We are all talented marketers and know exactly what customers want, right? Wrong! After reading the three articles related to this assignment, what sticks out the most for me is the fact that, it is not just hard for companies and marketers to identify what customers want, but that it is also hard for consumers themselves to easily express their needs and wants in a product or service. For me, Ulwick’s reading was particularly interesting for the fact that he suggests that in order to launch a big and successful blockbuster you need to stop asking customers what they want. This statement seems “playfully” exaggerated in order to make a point, but the method suggested in the article makes total sense to me. Companies shouldn’t be asking consumers what solutions they want in products, but rather, they should be asking for outcomes they want in the products. I know that my backpack would be more comfortable with more padding on the shoulder straps and that the sofa bed I just bought could fold differently to optimize space; but after reading Ulwick, this is all I would need to tell the manufacturing companies about my problem for them to come out with a solution to my wanted outcome. I mean, do you think I could come up with a better solution for an efficient-folding sofa bed than those Swedish IKEA designers?!
The Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) teaches us about social communication being mostly nonverbal. This means that thoughts occur in images and how we display and order these images in our brain is very important. By using metaphors, marketers extract and then translate these images of consumers into valuable information. I like the fact that this technique tries in a way to get into the consumers’ unconscious by having them relate a certain product or product concept with images that they choose themselves. I think this is a very innovative way of looking at marketing concepts and essentially explores the consumer’s thoughts and perceptions in a much more absolute sense.
I have read some of Gladwell’s articles from “The New Yorker” and will admit that I have mixed reviews about his work. I normally like a lot of the stuff he writes, but sometimes it seems to me that he does research and tries to find relationships and trends just for the sake of it; occasionally oversimplifying complex situations. Well, this discussion about Gladwell’s work will need to continue in another time since it so happens that in this occasion I agree with what he discusses in his “Kenna’s Dilemma” article. I believe that his comparison of the Pepsi Challenge sip test to the outcome of Kenna’s fate with the music industry is a good relationship of how marketers need to be aware of traditional ways of doing market research in certain markets. In both instances (Pepsi Challenge and Kenna) the consumers where just getting a sip of the actual product and in doing so, the product was taken completely out of context. Tying back to my initial argument at the beginning of this entry: Kenna’s dilemma is another example of how sometimes not even consumers know exactly what is it they want. Have you heard Kenna’s music? I took the time to catch a few songs on YouTube. They are actually pretty good, very much like other top hit songs that we as consumers have accepted and listen to on the radio. By the way, with the lame songs I have been hearing in the radio lately, it makes me wonder if these songs are hits because they are actually good music or just because the radio companies play them over and over and over and over again. Salud! R
