About some lec 5 topics

Here's from a student who'd made good points in class and actually took the trouble of organizinig his observations in written form.

Posting in full.

Dear Prof. Sudhir,

I am Prasad attending the tue, thu 8-10 classes of MKTR. In the last lecture, I had a few suggestions on Customer Visits. You had asked me to post these on the blog.

1) You had commented that customer visits are done in a B2B context largely. But in my experience, customer / consumer (more specifically in FMCG) visits are also done in a B2C context. Apart from all the reasons that you mentioned on slide 22, they are also done to understand the product usage pattern or method, which can aid greatly in new product / new concept development. In fact, some of the most difficult product designs are carried out after conducting a series of such consumer visits and learning their usage pattern in depth. Aditya Jalan also pointed out to the ethnographic studies that are done in this context, and I am a witness to such studies in my previous job, where one uses the learnings from the culture and history of a target population to design new product appearance etc. Ethnographic studies are jus’ emerging in India now, with an already wide presence in the European market.
2) Another comment that I learned out of personal experience is the substantial hurdle of Confirmation bias that one has to overcome while doing a consumer or customer visit. It is really hard, from a designer’s perspective. The reason being the sheer effort the designer puts in the process and attachment to the product he develops can blind him from observing the otherwise glaring realities of consumer perceptions of the new product. The way we used to overcome this bias was to be very non-judgmental while interacting with the consumer and also recording the whole interaction, as you mentioned, and later on replaying it in the presence of experts who are not directly involved in the project, which can point some realities. In fact, we have overcome some interesting consumer problems using this tool of consumer visits. Not only this, even FGD’s are used for observing the process.
3) Another point was that we also do the qualitative studies in large scale, especially when we are trying to understand the Habits and Attitudes of consumers while using our products. This is done typically to observe and measure, say for example, the entire washing process.

Kindly let me know if these comments make sense to you. Else, I can have a chat with you on them.

Thanks & regards,
Prasad.

Good!

Tks for sharing these thoughts, Durga Prasad.