Breakthrough innovation – NPD and the rising power of the consumer
The role of the consumer in promoting and advocating products, and within new product development (NPD) is an increasingly debated topic. This has been particularly the case since the internet made it so easy for the consumer to expand on their opinion and share reviews and feedback with their peers – whether positive or otherwise. Some developers are now seeking to garner support from influential consumers, even at the development stage of their products, rather than when they come launch the merchandise. Such developing consumer advocacy has led to many organisations questioning how they can recruit such influential consumers and encourage them to become advocates and publicists for their own products. Furthermore, some marketers and product developers have expressed alarm at the possibility that potential advocates could be lost to the competition or, perhaps worse, become vocal critics.
Guy Kemplay, head of segmentation and positioning at TNS Global, agrees that an influential consumer can play a “strong advocacy role” and spread the word about products and new ideas. To put it simply, he asserts: “It is this advocacy role that is so important for products and brands; essentially the more future influential consumers you have buying your product the greater the chance of that product showing growth in the future.”
The TNS Global boss is confident that targeting influential consumers is not an ethical concern, because citizen marketers are not misleading the wider public, they are spreading their genuine enthusiasm for a brand. In fact, he continues: “These are the savviest consumers and are the leaders in the shift of power from the manufacturers to the consumer. Of course the attempt to make anyone say anything about a product or brand which they did not believe to be true should be considered unethical, but we need to recognise that the balance of power is with the consumer (and becoming more so) and the only enduring way to harness the power of future influential consumers is to develop products and services which meet their demanding needs; then they will start to work for you.”
However, he cautions firms to be careful how they go about seeking the goodwill of such consumers, asserting that “recruiting” them can be a problematic course of action and even have a negative effect if they make their efforts at swaying them apparent. “Truly future influential consumers are strong advocates of brands because it is their nature to be so; it would go against the grain for them to be led by companies into being an advocate. They are an advocate because they want to be – but only if the product is meeting their needs. Put simply, they enjoy talking about brands and products and want to talk to as many people as possible about them.”
This means that rather than creating products and then hunting out potential super advocates for them, firms must develop new products which are relevant to their needs. Mr Kemplay continues: “Identifying the needs of future influential consumers is critical in understanding how the consumer landscape is likely to change in the future. To give an example, a key application is using those future influential consumers in the new product development process from the creation of new ideas through their evaluation.”
Steve Rogers, strategic director of Sopheon, an international firm providing software and services for product life cycle management, agrees that involving future consumers at the product development stage is “a good thing” but warns that it is certainly not the only way in which consumers can aid NPD. “There are plenty of examples of perhaps the more innovative leaps in product offering which could not have come about from market research. Future consumer involvement in the front end of innovation is typically appears in two forms. The more traditional is in ideation – idea formation and management – to help form and evaluate product ideas. Increasingly today we see a second approach which is to use social networking software to percolate ideas and product suggestions among consumers. The social software is used for many applications, only one of which is idea campaigning, very often in the context of Open Innovation strategies. The software typically uses Web 2.0 techniques for blogging, wikis, user content, comment boxing, chatting, discussion forums, gaming techniques and so on. This may be less formalised and empirical than the traditional approaches but perhaps the more accurate for it – it would be interesting to see research on the effect of the observer’s paradox in the use of social networking software in this way.” The challenge, he explains, is to somehow glean the useful information from the “noise” of social media.
Furthermore, consumers can also be useful at a later date, as their feedback can help ensure the new product delivers all that it was meant to. “When this occurs is important – the product needs to be sufficiently formed to be tangible to the consumer but not so far through its development that incorporating changes becomes prohibitively expensive,” Mr Rogers cautions. “If you can’t afford to listen to the answers, then don’t ask the questions!”
However, there are some that would argue that involving the consumer at any point beyond the “fuzzy front end” of NPD is not as productive as using them to drive innovation. Andy Wilkins, senior partner with Perspectiv, an agency dealing with new product and business development, comments: “The early stages are about diverging and opening up and looking for possibilities, whereas if you use them later on, it tends to be more looking for the confirmatory.” The fuzzy front end refers to the very early stages of a product, he continues, because “it’s all a bit ambiguous and woolly”. However, he adds that it is widely believed that firms using best practice devote more time to this period.
Discovering consumers who could be useful at this stage is also complex, as there is no easily-identifiable group of people, Mr Wilkins believes. “There is a widely-believed part myth that there is an early-adopter crowd ‘out there’. It is not always the same people, it is not a particular characteristic based. There is no latent early adopter crowd, there is no one personality type.” That is not to say that individual products and brands do not have early adopters who can also be useful in the early stages of NPD, he states. These “can be, are being and should be” brought into the creation of a new product early on.
However, even once such consumers have been identified, they cannot normally articulate the information a firm is seeking. “You just ask people and they don’t tell you. What we try and do is go after the needs that people cannot even articulate they have. You have to go down really deep and look for what is called universal drivers. Deep needs that humans have but they can’t necessarily tell you if you just ask them. They just don’t know that they know it.”
Once such consumers have been identified, businesses can use creativity tools combined with dialogue to discover these deep needs and use them to shape the creation and development of their new products, Mr Wilkins continues. However, he does caution that there is a need to consider ethical behaviour when accessing consumer drivers this way. “There is a moral side to this. To us, the way we address that challenge is that there are some fundamental values that we work with up front. Everyone is invited, they make an informed choice to volunteer and they understand the boundaries and confidentiality. So, you are the consumer: First up, you are invited to come in so you have a choice and can say no. Secondly, we have to give you the consumer enough information to allow you to make an informed choice. That is how you can be said to voluntarily participate. So you’ve got enough information to know what you are agreeing to and, lastly, you have to understand the boundaries and confidentiality we are employing.” This, he notes, is very similar to the ethics used for medical experiments such as drug trials.
It seems that experts have varying opinions as to the point at which consumers can be most useful, at the innovation of a product, its development or its marketing. However, regardless of such debate, it is widely accepted that consumers have a vital role in the life of a new product and can be central to whether or not it succeeds.
