A fascinating article in Inside Retailing this week about some of the crap involved in branding, market research and business plans. To be quite honest, it was on a theoretical level just slightly above my intellectual ability, but I did get a couple of gems out of it.
Steve Jobs is claimed to have said “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” and “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Another related quote from this article – “What people want to say and what they say and what you think they said and what they eventually do are four different things.”
The outcome of this whole discussion was that there are two key ingredients to navigating through the problem of determining customer needs:
1. Talk with your customers regularly. This is an ability that the designers and backroom boys don’t have but retailers do have. By the time the backroom boys work out changes in customer sentiment it is too late. However, retailers get the current gossip and can react immediately.
2. Be adaptive. The bigger the ship – the harder it is to turn around. Smaller market traders have the advantage of being able to adapt quickly to current trends.
It is nice to know we have one more advantage over bigger retailers.
Footnote: There is a lesson for QVM management here. Policing our product mix around the market is desirable and we don’t want ad-hoc product content on stalls. However, a trader having the flexibility to adapt to changing consumer trends is also important. It is a fine line that requires great marketing expertise.
Footnote: There is a lesson for QVM management here. Policing our product mix around the market is desirable and we don’t want ad-hoc product content on stalls. However, a trader having the flexibility to adapt to changing consumer trends is also important. It is a fine line that requires great marketing expertise.