Innovations - when surveys of «normal» consumers are purposeful

Consumers cannot contribute anything to innovations. This is often justified with a quote from Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, who never did any market research ... they say. Firstly, this is not true across the board, and secondly, a distinction must be made between the innovation cycle in which we find ourselves.

Of course, it is not helpful to get consumers off the street and ask them for their innovation ideas. And - even if consumers had ideas, they would often not even be aware of them. A company's good customers are even contraindicated when it comes to innovations, since they are satisfied with the company's services and do not consider the need for change or innovation to be necessary.

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The lack of benefit of surveys in innovation management cannot be deduced in this way.

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At the beginning, virtually every innovation project is not stringent due to the scarcity of information. The incoming information, which has to be updated again and again, leads to a continuous reassessment regarding the right course of action. The situation and the measures taken in the first year of the Covid pandemic illustrate this impressively.

However, there are two conditions under which it is purposeful to listen to and analyze views of people who are not employed by the company.

Lead users - early movers looking for solutions

On the one hand, this is the time when companies look for new opportunities. Again and again, consumers deal intensively with a problem for which they cannot find a solution on the market. If the consumer's problem now meets a company's targeted opportunity, the company can take advantage of the know-how of these lead users.

Lead users are, as mentioned above, people who have intensively studied a potential target market in a specific area and who do not currently find a satisfactory offer on the market to solve their concerns. The question now arises whether the «dissatisfaction with market offers» of these lead users will continue to affect only a small minority in the future or whether this dissatisfaction reflects potential needs of a larger market.

Lead users cannot usually be recruited at a reasonable cost via consumer panels - as they are generally very few in number and have a clear awareness of the problem. If you want to get in touch with lead users, groups on social media platforms or specific, thematically oriented forums are suitable.

Consumers can criticize - but they do not innovate

If you want to take advantage of the opinion of the population, i.e., of the intended consumers, the benefit aspect is completely different from that of lead users. The innovation team has, for example, developed initial ideas or a concept that it would now like to know whether it will be accepted on the market in the future. Now, it is a characteristic of consumers that they can usually contribute little constructively to innovations. What consumers can do, however, is criticize. And they do it well. Anyone who has ever attended a consumer focus group with their innovation knows a thing or two about this. They try to find the fly in the ointment, to question the idea and to criticize it. Very few innovations manage to meet with a positive response from consumers, at least at the beginning.

With a 95% flop rate, it is advisable to take consumer feedback seriously.

Despite this - or precisely because of this - it is advisable to pay attention to consumer feedback. A flop rate of 95% of all innovations is fact enough to seriously consider consumer feedback.

In particular, it is important to take note of negative feedback, analyze its meaning and draw the right conclusions. This is not nice for project managers, but it is important. And it is important to deal with the feedback from consumers as early as possible and, in particular, to benchmark the critical comments with one's own assessments.

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In cases where the opinions of consumers lead to a critical examination of one's own innovation, deeptrue's innovation tools can offer great added value.

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They are fast, agile, cost-effective and convenient to implement.

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