Design Strategy_Identify “who” will buy your product
How do you determine “who” is the product or service for?
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This is a big question that is raised while working on brand new technologies or ideas for products and services in startups. In most of the cases, there is no budget to hire a large consultancy firm to crack this question for the business and as usual resources are limited.
Today in India, where every minute a startup is born, a new idea is introduced into the market; the key question is what makes a customer adopt a brand new service or a product that just entered the market?
The age-old methodology of making a presence in every media possible and talking to every customer you find is not only going to be time-consuming but also very expensive.
According to the Law of diffusion theory, developed by EM Rogers the key to adoption is that the person must perceive the idea, behavior, or product as new or innovative.
The people who have the ability to perceive the product/service as avant-garde are known as “Innovators”.
These customers fall within the 2.5% of the population according to the law of diffusion theory. The first 1000 customers for any product or service are the customers who are highly driven by an emotional purchase rather than a trend or value driven purchase.
Most of the time these customers arrive at your online/brick and mortar store already knowing if he/she is going to buy a product or a service. What they expect to hear from the sales representative are facts that would confirm their beliefs or emotions towards making that purchase. This is defined in cognitive psychology as confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias which states that people tend to hear or pay attention to information that aligns with their earlier beliefs. They want to hear statements that would help them convince themselves more and also points that would help them convince a key decision-maker within their family or friends circle.
Especially in India where movies and soaps play a key role in our everyday touch-point, emotion is a key driver for any decisions taken within a family. In India we continue to live in complex family structures where a personal buying decision is not just criticized by your immediate family members but also your extended family, neighbours, their families or even a stranger you meet at a family gathering.
“Innovators” in an Indian demography have certain belief systems about the world which leads them to make certain gut decisions. These decisions are no more preconditioned by the social systems that they were born into but it was developed due to high level of worldly exposure due to their travels across countries, attending conferences, meeting people with new beliefs and social media.
This category of people have an unconscious perception of themselves and their beliefs, which triggers an emotion within them. I further delved into understanding how an emotion is triggered within an individual, when I fell upon Seth Godin’s talk.
He gives an example of the context of selling a hot dog — If an expensive hot dog is sold at a baseball match Vs outside your office, the chances of you buying it at the baseball match is higher than on your way to office. In the first case it triggers a memory of you going to the games with your grand parents Vs near your office you are wearing a suit and do not want to look messy when you walk into a meeting.
In the first case your not just paying for that “hot dog” your paying for the emotion associated to that memory.
“We have to make an assertion, if “this” kind of people sees what we are making in “this” kinda setting, I bet its going to remind them of “that”- Seth Godin
This lead me to question -
- How Might We identify an Innovator?
- How Might We identify the emotional trigger that would enable an “Innovator” to understand a brand, connect with the brand and establish trust with the brand?
How Might We Identify an Innovator?
In order to identify who an innovator could be, I looked into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is often portrayed in the shape of a pyramid with the largest, most fundamental needs at the bottom and the need for self-actualization and transcendence at the top.
The theory is that individuals’ most basic needs must be met before they become motivated to achieve higher level needs.
But from our personal experience, it is evident that we as humans do not move up a ladder linearly. Our brain being a complex system has multiple processes running parallel,thus many different motivations from various levels of Maslow’s hierarchy can occur at the same time. Maslow spoke clearly about these levels instead of stating that the individual focuses on a certain need at any given time, Maslow stated that a certain need “dominates” the human organism.
Thus Maslow acknowledged the likelihood that the different levels of motivation could occur at any time in the human mind, but he focused on identifying the basic types of motivation and the order in which they would tend to be met.
From the above two principles of Law of Diffusion and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I mapped the two diagrams together -
From the above diagram, we could infer that an “Innovator” is a person who has transcended above physiological and safety needs. He\she is a person who is more focused on “self actualization” than”esteem”.
Maslow used the term self-actualization to describe a desire. He did not feel that self-actualization determined one’s life; rather, he felt that it gave the individual a desire, or motivation to achieve budding ambitions.
An explicit definition of self-actualization according to Maslow is “intrinsic growth of what is already in the organism, or more accurately of what is the organism itself … self-actualization is growth-motivated rather than deficiency-motivated.”
This explanation emphasizes the fact that self-actualization cannot normally be reached until other lower order necessities of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are satisfied.
“What a man can be, he must be.”
This quotation forms the basis of the perceived need for self-actualization. People may have a strong, particular desire to become an ideal parent, succeed athletically, or create paintings, pictures, or inventions. Maslow believed that to understand this level of need, the person must not only succeed in the previous needs but master them.
From the above hypothesis, possible behavioral traits to identify an independent adopter also known as the Innovator could be that -
- They have high spending power, as this would enable them to not focus on meeting their ends meet but contribute to their larger identity.
- They have formulated certain values over time, which enabled them to transcend above “esteem”.
- They have a perception of who they are today and who they want to be tomorrow and constantly seek to associate them to larger ideas like climate change, poverty, contribution to art,culture,technology or humanity through services or products they own.
- They are conscious and understand how their needs, relationships, and sense of self are expressed through their behavior and decisions.
- They are more empathetic with the product or a novel idea as there could be multiple bugs at an initial product / service life cycle.
- They commit to building an idea with the business Eg- beta testers, kick starter contributors etc
- They are not vocal to their social groups regarding their interests, but they are opinionated within their specific community of Makers, technologists, scientists to name a few.It has been identified in [1] that many innovators do not communicate the outcomes of their experience with others.The propensity to do so may depend on the innovation itself. Dickerson and Gentry (1983) found that innovators in the field of computing were “not interested in the arts or cooking or a great deal of social interaction” while Midgley and Dowling (1993)found fashion innovators to be more socially active.
How Might We identify the emotional trigger that would enable an “Innovator” to understand a brand, connect with the brand and establish trust with the brand?
As observed earlier, Innovators have a preconceived perception of themselves which they want to re-iterate with the brand, product or service they associate themselves to.
For example — A person who has a background in business but identifies them-self as a designer with great taste, would often exhibit their personality in the space they live in by handpicking products that aligns to their beliefs. You would notice books that further enhances or validates this perception of them. Today an individuals perception of them is very evident in the way they curate their Instagram profiles!
“Emotional motivators” a term coined in the report by Harvard Business Review -The new science of customer emotions states that these emotional motivators, provide a better gauge of customers’ future value to a firm than any other metric, including brand awareness and customer satisfaction, and can be an important new source of growth and profitability.
Emotional motivators vary across customer segments based on age and experience. The “Innovator” category is not age specific. They are distributed across Generation X, Generation Y and Generation Z.
The hypothesis is that the percentage of Innovators is higher within Generation X and older millennial as they have higher spending power and were not directly impacted by world economic crisis like Recession and destruction of World Trade Center.
“There’s a sense of wanting to do more than the everyday job; there’s a sense of wanting to give something back to the community. Maybe part of it is because of 9/11 and what followed." — Sarah Finney, 30, a commercial real estate broker from Hellertown
Emotional motivator also seems to change as a customer transitions across various phases within the customer journey. Studies predict that these motivators are not consistent for every product segment. As product categories differ, so does the emotional motivator for an innovator within that category.
Example- For fashion the emotional motivator could be a “sense of belonging” but for a technology related product or SaaS, the emotion trigger could be “contributing to the future”.
To identify the emotion trigger for “innovator” category for your product, a possible strategy could be the following-
- Identify the fundamental behavior traits that your Innovators should have to associate with your brand or product.
- Invite people from your network who closely align to these fundamental behavioral traits.
- Create a speculative setting / environment as mentioned by Seth Godin to stimulate the emotional motivators.
- Guide your participants across the different phases of customer journey which includes -Awareness, Consideration, Acquisition, Service and Loyalty.
- Attach an ‘Emotion’at each of the phases. which will help in determining what motivator excites an “Innovator” to transition across each of the phases. For example — As identified in the New Science of Customer Emotions, when Flourishers are initially considering the retailer, “having fun” while shopping is paramount. At the point of purchase, “helps me feel creative” emerges as key. Working from such insights, the retailer has developed a series of messages targeting Flourishers and timed according to their position in the journey.
- Understand the source of information consumption for the ‘Innovators’ in your product category.
But the key to building a successful ‘Innovator’ persona and identifying their behavioral traits lies in drawing insights from each of these steps and continuously engaging in conversation with your brands innovators.
These are the methods I have been playing around with when I work with Startups and new tech companies who have budget constraints but want to engage with the right customers to build their product / service collaboratively.
If you found this article to be useful please don’t forget to clap, the more you clap (up to 50 times) the more people this article would be able to reach.
Please feel free to write to me (juneza.niyazi@gmail.com) if you have other ideas or methods that you tested and succeeded or failed at!!!
Sources:
https://hbr.org/2015/11/the-new-science-of-customer-emotions
https://hbr.org/2009/12/the-innovators-dna
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242063431_Who_are_'innovators'_and_do_they_matter
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