Collaborating with Your Customer

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Collaborating with Your Customer

February 20, 2009. By Peter Lloyd

Everybody has a customer. Or as Bob Dylan sang, "You're gonna have to serve somebody." So it's no surprise that innovative market researchers have replaced dry, objective, hard-knuckled research with creative forms of product play. It's sort of like collaborating with rather than examining your customer.

Instead of the remote and sterile market research exercises we call focus groups, mall intercepts, phone interviews... Instead of taking such great pains to be objective... Instead of keeping the customer as far away from real, natural interaction with the product as possible... some companies have been using product prototypes. They've found that giving the customer a chance to play with a prototype of a proposed product amounts to collaborating with the customer in its development.

It turns out that customers are much more likely to buy something they or other consumers have had a hand in making. Is anybody surprised?

Of course, there's a lot of turf that likes to be protected on the road from mind to shelf. And product prototypes are often sidetracked by one of the more possessive parties along the way.

photo of Michael Schrage

To succeed, according to Michael Schrage, writing in the Wall Street Journal, "the prototype can't be seen as the property of the engineers, the designers, or the marketers—it has to be community property."

Why not call it customer property? That's what you want it to be in the end. Isn't it?

There's a principle of creativity that applies here. Ideas don't come until you let them go. Or in product prototype terms—the sooner you give up ownership, the sooner you get paid.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest business problems.

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