Look for B2C marketing advice beyond the web, and beyond technology.

In a recession, you need to get closer to the customer, so de-averaging is what you do. Quantitiative provides average insights and hides opportunities and value. Qualitiative provides large scale trend data, again much too far away from the individual user.

Do you profile your individual users? Do they register and sign in? Do you treat use as a transaction and look for the places where they abandon your site? Have you provided a social environment where they are creating user generated content. They could tell you what they need in that user generated content.

You make excellent points about identifying the unmet needs and gaining insight into customer’s real problems. Recently I moved from managing a B2B product to a B2C online product and the challenges are completely different.
With the B2B product I knew my customer segments, I knew which customers were important and I could approach them directly to identify and understand their problems and unmet needs. Sometimes I have to help them identify and articulate the problem. In most cases the customers have an incentive to spend the time to think and articulate the problems they wanted to solve using my product.
However, with the online product, gaining that insight is much more challenging. While quantitative methods like web analytics give you insight into the customer’s behavior it doesn’t tell you much about why they behave that way. Qualitative analysis probably gives you better insights but how do you know that the customers or potential customers that participate in qualitative analysis represent the needs of mainstream customer base (unless you take a significant sample size which might be expensive)? I would like to hear your thoughts and from others who have found a good way to identify customer’s unmet needs and real problems in an online B2C product.

You can do the listening to the customer stuff in the early vertical and early horizontal/mainstream. But, when you move from those markets, your customer bases change and your business focus will change. You have to partition your listening. Continuing to listen to your existing customers allows them to become the trap that kills your company.

That said, as Mike A talks to here in “Ask, Don’t tell”, you still have to make your users think they are coming up with the requirements and you are just “gathering them”:
http://requirements.seilevel.com/blog/2008/03/ask-dont-tell.html

When you look at pricing and other strategy elements, one strategy that appears again and again is that of de-averaging. You can charge different populations different prices. You can do one-to-one relationship marketing, which differentiates specific populations in terms of retentioin efforts.

If you are a vendor in the horizontal (IT) market, de-averaging doesn’t make sense. But, once you are in the late market and face competition on price, de-averaging is essential, as is moving to a SaaS business model.

Aspect-oriented programming can facilitate de-averaging.

De-averaging is only the beginning if you want to take as much money off the table as possible with the least amount of code. Leaving money on the table only assists your competitors.

“It’s a combination of listening really hard to customers, and innovating on their behalf. For example, quite awhile ago we developed the “similarities” feature – the one that says “people who bought this also bought that.” In focus groups, no customer ever specifically requested that feature. But if you listened to customers talk about how they buy things, they’d say, my friend bought this, and I like what they like. In other words, they get recommendations from people they trust. There was a cognitive leap, based on those comments, to realizing that we could create something like that based on the data we had. That’s an example where there was a need expressed by customers, but the innovation was taking that general need and making the leap to a technology that meets that need in a new way.”

I like the “innovating on their behalf” comment.

Today’s article is a harvest of pointers to articles about the focus on problems. An idea farm, so to speak, with really good articles about the importance of solving problems, not just eliciting requirements.

Focus on Problems To Create Great…

WordPerfect changed those keyboard assignments often without regard to the learning load that they created.

At any rate, it worked, because the legal secretaries moved to MS Word.

When your functionality is wide, there will be communities of users that use the core and a few other feautures, and other communities that use the core and a different collection of other features.

It may not require that you change your interface, but you might want to write different manuals for different populations.

It would prevent you from delivering functionality of an average fit. But, that means that you would have to extend the existing functionality to fit the population, instead of insisting that the population fit the existing functionality.

Use is based on meaning. Averaged functionality negates meaning at the edges and sometimes at the core.

Once you can map individual populations to your functionality, you can deliver the desired functionality with a veiw created specifically for that population. You may need a population specific model as well.

In your case, I would question the discoverability of your product features if you had to send an analyst before your customer could discover that 80% of what they wanted was already n the product. Neither is this cheap to do nor is it scalable.

Unless this customer was using your product in a very unique way that no one else would, take this as a great feedback – what could you do to make the features more discoverable.

This is one of the biggest challenges that product managers/designers face as the product grows – it is something I have struggled with as well, with no good answers. Look at MS Office – I still use the same features as in Office 97 – what happens when your customer base falls into this mode as your product gets really big.

I would love to hear from others who have figured out how to do this best, because I could learn some things here.