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Wednesday, July 21, 2004, 20:04
Focus On: New product development with anthropologists
Business Europe
Finding out what the customer wants can be a difficult task. A new approach that is becoming more widespread is to treat potential customers as participants in the product development process. This customer research approach is known as ethnographic research and is defined as "the description and study of human culture". For the purposes of new product development, customer research is conducted in a much shorter time scale to fit the needs of industry.
The power of taking such an approach is that it provides real life accounts of customers' everyday activities, needs, desires, beliefs and values; it highlights the differences between what people do and what they say they do, and as a result find needs that have not been directly expressed; and it describes what meanings people place on products and how products are used. It is also cheap as it is purely about observing and listening.
Large multinational companies, including Microsoft, Nokia, Ericsson, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Kimberley Clark, General Mills and Motorola, are using this approach.
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