Design Thinking for Innovation – Assignment: Using the Mind mapping tool to compete as a Deli  Store in retail business

Challenge & Selection

As business owner of a local cheese & wine shop within a side street of an urban neighborhood  outside the city center I offer premium wine and gourmet alpine products. The products being   offered are different varieties of mountain cheese as well as air-dried sausage and ham products.  Furthermore, we sell exclusive wines. All products come directly from the manufactures themselves.

As the online business increases and big food retailers exploit the market, we currently suffer a crises  in the retail segment, facing a drop of both, clients and sales. Therefore, my team and I decided to  find out what features would make the store more attractive for potential clients as well as the  customer base. In consequence, the challenge is to attract more customers to both visit the shop and  encourage them to buy more items to increase sales. The goal is to compete successfully against  online competition and bigger food retailers.

We favour mind mapping because it is an intuitive and creative process. Also, it makes things more  visual and engaging. Personally speaking I can use the mind mapping process not only to look into my  mind separately, but in the minds of our customers to capture and represent perfectly the current  reality and environment.   Moreover, we focus on detailed customer meaning instead of assumptions we make. This being said,  we can extract the ethnographical insight from the data we gain to emerge patterns and insights of  consumers. That gives us the opportunity to achieve our goals to establish design criteria for the idea  generation, identifying the challenges and opportunities for improvement and solutions. Obviously,  we want to gain more insides to adapt into a successful future.

Application & Insight

We started the process with some ethnographic interviews of random costumers asking them  directly what we could do making the store and its products more appealing. Also, we analyzed the  latest quality data such as sales of the last consecutive months.

Instead of holding a yard sale demonstrated in the tutorial video section, we arranged an event at  the store itself. For that event, we equipped the store with the information we gathered so far,  placing it all over the show room.

In a first step, we invited 15 of our regular customers to come and join us for an evening program.  We asked for their creativity and intuition for about three hours. After a welcome speech in which  we introduced our intentions we wanted them to wander around by their own to get a first  impression.

At the same time, we wanted them to mark everything on sticky notes what appeals shoppers. And,   of course what does not attract attention. Furthermore, they could note aspects, which they missed  on both, the product side as well as interieur details or for example customer service.

Afterwards we divided them into teams of five to discuss and review the exploration of what they  think is positive. Also, what they dislike about the shop.

We let them stick their notes on a wall in a separated room inside the shop we had cleared for the  event. The goal was to present all the notes in one clearly arranged place.

Finally, we brought the consumers together to discuss the identified insights related to each cluster  and let them look for connections in between the groups. The goal was to turn the observations into  insights.

After all, we got deep insights and a much better understanding of our customers and what they  want and need to come around more often. Those insights helped us to create design criteria. From  now on, we could use these design criteria to generate ideas for our retail shop.

For example, we found out that costumers prefer raw milk products instead of pasteurized cheese.  Moreover, we actually figured out insight that consumers favor meat products of beef, boar and  deer. Less in demand are pig products we had offered so far.

What we also realized was that costumers would love to know more about the production process  itself to learn about why buying a premium cheese product or wine makes a difference to purchase  an average cheese product in a regular supermarket. Consequently, we plan to set up regularly  exclusive cheese & wine tastings, focusing on the information and insider knowledge we have of the  products itself. Combining both, have the customer get a better understanding and knowledge about  the products, and having them spending a good time in our location.

Furthermore, we discovered that within our product segments, our customers tend to buy more  cheese and wine and less meat. This is why we consider to extend our cheese assortment and  reducing the meat supply at the same time.

Summed up the situation, it was crucial to identify what we were unaware about so far. Getting the  opinions and ideas of our customers will open up more opportunities to solve problems, both to  compete with online shops and to gain more potential buyers into the store. All in all, it will help us  significantly to step into the idea generation to get on track again for the benefit of our customers.

Approach

If I had the choice, I would definitely go for this approach again as I think it is an appropriate tool.  Nevertheless, I would invite more shoppers to our event to get an even deeper understanding of the  consumer´s needs and to benefit from a broader consumer horizon. Furthermore, I would ask the  attendees to visualize their notes to set free even more creativity for future products and events.

Anyways, what we realized was that the most valuable thing we could gain is to know about the  minds of our customers. That is the way to discover our consumers and turn the insights into learning  to improve both, our product assortment, customer service for example with exclusive events and  improving our comeback rate of costumers.

