Challenge and Selection

As detailed in the earlier sessions of this class, a tool that I find to be extremely beneficial to  understanding the customer and which helps to aid in the creation of customer-centric product  development is visualization.  At my last job, I was part of the launch team to create a new beauty  subscription box targeted towards women.  My role in the team was to acquire new subscribers. The  target demographic for this product was a niche customer set, who had needs and concerns that were  different from many of the launch team. In order for the team to deliver a customized product, and for  myself, in particular, to create marketing campaigns that would attract the target demo’s attention, we  needed to go to the source.  Working with our custom research and insights team, we gathered a group  of women across several states and varying ages and economic backgrounds to ask them directly what  they were looking for.

Application

In each session, we asked each woman a series of questions about their daily beauty habits, their  favorite products, how much they spend on products and how often they bought them.  While these  questions alone were incredibly valuable in providing insights into what types of products we should  include, I found the conversations between the women (strangers to each other before the session) to  be the most beneficial.  I took note of the terms and phrases they used and knew those would be helpful  as I created marketing copy for my campaigns.

Another part of the session that helped shape the product and the marketing was asking each of the  women to scour the pages of women’s magazine and pull out pictures and phrases that were  inspirational to them.  The collages that these women created hung on the walls of our offices and we  often referred to them for ideas on colors, images, and products.

Insight and approach

There are tons of research tools available for businesses that can provide information on demographics  and spending habits.  It would have been easy to just use that information and test and learn along the  way. However, without having these in person sessions and really getting up close and personal with our  targeting customer, many of the reason why the product was successful at launch was from the  information these women provided to us.  They showed us the value of making the product a part of the  “community” and speaking amongst the women and not at them.

