Customer Understanding: Exploring and Satisfying real market needs
Exploring and satisfying real market needs:
To build a successful new company, you need to introduce a product or service that satisfies customer needs in a better way than competitors, and at a price that fits the business model for your venture.
You do not need to meet every customer need imaginable. Focus on the products and services you can create & launch successfully.
Understanding customer preferences:
1. Evaluate preferences for new products and services using focus groups & surveys
2. Examine forecast trends and potential adoption patterns to learn about customer preferences
3. When the product is truly new, the customer may not understand his or her own need for it
Prime opportunities for new products are usually sources of pain or aggravation: best clue is a customer complaint and another clue is the expression of an unfulfilled wish.
Identifying the need is only the start - after that, you need to develop a product or service that meets the need and consider the future of those needs.
It is much easier to find a new way to solve a known problem than an unknown one.
Separate and rank preferences & costs for product attributes to prioritize customer needs.
Identify market segments. Beware of producing multiple products & over segmentation - each segment alone may be too small to justify the cost of serving it.
To build a successful new company, you need to introduce a product or service that satisfies customer needs in a better way than competitors, and at a price that fits the business model for your venture.
You do not need to meet every customer need imaginable. Focus on the products and services you can create & launch successfully.
Understanding customer preferences:
1. Evaluate preferences for new products and services using focus groups & surveys
2. Examine forecast trends and potential adoption patterns to learn about customer preferences
3. When the product is truly new, the customer may not understand his or her own need for it
Prime opportunities for new products are usually sources of pain or aggravation: best clue is a customer complaint and another clue is the expression of an unfulfilled wish.
Identifying the need is only the start - after that, you need to develop a product or service that meets the need and consider the future of those needs.
It is much easier to find a new way to solve a known problem than an unknown one.
Separate and rank preferences & costs for product attributes to prioritize customer needs.
Identify market segments. Beware of producing multiple products & over segmentation - each segment alone may be too small to justify the cost of serving it.
This blog post is based on my learnings from the course on ‘entrepreneurship’ offered by Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute, University of Maryland through Coursera (2014).
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