Challenge & Selection

My sister has recently decided to set up her new business enterprise in South India, which is an  online store for retail and whole sale marketing of a wide range of goods.   She wished to market  goods ranging from clothes to carpets to food items and house-hold items and decors and her  enterprise takes orders online to post it to the customers. The challenges were multiple; i) there  were diverse goods i.e, products and was initially confused what to focus upon or project in her  online website ii) unaware of customer’s choice or demand of a product iii) further as soon as a  query on a need of the product was floated by her enterprise, there were too many  producers/manufacturers who contacted with varying prices and was unable to choose which  producer/manufacturer to go with.

We decided to find out solutions for the above problems by adopting a tool, ‘mind mapping’.   Mind  mapping is looking for patterns and insights in a large quantity of data you collected during your  exploration of what is the current demand of choice of customers. Through mind mapping, we  extract meaning from data in a way that lets patterns and insights emerge.  The goal is to identify a  specific pattern from the choice of customers and subsequently find out the demand and criteria for  selection and marketing of goods for my sister’s enterprise.

Application

To identify a pattern and insight in the consumer’s choice of products, which is nothing but,  exercising the tool of mind mapping,  we set out a task wherein we wrote a short description and  picture of around 26 goods.  Some of the goods were similar, except the source.  We rolled out the  pictures and description via social media/online to friends, apartment families and all known  acquaintances.   We requested them to rank, comment and add an emoji (emotional aspect) to the  goods.   We also asked them to capture their first feel on seeing the picture of the goods and to state  candidly if they had read the complete description.  An open call out were drawn blank across the  goods for the friends to capture anything over there.     We floated and set a time to come back with  responses.

After the responses were received, we decided to print and put it across the table. We printed all the  responses attached to goods and laid out to look for a common pattern among the responses.  The  emojis provided us a lot of insight and could interpret people’s feeling and choice for a particular  product.

Insight

We could see a commonness in the collection of responses.   House-hold food items (healthy snacks)  and handcrafted products secured high rank. Products with multiple usage ranked next. Further,  among the products, eco-friendly products were tagged with smiley emoji.  Simple and non-fanciful  descriptions were read fully.  Lengthy descriptions were also read if the elaboration were on the  health and use of the products. Another important insight was among identical products,  source/geographical origin of the product, specifically from rural small microenterprise farms  emerged out as the first choice of the people.  People were willing to get back to the roots (from  comments).

We applied this insight as our criteria for the selection of products and producers.  The enterprise  now has fixed the option of handmade, healthy, eco-friendly products as their main focus.  In case of  multiple producers, a particular producer was chosen based on the geographical origin and micro- rural farms.    Every description was made realistic with no exaggerated promise or words.  After

usage, or re-use of the containers of the products were also taken care of.   Mind mapping gave an  important insight, that people across sectors, respect health and environment, also their time. The  start-up enterprise of my sister now placed this as it’s criteria viz., respect for health and  environment.  And another criteria being products that would cause up-liftment of rural society.    Based on these criteria, the goods and producers/manufacturers were chosen.

Approach

Although the above application would appear as a simple market survey, and a learned  entrepreneur would venture to do it,  however learning the design thinking course clearly provided a  structure in terms of ‘mind-mapping’ and the need to specifically look for patterns and outliers.    Additionally, I passed on an important aspect of the course to my sister,  which is non-restriction of  people’s responses to a specific customized built-in default options ! Instead, suggested to use  something (like a visualization tool) that would allow the people to capture openly and candidly their  thoughts, which in turn made her to draw an open balloon carve out across the goods.

The next approach we would like to adopt is learning launch.  We wanted to float the products  fitting into the criteria that emerged from the mind-mapping experiment and watch for a response  in real world online market.

