There has been a lot written about hearing the voice of the consumer in your product development and marketing programs. And the amount of “ink” is well spent because clearly many companies still aren’t listening or maybe not really hearing (or wanting to hear) what is being said.
Your consumer (or customer) is the most important thing to consider when developing products and programs. More important than management (heresy I know), more important than what your consulting company says and more important than the comfort of your sales department.
Without consumers, you aren’t making money and if you aren’t making money nothing else matters (a statement of the obvious but often missed in many companies who are totally focused on themselves). Consumers will tell you what they don’t like, what their expectations are and where they expect to find you. They will tell you how they want you to talk to them and how they feel about you company. It gets trickier if you are looking at totally new concepts – people can’t articulate what they don’t know they need but if you show them something, they can certainly tell you if it “speaks” to them. You can also start to gauge how much explaining you are going to have to do (this is really important when it comes to advertising).
I went through this issue a few years ago. We spent a lot of money doing consumer research for a new product launch. We specifically asked the consumers where they would expect to find our new product line and they told us. Then the consultants, the sales department and management wanted to do something else. We kept pointing to the research and everyone kept ignoring us – they were in love with an internal strategy to create a “power aisle” within stores and didn’t want to hear what the consumer wanted. We persisted, we begged, we fell on our swords and finally got the company to follow the research.
The result? A very successful product launch that generated millions in sales. I am sure that this would not have been the case if we hadn’t listened and given the consumer what they wanted.
I don’t recommend falling on your sword, but not listening to your customer will make you fail – even if you have a really great product. Price it wrong, put in the wrong place, have the wrong packaging or don’t advertise and promote in the right places and your targeted customers won’t find you or won’t like what you are offering them. And this assumes that you listened about your product in the first place.
Always stop and ask: what would my customers think? Would this delight them? Is it relevant? What are they willing to pay for this?
The voice of the customer has to be present!
