Friday April 07, 2006

Brand or Customer Debated...

Brand versus Customer Requirements?

So the other day we were having a great philosophical discussion about applying brand to what we do....it sort of went like this:

Assume you work in an area where you are trying to open new markets. A domain that moves fast and change is the rule. You start by going out and doing homework. Figure out who the companies are that represent this market. What is their business model? What keeps them up at night - also known as "pain points". What do they think makes a product successful? Who is their target market?

Gather as many requirements from as many key customers as possible. Correlate your information. Think hard about what these requirements imply about problems to solve. Turn them over and view from all sides. Upside down works really well. Then you can start innovating about what you can do to solve those "pain points".

The burning question to answer is how to prove to a customer in a brand new market that you understand their domain and therefore they should consider you as a potential source of cool stuff to buy.

Somewhere in here, insert orthogonal thread. We need to apply our brand to whatever we do. Yeah right. And how do we do that? What comes first, the brand or the customer requirement? How do customer requirements and brand intersect?

Imagine the new domain is consumer devices. One of many possible ways to prove to a customer that you understand what they are up against is to design one of their devices, user interface and all. So, do you start the design of the device from your company's brand concepts? Or, do you start from customer pain points and requirements?

The customer wins.

What we ended up with was a process where you went out into the marketplace and researched what devices worked, sold, were cool, etc. Brought back those ideas and turned them into concepts. Took the concepts and innovated while keeping the customer pain points and requirements in mind.

Once the concepts had a chance to gel into something that captured the innovation and pain points solutions, then put the branding filter on them and consider how to innovate the brand into something that works in that domain for that customer audience.

[evil laugh] The customer always wins.

( Apr 07 2006, 12:57:02 PM PDT ) Permalink