BusinessWeek featured a story in 2006 about the use of ethnography to deeply understand customers. Titled "The Science of Desire" they go into details how ethnography is used in various companies to develop new products and improve services.

Companies have been harnessing the social sciences, including ethnography, since the 1930s. Back then executives were mostly interested in figuring out how to make their employees more productive. But since the 1960s, when management gurus crowned the consumer king, companies have been tapping ethnographers to get a better handle on their customers. Now, as more and more businesses re-orient themselves to serve the consumer, ethnography has entered prime time.

 

They also published a nice playbook with best practices on how to apply anthropological research in a corporate environment. (Click on image for full view)

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The Harvard Business School | Working Knowledge has a list of ten low costs methods for spotting consumer trends. The article is from the year 2002 but content like this is timeless.

The ten methods are :

1. Take a neuroscientist to lunch (yes they are serious )
2. Tap into your community
3. Organize to integrate knowledge, not isolate it
4. Choose forward-thinking partners and customers
5. Develop a shared framework to sort the trends from the trendy
6. Form a posse on the future
7. Diversify your teams, not just your workforce in general
8. Get off the beaten trail
9. Beware traditional research
10. Watch the games people play, and the people watching games

Read the full article.

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Why should you care about sales mistakes if you are not a sales person? Let’s look at a generic definition Sales is the act of meeting prospective buyers and providing them with a product or service in turn of money or other required compensation. Now if you take one step back and look at the bigger picture, here is what comes to mind: Everyone of us is selling products or services.

When we talk about a sales person, some people think strictly about the person that is walking from door to door selling insurance or newspaper subscriptions. Yet this view is too narrow. When you are giving a presentation to your boss about your latest project or a new business idea and trying to get funding and additional support – this is just as much a selling process as selling life insurance is. And even convincing your girl- or boyfriend to go on a certain weekend trip is a selling process .
This list is based on the book with the same title, which can be bought online here. In the following article I want to give you a quick overview of the mistakes and how to avoid them:

No. 1: Not being obsessed

The solution: Forget about input and how much time you have invested. Focus on the output of your work and maintain a commitment to results all the time.

[Read more]

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Diego Rodriguez over at metacool has a nice post about his observations of Toyota Prius drivers. The key message is that there is certain behaviour of your customers regarding your product that you can’t control. But exactly this behaviour can have a serious impact on your brand and the related image.

These are chapters in building your brand (and spreading your idea) that can not be written ahead, but in a follow-up post, he comes up with a solution: rewarding brand-building behaviour.

In order to ensure that your customer are using your product in the right way or that the correct brand message gets delivered all you have to do is come up with incentives for rewarding brand-building behaviour. Diego comes up with a few examples for the Prius case and this exercise can be done for any product, service or brand.

Now the question is, how we can create ideas for rewarding brand-building behaviour? Let’s try it with these steps:

1. Identify “good” and “bad” brand-building behaviour situations
2. Identify situations, that would increase the status of your customers
3. Now mix them up and reward “good” brand-building behaviour and provide an incentive for not pursuing “bad”

The result would be a guideline (of course you don’t call it like that ), how to use the product or service and how to “life” the brand. The result is an “army of brand ambassadors” – which would open up countless new opportunities.

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Many reasons exist for someone to start his own business or for a company to market new products. Even if you are not starting something new you are still in the situation where you are offering something to someone.

This could be an independent software developer producing some customized software application, a biotechnology entrepreneur trying to sell his potential blockbuster medicine or a musician playing music on the street.

The problem is that most of us are very focused on ourselves. What we have, what we do, what we can offer and what we want to get form that. When you catch yourself thinking “What can I do? What can I offer? How can I sell what I already have?” you should step back and take a look at the big picture again.

Here are some questions that should help you in this process:

1. What exactly is it that I am offering?

2. Who could be interested in that (a.k.a. Who are my customers)?

3. Why should anyone care about my offering?

4. Does my product or service increase anyone’s overall performance?

5. Does my product or service decrease anyone’s costs?

6. Are you really sure that your answers for 4 & 5 are realistic?

7. Why exactly should anyone choose you or your product and not someone else?

8. What could you do to improve the performance or decrease costs for someone?

Don’t get me wrong here. With these questions I don’t want to be overly pessimistic. All I want to do is to think about your business not from the point of “What’s in it for me?” but from the point “What’s in it for them?”. Because at the end of the day, everyone is thinking more about himself than they are thinking about you – so you better give them a good reason to do business with you!

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