Mind Mapping

By Blanca Becerra

Challenge & Selection:

I used the tool of mind mapping to drive possible solutions of the problem that I was

facing. The mind mapping tool helps you organize the information in a visually appealing

manner, which is understandable and clear. The challenge is to understand the type of

customer personas for a new business idea, and to present insights gained from an

experiment that was conducted prior to this. The business idea was to create travel

journal and merchandise for travel enthusiasts.

Application:

So to start I made some sample journals and merchandise that showcased travel

experiences in different regions and countries. These prototypes were shared on my

personal social media profiles and some of my friends helped me by sharing it online on

different groups made for people who love to travel on frequent basis. We gathered the

relevant data by observing the comment section, by asking them about the items they

liked or disliked, and the number of direct messages I got for pre-orders, the next thing I

did was to check the social media profiles of these people and divide them in different

segments based on their preferences and demographics.

I print this data and made sure that we had all this data, sheets and profiles printed with

me. To make the mind map I took a pin board and a couple of small colored chart papers. I

made small prints of the information that I received on these colored papers. Then I

shared this board with some of the people who ordered the stuff online. This was to make

sure that they belonged to this clusters and asked them to give their thoughts on this

segments, and share their thinking process on the time of their purchase.

Insight:

By creating prototypes and testing them with the actual people, receiving their feedback

in person and then driving insights from it is a wise process before launching anything in

the marketing. I believe mind mapping process is a long process but a rewarding one

especially for new entrepreneurs.

Approach:

An alternative approach here can also be visualization or visual thinking tool.  By drawing

out the possible customer personas and how the product will be helping those people we

can be sure about the relevance of the product. Designing the whole thing on a white

board will give out the clarity about the idea. However I believe this approach will not be

applicable in this case since mind mapping tool gives in dept. detail and feedback from the

potential customers which visualization fails to do. In my option both can be used, first

visual thinking is done to make assumptions and then mind mapping to test those

assumptions.

