Empathic Market Research Case Study: Printpack's Shopping for Ideas

Much has been written about the need to hear the “Voice of the Customer” as companies consider new business growth opportunities. There are those who insist product development teams spend time asking customers to communicate their most important needs (I agree with these folks) and those who suggest asking customers to communicate their needs only gets you a list of issues and problems with current products and does not open you to totally new high value ideas. These folks suggest it is better to observe customers or experience what they are experiencing (walk in their Nikes, so to speak) and I agree with these folks as well.

As stated earlier, to find growth opportunities companies must use a variety of what I call empathic market research or “market sensing” and “co-creation” approaches. It is not sufficient to just send out questionnaires to customers asking what could be better about your current products and services. This gives you some “baseline” information about the status quo, but doesn’t necessarily open your eyes to higher value ideas. Many companies are now applying more “empathic” approaches to understanding what will delight customers.

These empathic approaches range from Nokia’s “Developing Market Scouting Teams” (highlighted recently in Business Week’s March 27, 2006 issue) http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_13/b3977063.htm?campaign_id=search, JetBlue’s use of “Story Booths”, where customers can walk in and privately tell their best JetBlue stories http://www.jetblue.com/experience/schedule.asp, to BMW’s development of a Marketing Innovation Laboratory in Munich, Germany where marketing and sales people are trained in empathic approaches to better understand BMW drivers’ “dreams”.

Recently Printpack Inc., http://www.printpack.com/ the US$1.3 Billion packaging company based in Atlanta, conducted an Innovation Summit where 60 of their top product and business development professionals spent three days coming up with new packaging ideas for their various markets. At the end of the Summit a handful of ideas refined from literally hundreds of ideas surfaced the first days of the Summit were presented to Executive Management. After this review the ideas were prioritized and given resources for further development. What made the ideas compelling and easy to select and prioritize was work teams from Printpack conducted several months prior to the Summit.

During the weeks prior to the Summit, Printpack scouting teams were formed to “Shop for Ideas.” The teams were cross functional and represented various levels of experience. Each team was given specific aisles in stores to scout (for instance, the Pet Supply Aisle in a Grocery Store, or the Fastener Aisle in a Hardware store). The team asked permission from store managers to observe customer behaviors and interact with customers to better understand these behaviors.

Observations like customer movement in the aisle, customer attention patterns, item investigation and selection, were recorded. Customers were often interviewed to better understand behaviors. After each hour of observation the Printpack Scouting Teams reflected and debriefed their observations with their teammates and looked for more compelling patterns in their combined notes. These insights were then logged and shared with other teams in larger debrief sessions.

For instance, an observation in the grocery spice aisle was customers more often than not tended to buy the smallest quantity of a given spice. When several were asked why this was so they stated they had a recipe that called for that spice but they knew this may be the only time in years they would need this particular spice; they did not want to have excess in their kitchen that would take up lots of space and eventually go bad.

Shelf stockers were observed and interviewed to understand stocking issues. Inventory managers were observed and interviewed to understand inventory issues and numerous freight haulers were observed and interviewed to understand product conveyance issues and packaging’s role in these issues. The Printpack Scouting Teams even observed customer interactions with the packaged products in homes and restaurants.

Hundreds of insights and idea “stems” were collected and refined into “Key Insights.” These insights were put into a visual form that was easy to understand. The insights were crafted into idea selection criteria to be used at the Innovation Summit.

At the Summit the scouting teams presented their insights using content rich media to the Summit participants and the ideas flowed. While this appears straight forward, here are a few things companies should consider as they put their market sensors into play:

Make the outcome of market sensing part of specific idea generation sessions, like Printpack’s Innovation Summit.
Make sure you involve people from different functions and levels of the organization in the market sensing work.
Give strict timeframes for teams to work within and be clear your expectation is to come up with new insights, not just validation of existing assumptions.
Define the sensing tools you will use (observation, video, interviews, etc.) and make sure scouting team members are trained in the use of these tools.
Push your teams to come up with insights by combining various scouting teams in insight sessions.
Make sure you apply quantitative data analysis techniques to ensure a higher level of validity in your insights.

This form of proactive/multi-perspective market understanding is what will ultimately separate the commodity players from the true innovators.