Enter the mind of your customer

The second of the 4 factors I propose for innovation success is the need to enter the mind of your customer. When you start a business you inevitably immerse yourself in the category, and develop expertise in the products or services available. From the outset you will know more about your category than your customer, and you’re likely to understand it using ‘Type 2’ reasoning – while most customers in low involvement categories will be making swift ‘Type 1’ judgements about the category, using heuristics and prejudices to make swift decisions.

This asymmetry of information means that consumers will understand any given product differently than the business selling them. So the new idea you’re excited about may mean nothing to your customers. Understanding how your customers experience the category of products you operate in, and how they make sense of that category, is essential if you are to communicate a compelling benefit to the people who will ultimately buy your stuff.

When innocent first launched their orange juice back in 2009 they assumed that their brand would be able to sell juice as successfully as it did smoothies. Unfortunately 12 months later the product was struggling to achieve its commercial objectives.


 
When we ran some exploratory research to understand the drivers of juice consumption, it became clear that consumers buy orange juice for that early morning hit of refreshment, the ‘aaahhh’ you get when the acid in the juice crosses your palate. Innocent’s association with thick, sweet smoothies was at odds with the key motivations for juice consumption. When we relaunched it we used a clear carafe to help understand that our juice was not thick like a smoothie, and emphasised refreshment heavily in the tv advert.

The result, even before promotions and tv advertising broke, was a sharp increase in sales.

In most of the categories I’ve worked in consumers have unspoken, often subconscious ways of evaluating the quality of products offered to them. Premium crisps need to be thick and have a solid texture. Cars need doors that shut with a ‘thunk’ not a ‘clang’. High end Gin benefits from having an intriguing back story. In some cases consumers will be able to explain how they make decisions clearly, in others you need to use some decent research techniques to fully understand the category drivers. The means by which consumers deduce quality may be to do with packaging, advertising, or promotional strategies, and consequently the entire mix needs to be designed around the heuristics and cues that your customers use to make decisions.

In addition, you need to understand how the lives of your customers are evolving. Our lives are constantly changing as technology improves, society evolves, and culture marches onwards. In the last few months consumer concerns over sugar have caused innocent’s growth to pause in the UK, as their otherwise perfect health credentials become less compatible with consumer beliefs. Mainstream lager brands used to succeed by using semiotic codes that conveyed authority.

As social media became more prevalent, it became easier for smaller craft breweries to tell their stories, and these brands became more trusted than those owned by large corporations, leading to the rise of craft breweries and an interest in beer flavours beyond lager. If you can identify what’s changing for your target consumers – politically, economically, socially, or technologically - this will help you identify new customer needs, and these needs are invitations for innovators to create disruption.

This piece was written by Joe Goyder. Follow him @joegoyder1