Tom Inns gave a lecture on Market Positioning and how it is best approached.
It’s first important to understand the market in as much depth as possible. To do this, we need to break things down a little.
Understanding who could buy the product?
Market Segment
A subgroup of consumers sharing one or more characteristics that cause them to have similar product needs.
Market Segmentation
The process of dividing a market into distinct subsets (segments) that behave in the same way or have similar needs.
YumTum’s Market Segment is difficult to break down however not impossible. The common characteristics involved would be owning an iPhone or similar, the desire to eat healthily, and the desire to save money.
Forecasting a trend can prove helpful. There are companies existing that specialise in future trends, and how customers are likely to change/behave. One such company is TheFutureLaboratory.
The Future Laboratory helps brands to:
Identify future, profitable customers
Achieve rich insights into how customers’ values will change over time
Devise cost-effective brand strategies that ensure brand values are continually aligned
Stay up-to-date with the latest retail, social, commercial and design trends affecting their industries
Analysing future trends will help a business check that their values and strategies are properly ‘aligned’ or heading in the right direction. This is appropriate for my business, because YumTum needs to stay “ahead of the game’. Analysing possible future trends will allow the App to evolve and anticipate possibilities that lie ahead.
So how can we find out more about our market?
Observation, Role Storming, Focus Groups, Interviews and Prototypes.
Role Storming
This is when we try to think as closely to the consumer as possible. “get inside their heads” as such, and act out the experience of using the product first hand.
Focus Groups
Asking useful, and inviting questions to focus groups will spark conversation and give more useful feedback rather than yes or no answers. Asking focus groups to use the product while taking a video, or simply watching can be very useful. Props and stimuli are useful in this situation also.
Surveys and Interviews
Surveys can only prove useful if the person filling them out is bothered about doing it. In order to keep the user’s interest, questions should be short, and the design must be well constructed. Again, it’s useful if these questions allow for a response.
Prototypes/Cultural Probes
Prototypes are generally physical objects that a consumer can interact with at an early stage. They are useful in focus group situations, or one on one interviews.
As I’ve been continually developing the project, I’ve been having mini-interview sessions with consumers to gain another perspective on the idea. I’ll be documenting more of these once the YumTum branding is in place and I can provide a form of early prototype.
Once information is gathered from any of the above, it must be translated into something useful like a design target. A well practiced method for structuring the opinions of a customer is to use an Affinity Map. An Affinity Map provides a strong framework for organising data, and helps bring to light relationships which might not be quite so obvious as at first.
Affinity Maps are broken down into levels of customer need. Primary, Secondary and Tertiary. Each stage is more detailed than the last. Here is an Affinity Map I developed for helping the design of the YumTum App.
These needs can be translated further into measures or targets. How can we test or measure if this need has been fulfilled by the product?
- Decide key areas for comparison (based on customer needs…)
- Collect competing products together
- Evaluate against key needs and their measures
- Use this evaluation to identify ‘targets’ for future development.
The targets are what form the basis for defining the Product/Service. This is usually known as the Project or Design Brief. When we define these, it’s best to place them as either Demands - requirements that must be met otherwise the product will fail, and Wishes - requirements that are desirable but can only be pursued as far as is realistic or economically viable.
Being able to rate customer satisfaction allows a business to structure an approach to their customers, and review how well things are progressing. A well known method for analysing customer satisfaction is Kano’s model. By rating attributes against eachother like in the diagram below, we can realisticly view how satisfied a customer should be with a product.
