News & Events Your Objectives Our Approach Results Resources Team Contact Us

Customer Insight

Understanding customers and their buying behaviours is more easily said than done. It takes so much more than simply asking them what they want and why.

Customers today are complex and worldly. They are overloaded with choice and information on which to base their decisions. However they are still as irrational, impulsive and driven by emotional or social factors as they have ever been. What makes understanding customers even harder is that they will often make different decisions based on the context they find themselves in or the specific 'job' they are trying to get done.

Gathering cogent evidence that supports a course of action is a vital step in undertaking a number of critical activities including:

 

Why gather insights?

Some of the most successful business people have extraordinary intuition about markets and customer needs. However, while intuition is an invaluable competitive advantage it is often not repeatable.

We assist in the gathering of evidence. Evidence that will support action. So rather than just jump in and start to interrogate customers, we start with a focus on your business and its needs. The first step is always to reach a clear understanding of why you want to undertake research and what decisions will be made as a result of the findings. We then overlay the need for accuracy, timing and investment to arrive at a methodology that provides you with actionable insights that will allow you to move forward with confidence.

Our approach takes into consideration a wide range of qualitative and quantitative approaches. We then tailor a methodology that delivers the right level of depth and reliability and that will mitigate the risks associated with the business decision.

The insights that we deliver may be used in many ways:

 

Marketing and Business Planning

Understanding customer behaviour and needs is a critical starting point for all business planning whether it is directed at existing businesses or opportunities for innovation into new markets.

This understanding extends beyond how customers make purchase decisions to what more they want from the category, how well satisfied they are with the available solutions, their attitudes and perceptions towards individual brands and ultimately what it would take to make them switch to a new offering.

However, we've found that customers don't always want more from products and services - sometimes they are actually happier with less! By identifying where customers are over-served within a category we can uncover opportunities for Market Disruption. In complex markets simpler products may open the door to a whole new target market or provide a well priced alternative for customer segments with simple functional needs that do not want to pay for features and benefits they do not use.



Identifying Opportunities for Innovation

Capturing inputs to innovation relies on an in-depth analysis of what customers want from products and services. However, rather than analyse product features and benefits, we use the Job's Framework to understanding customers' needs.

We do this by analysing all the jobs customers tell us they want to be able to do. What we find is that some of these jobs may be highly rational or functional jobs (such as, ‘make a phone call" or "take a photo") or they may be emotional or social jobs (such as, "feel connected with friends" or "be regarded as a good friend"). We then collect the menu of all the existing products or services that are being used to do this job.

Once we have identified all the jobs, we undertake an analysis of the context that drives the importance of each job in the mind of the customer. We then ask customers to rate each of the jobs in term of how well a solution satisfies the job.

This approach, identifying the gaps in customers' ability to get a job done, provides a clear brief to the innovation and marketing teams for product improvements, the development of new products and services and the development of propositions that will resonate with customers.

 

Increasing the Success Rate of Innovation

Experience has shown that both the cost and the pitfalls for innovators are very high. Cogentum helps to mitigate the risks of new product failure by firstly, identifying areas where value can be added, and secondly, by providing the opportunity to test ideas and prototypes prior to key investment stages of the innovation process. This approach ensures alignment between opportunity and solution and provides a true rigour to the investment in innovation.

 

Validating New Product and Service Concepts

By testing new product and service concepts prior to investment in R&D or design will ensure that the very best concepts are progressed and those likely to failure identified early. Our concept testing approach is designed to optimise the concept's ability to meet customer needs, provide breakthrough advantages over competitive offerings and provide measures of customer appeal and likely adoption.

 

In-use Testing of Products or Prototypes

Once ideas are developed into prototypes or products, in use testing provides a practical assessment of the product's ability to satisfy the requirements of customers helping to refine products attributes and features, capturing competitive comparisons and measuring customer adoption rates.