Brands who understand what their customers want as individuals – by looking at both behavioral and psychological factors – don’t simply have a greater chance of crafting a stellar customer experience; they are also much better positioned to launch successful products.
Really “getting” your consumers and providing exactly what they want and need are key factors in nailing your product development strategy. Let’s look at how understanding your consumer buying behavior, in particular, can ensure your product development is on the right track and informed by valuable customer insights.
The connection between consumer behavior and product development
Businesses often look at the best lead generation companies to help drive more potential customers to engage with and purchase from their businesses. But this activity is wasted energy, if your products don’t match customer expectations, desires, and needs – and that’s where consumer psychology and behavior come in.
Customer behavior in product development involves looking at the customer journey, understanding buying decisions, and being vigilant for any pain points and gaps in your offering. It also means seeking and taking on board customer feedback in the form of surveys, questionnaires, and even focus groups.
Understanding consumer behavior in terms of product development also requires shifting your focus. Rather than putting the products themselves at the heart of product development, you are centering your decision-making process on your customers. This is what’s known as a customer-centric approach.
This approach involves strategies such as:
- Collecting information about customer satisfaction regarding your existing products. This helps establish if there are any unmet needs or dissatisfaction with any aspect of the range you currently offer.
- Running trials and tests of potential new products with a selected group of loyal customers
- Working with focus groups of real customers and gathering opinions and consumer attitudes on the products before you decide whether to develop them further.
It’s also helpful to gather data on your competitors’ products, to find out how your business compares in the perceptions of customers. This allows you to identify any obvious gaps in what you think customers want and what they actually want (and are having to seek elsewhere).
The kind of data gathering and exploration supplies invaluable insights, and can uncover flaws in potential new products, such as issues with quality, pricing, whether something is user-friendly, or difficult to clean, assemble etc. Only your consumers can reveal these important facts.
Benefits of customer-centric product development
Here are some of the most impressive benefits that you can expect to reap if you follow a customer-centric product development approach.
1. Drives targeted innovation
Gathering and using customer feedback and surveys means product teams can focus on genuine needs and desires, and create products more likely to find favor and succeed. This approach reduces the risk of getting product design wrong.
2. Saves money and time
Creating a product that consumers actually want and need means money is not wasted developing products which fail to fly when they are launched. Working on new products that target consumer wants, desires, and aspirations means your team is using its time wisely, rather than wasting its efforts on speculative products that may not hit the mark.
3. Keeps you ahead of competitors
It could well be that in your industry, customer-centric product development hasn’t been taken up by all of your direct competitors. Taking the lead in this, and ensuring your customers are the focus for your product development strategy, could give your brand the edge.
Best practices of customer-centric product development
Before you launch a product, collecting crucial information such as what is total addressable market (in other words, quantifying the size of the market you have available for a particular product) is invaluable.
Once you have established that your product might, indeed, have a potential spot in the market, it’s time to move on with your customer-centric product development strategy – here’s now.
1. Put customers at the heart of development
Asking and listening are, by far, the two most important actions in customer-centric product development. Give your customers a voice, ask the right questions, and gather the resulting data carefully.
Identify the most important findings, including the most prevalent comments and aspirations and make these the absolute center of your development strategy.
2. Involve your customers and communicate with them
Make it easy for customers to communicate with you either via social media, email, or phone. Upgrade your systems; look at what VoIP means, for example. Would an enhanced phone system help you keep in touch with your client base during the testing phase of a new product?
Or, do you need more call center operatives who are trained in collecting feedback and keeping customers up to date on product improvements and developments? Keep customers informed and demonstrate that their opinions and feelings are of great value to your brand, and that you appreciate their feedback and will act on it.
In parallel, you can also use this as an opportunity to build customer retention, loyalty, and advocacy.
3. Keep an eye on market trends
As well as keeping tabs on what customers are saying and what they want, it’s also good to keep an eye on general market trends. How do your product ideas fit into this picture? How does your customer feedback match up with the trends you are seeing? This is also important data to factor into your product development.
To make sure that all the relevant stakeholders have easy access to this vital information, consider presenting it in an intuitive, user-friendly way, such as by using data visualization.
Conclusion
Innovation is vital to a brand’s survival, but it’s an investment of money and manpower, and must work for your business rather than be a drain on your brand’s resources. That’s why having a clear customer-centric basis for your plans to develop new products is essential.
Focusing on your consumers is the only way to get your products right, and your innovation targeted and far more likely to succeed.
