BIF-2 storytellers.
Tim Westergren talked of creating Pandora.com as an interface to connect musicians and listeners, thus creating a community. Part of the greatness of Pandora, though, is that music is always being suggested by the community to the end of bettering the mix of the individual “stations,” and then once it’s in the Pandora database, it’s available for recommendation to others in the community. There are also community stations – BIF-2 had one, and it would have been cool for the facility to have played it during the networking/discussion times.
Pandora.com is definitely about service, and Jeanneane Rae of Peer Insight talked about the customer-focus of the service innovation movement. Service is “about experience not product, which is a customer-focused kind of thinking. ….When you buy a service you buy a whole experience – so it must be customer centric.”
Diane Hessan of Communispace talked of creating online marketing communities as a way of understanding the people who buy your product, a way of walking in their shoes rather than assuming you know what they want. There are many ways to do this, but Communispace’s privately built custom communities are probably the most intimate way a company can connect to its customers in real time. If the community is specifically for a company, there’s great opportunity for these customers to share their opinions, thoughts, and ideas in any number of ways that could benefit the company *and* the customers themselves.
An example of how this would work came from Alice Wilder of Think-It-Ink-It, who talked about her work with the children’s TV show “Blue’s Clues”. She said “When you’re making a product, you need to ask your consumer what they think about your product as you make it.” This approach was more about shaping the product in progress – which requires a trusting and somewhat dynamic, not static, relationship between company and its community.
Author Bill Taylor, a co-founder of Fast Company, spoke of “tapping into the brainpower of your customers” by “establishing a platform in which everyone else does the work (!) He called this an “architecture of participation” whose driving question would be “what kind of social system can I create that will bring more smart people into my organization to contribute ideas?” Another driving question he mentioned – “Am I the kind of person that other smart people want to rally around and work with?” And, if the answer to that is “no!” I suppose the next question might be “In what ways might I become the kind of person that other smart people want to rally around and work with?” !!
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: BIF-2 | Collaborative Creativity | Crowdsourcing | Customer Co-Creation | Customer Viewpoint | Idea Generation | Marketing Research
September 27, 2006
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
We know there's value in customer co-creation. If a customer helps you come up with an idea that you can make into a salable product or service, clearly there is value. But is that all there is?
The article My Customer, My Co-Innovator by Michael Schrage in Strategy + Business, talks about two other potential areas of value.
Let's say I call the value I just described in the first paragraph "idea value." This is not news: "Involving customers in the innovation process can add value to new product designs." That has been reported over and over in the stories on crowdsourcing, lead users, customer co-creation, etc.
But here's a second one -- I'll call that "insight value." It does not get talked about as much, and is well worth noting -- by inviting customers into your innovation process, you can learn a lot about what those customers actually want. It's like marketing research on steroids. Schrage quotes Randy Pond of Cisco: “We’ve found that when we share our tools with customers rather than just demonstrate how much we’ve improved our technologies, we learn a lot more."
The third area of value I want to call "trust value." This one has rarely been tied to customer co-creation. It's this: Inviting customers into your innovation process creates an environment of trust and can start a relationship that makes it easier for your customers to buy from you. Letting customers have a peek behind the curtain starts a relationship, and more importantly, implies a level of trust. And trust is persuasive -- people buy from someone they can trust.
So, even if you never gain a single usable insight or see a single usable idea out of the relationship you develop by inviting your customers as co-creators, you still benefit by the relationship because they are more likely to trust you -- and buy from you -- if they know how you do what you do. Here's a great illustration from the Strategy + Business article:
The world’s top investment banks, meanwhile, profitably peddle tens of billions of dollars’ worth of complex financial instruments, such as synthetic securities and derivatives, every year. Even sophisticated customers, such as Fortune 1000 companies and hedge funds, are often understandably reluctant to take a chance on new financial instruments. So the banks now give their customers the same computerized “wind tunnel” and “stress testing” algorithms that their own quantitative analysts have used to design the products in the first place.
“In the early days, we would run simulation after simulation demonstrating that our instruments would help them better hedge their risks,” acknowledges one former Goldman Sachs and Salomon Brothers executive. “But, frankly, they didn’t fully trust either us or our simulations. It wasn’t until we started giving them the simulation tools we used ourselves that they took us seriously.”
These free simulators proved to be the most profitable innovation that the Goldman Sachs derivatives group launched. Soon, clients began asking for custom derivatives and other tailored instruments. “Without the simulators, customers would never have known what to ask for, and we would never have thought to ask,” recalls the bank executive. Yet, despite its success, this innovation appeared nowhere in the bank’s R&D budget or prospectus. It was only a tacit, not an explicit, locus of value creation.
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