Product Development & Customer Perception

When it comes to product development, product developers face the tough question of, how to incorporate the customer perception in their product so to develop a product that the customers would buy and appreciate. This is really a difficult task and thus demands careful analysis and assessment on part of the product developers, considering that today I am going to provide a way to overcome this challenge easily and effectively.

Before getting into the approach, let's first talk about why do we need customer perception analysis, what benefits and advantages we will gain from such strategy.

Benefits and advantages of developing product based on customer perception

• Target market would buy and appreciate it (thus less failures)

• Tackles competitors and hence attain competitive advantage

• Company develops competitive expertise

• Cultivates a culture of market oriented approach than product oriented

These are some of the major benefits and advantages that a company can achieve by keeping customer perception of product in their view.

Now let’s get to the process of incorporating customer perception in your product.

Customer perception collection and incorporation in product

Step 1: Identify the products that would be your competitors

            This step is the first step in the processes and is very important one too, if you correctly identify your competitors in terms of products you would be able to produce a product that would tackle your competitors in effective manner. Otherwise you would end up developing something that won’t make sense to your target market, neither would it tackle competition. So it is very important to identify the right products that you will be competing with.

Step 2: Identify the right target market

            After right identification of your competitors it is time to identify your target market, which would be easy if you have carried out the first step in right manner. In such case you would easily identify who are buying those products. And so those buyers/users are your future customers (target market).

Step 3: Develop questionnaires (that covers these identified products) for comparative analysis

            After identification of target market develop questionnaires that are comparative so to understand and identify the reasons why certain customers prefer certain products over others. What are the motivators and what they don’t appreciate or prefer. Like the first step this step is extremely important, if you are unable to develop right comparative questionnaires then it is more likely that you might end up developing something that won’t grab the full target market attention rather of sub segments of the target market so it is extremely important that your comparison provides the exact analysis needed for developing a product that would meet the overall demands of target market.

Step 4: Conduct the comparative survey

            Assess your target market opinion based on the questionnaires so to acquire the right data/product idea for further work. Remember like many steps this step also demands care in terms of conducting the questionnaires based survey from the right people means from the identified target market. The higher the target market sample the better.

Step 5

            In the data collected you need to do the following steps to get the right data to work further on it to develop a right product for the target market.

• Identify the leader

Identification of leader is really important this will not only help you develop a product that can challenge the market leader but also give you an insight about the product elements that has given the leading position to one of your competitors.

• Identify what makes the leader

You have to identify from the data collected the reasons that make the leader (from customer perspective). It is obvious that a good number of customers would go for certain product, in other words that is the market leader from customer point of view.

• Identify the second best and third best product

You can’t just take on the leader; you have to move from one level to another so it is necessary that you identify the second and third best product.

• Identify what makes the second best and third best product

To move from one level to another you have to identify what are the reasons (target market opinions/judgments etc) that makes these products second and third most favorable products in the target market. Remember utmost care and seriousness is needed in all these steps, a minor error on this stage can lead to unfathomable consequences. 

Step 6: Collected data dissemination

Share the collected data with all the relevant departments, this figure by no means is the complete recommendation rather it provides a mechanism through which you can disseminate the collected data. Like sharing it with HR department to hire or outsource the right human resource, with R&D to get the right product, with marketing department to get the right marketing strategy, with stakeholders to get their trust and funding and with finance department to allocate funds so on and so forth.

You may also like to read some interesting posts on Super Product, Super strategy and strategy on developing a product emotional aspect.