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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Customer Insight is the first step when designing interactions with customers that create remarkable experiences. The challenge is not to capture the explicit customer requirements but to understand the implicit requirements and latent needs of your customers.

The article “Deeper customer insights – Understanding today’s complex shoppers” published by IBM Business Consulting Services provides some valuable insights into customers in the retail industry.

Here are some excerpts of the report:

Five “megatrends” for 2010
[...] we identified five deep-seated trends that are reshaping the business environment [...] :

• Customer value drivers fragment
• Gatekeepers become more guarded
• Information exposes all
• Megaretailers break the boundaries
• Partnering becomes pervasive

These megatrends are driving the industry to a “world of extremes” where customer diversity and individualism are pervasive, and traditional segmentation is rendered inadequate. Customers demand low prices for basic goods, but pay premiums for products that matter more to them personally. Consequently, those best positioned to grow and succeed will be huge megaretailers on one end of the spectrum and targeted retailers on the other, while undifferentiated companies, lost in the middle,
risk fading into irrelevance.

Corporate thinking thus needs to switch from “bell curves,” where firms try to serve a generic mass market but do not meet anyone’s needs particularly well, to “well curves,” where companies drive growth by applying distinct models in each part of their business to deliver the greatest value to explicitly defined groups of customers.

A customer value cube is used to describe the value expectations of retail shoppers.

Another interesting chart are very/extremely important shopping services and features.

Groceries

Apparel

Download the full report.

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Nokia OpenStudio is a project by Nokia Design which is based on the concept of exploratory design research. The Nokia Open Studio took place in three communities in India, Africa and South America where Nokia together with local teams staged an event to gather design ideas for mobile phones that match the lifestyle of people in their environment.

Nokia designed entry forms and provided writing equipment so that local people are able to write down their ideas and participate in the contest. Additionally the teams performed interviews how the design of their mobile phones actually relates to the people’s life.

At the end an award ceremony was organized and the winners were awarded. The most promising  ideas were an intuitive and instant weather forecast, a solution for creating awareness of the environmental problems as well as a four Simcard holder.

This is a good example of how to identify latent user requirements especially when you are dealing with customers that have a totally different cultural and environmental context.

 

Here is the speech from Younghee Jung

 

For more scientific information about this you can read more about sticky information in a paper written by Eric von Hippel titled "Sticky Information" and the Locus of Problem Solving: Implications for Innovation.

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