5 effective methods to gain insight into user needs!

First of all, returning to the logic of the “value perception line”, in the consumer’s pre-conscious stage (below the perception line), due to the weak awareness of needs, in user insights , any questions starting with “What needs do you have” or “What are your needs” cannot be good questions.

At this time, it is often a wise choice to start from "user pain points" and "troubles", because although the user's awareness of needs is thin and vague at this time, the "problem awareness" may be rich and clear.

These problem awareness can be transformed into valuable demand information after reasonable "translation". This is our first approach to demand insight.

For example, if you ask consumers directly about their needs for pet food, they will probably say common sense about products above the perception line, such as "nutritious", "convenient packaging" and "cheap".

But if you ask them to recall the troubles and annoyances they encountered when using pet food, you are sinking the problem below the value perception line. Consumers may start complaining about the bad smell of pet food, or that pet food is easy to spill and difficult to clean up after spilling, etc.

Why was Jobs negative about market research? I think one of the important reasons is that many surveys are filled with a lot of meaningless questions that do not help us understand the needs at all. Here, it’s not that the user survey itself is wrong, but that the ideas and methods of the survey are often extremely wrong.

For example, let’s take a look at this question that is very common in restaurant industry questionnaires:

Which of the following aspects is the most important factor for you when choosing a restaurant?

A. Cost-effectiveness B. Overall environment C. Service attitude D. Food features E. Membership benefits

What valuable information can such direct questioning bring?

On the one hand, these common sense points above the value perception line are basically what a restaurant must do well; on the other hand, since users have different understandings of "service", "environment" and "uniqueness", even if they know that the most popular ones are "good service" or "uniqueness", they may still be confused about how to improve service and what constitutes "uniqueness".

Finally, even if there are almost no candidates for one of these items and it seems unimportant, it does not mean that the brand cannot create new value in this regard. Therefore, this type of questioning often just wastes the company's insight resources and users' valuable time.

When it comes to user needs, we now know that a better approach is to turn 180 degrees and start from the user's pain points. At the same time, we should avoid general questions such as "good environment" and "good service"; in addition, we must also be careful not to regard the pain points of a few people as the needs of the majority.

How can we achieve all three of these simultaneously in reality? Let me use the case of the community bakery Champs Elysees in the book Insight as an example. In this project, in addition to consumer observation, we also used focus groups and questionnaires to gain insights. In the focus groups, we first asked users to talk about a series of troubles they encountered when consuming at community bakeries.

In the second step, we "translate" these pain points into detailed demand descriptions. For example, we change "I often can't buy the freshest bread after get off work" to "Freshly baked bread is always available when I go to buy it", and then use questionnaires to verify whether it is the optimization item that users most want to achieve.

By asking users to rate these options separately, we can know the degree of demand for different items by users. Knowing which ones resonate more with the audience and which ones are relatively niche, we can then design prioritized optimization suggestions for our clients.

The second method of demand insight is to understand the reasons why users do not consume or use the product (brand).

This aspect of work is precisely the blind spot in many insight projects, because conventional marketing research generally emphasizes the need to understand customers' "reasons for purchase"; but from another perspective, SDi believes that it is equally important to explore why people "don't buy you, don't use you." Moreover, this information is often more credible than customers' explanations of their reasons for making a purchase.

This is because, in daily consumption behavior, it is difficult for customers to explain clearly why they consume, as there are many subconscious factors that even the customers themselves do not understand; but in comparison, it is relatively easy to ask customers to explain why they do not consume.

Therefore, understanding the reasons why users do not consume or use products gives us a basis for judging the satisfaction that users have “not yet” obtained from existing brands (categories), and also allows us to identify certain key hidden factors that restrict brand growth.

For example, in the Champs Elysees project, in addition to asking users why they frequently visited the bakery, we also specifically asked those who never went to the bakery why they didn’t go.

For example, someone talked about how their family members were reluctant to eat overnight food. Compared to buying bread that might be left out until the next day, they preferred to make breakfast with fresh ingredients. This makes people think that if community bakeries can provide some high-quality baking ingredients (such as flour) and create some home-made handmade baking content and experience, it may stimulate new demand.

As for how to identify the key factors that restrict brand growth through research in this area, here is a classic case of Netflix, a well-known streaming platform.

As we all know, Netflix started out as an Internet DVD rental business in its early years. In 2001, when the brand, which was the first to enter this field, gained 500,000 users, they found that although this result was already very good for a new company, as established giants and startups had also set their sights on this market, they had to achieve user growth at the fastest speed if they wanted to continue to survive.

To this end, management started by studying user data and soon discovered a strange number: the brand's penetration rate in the San Francisco Bay Area (2.6%) was the highest in the United States, and no other region could reach a similar level. What exactly accounts for the high penetration rate in the San Francisco Bay Area?

Brand management is divided on this issue. Some people say that this is because the company's headquarters is in the Bay Area, and employees often talk about Netflix to others (but Netflix had very few employees at the time, so it was unlikely to have such a large word-of-mouth influence); others say that this is because the Bay Area has a large number of technology talents, who are more willing to choose Internet services (but this condition also exists in some other parts of the United States); others believe that it is because the Bay Area is relatively wealthy, and the rich are more willing to spend on such entertainment services (having said that, there are also many wealthy people in New York and Boston, so why are these cities not interested in Netflix?)

Finally, the company CEO decided to end the debate with an investigation.

Netflix released a nationwide survey, and data from the Bay Area showed that the only difference compared to other regions was that users reported that they received their videos very quickly.

It turned out that the real difference that all managers had not noticed was that because the distribution center for mail-order DVDs was in the Bay Area, users here took less than 48 hours from returning the previous movie to receiving the next one. In contrast, customers living in Baltimore and Seattle had to wait four to five days, and by the time they actually received the movie, their interest in watching the movie had long passed.

Based on this insight, Netflix opened several new distribution centers within a year. In each region where a new distribution center was added, the number of registered users immediately doubled, and one city after another was like opening a demand valve. As of 2010, Netflix had built a total of 56 distribution centers, and the user base at this time had skyrocketed to 20 million.

The third idea of ​​demand insight is to focus on users’ “abnormal product usage behavior”. In reality, not all users will view and use products in the way marketers expect. A classic example is A&M's baking soda, which can be used for baking, bathing and cleaning teeth for a long time.

In the 1970s, when the brand managers discovered that some customers used the product to remove odors from refrigerators, the company keenly seized the opportunity and, through active publicity, increased the number of households using baking soda from 1% to 57% within 14 months, thus rejuvenating a gradually dormant brand.

The fourth approach we take to conduct demand insight is to determine whether we can “graft” other demands that originally seem unrelated to your brand onto your brand. What does this mean? Simply put, it is to understand the possibility that consumers have never realized that your product "actually has this kind of value."

For example, there are two options for men's shaving: manual shaving and electric shaving, also known as wet shaving and dry shaving. In the past, the representative brands of these two shaving methods have tried to claim that they are better from different angles. Sometimes it is from the functional perspective of "cleaner shaving" and "more comfortable"; sometimes it is from the ideological perspective of "successful people" who boast "successful career" and "continuous breakthroughs".

In response to this, Gillette razors did a unique communication case study on "manual shaving is sexier than electric shaving", using this "demand grafting technology".

Specifically, the communication changed the perspective. It did not tell you from a male perspective how good manual shaving is, but from a female perspective, it told you that "in the eyes of women, manual shaving is a more manly and sexier way of shaving." As a result, it had a very good communication effect.

For example, Nanfu Battery has made an advertisement to promote its batteries as "durable". Although this is not new in advertisements of similar products, the angle of information conveyed by this advertisement is different: the advertisement first shows a happy family with children playing with various toys. After a while, the toys run out of power one after another, and the children show a lost expression. At this time, the copy says - "The battery is not durable, and playing with toys is often interrupted, which easily distracts the children and affects their concentration."

The clever thing about this advertisement is that it creates a new perspective on the product, pointing out the trivial matter of "being interrupted while playing with toys" to the top priority of "affecting children's concentration" which is of concern to all families, thereby more effectively activating the target customers' awareness of needs.

Now if we think backwards, how do similar ideas come about? That is, marketers should pay more attention to consumers' lifestyles and think from a more macro perspective: what are the awareness of target consumers in wanting to "become better"?

At this point, what we need to do is to establish a connection between the brand and the typical desires of consumers from a new perspective. You have to know that in many cases, it’s not that our products lack value, but that we don’t know what kind of connection to establish. For example, children all have the need to buy things to honor their elders, and the success of Melatonin lies in the fact that it was the first in the health care product category to match this need and establish this connection.

From the demand grafting technology, we can now naturally transition to the fifth and perhaps the most important method of demand insight, which is to understand users' emotional and ideological needs.

Similarly, this is also the blind spot of traditional market research. All textbooks teach us to understand consumers' functional needs, as if users do not care about the emotional value of the brand. However, the reality is just the opposite. People's consumption behavior contains rich emotional motivations.

For example, a woman may like Nike because of the resonance of its value proposition. In her ideology, the brand symbolizes the life attitude of "not being content with mediocrity". But in the survey, she might only talk about things like the running experience that are "easier to explain."

Poor market research rarely touches on people's ideologies.

On our planet, there are two types of typical successful companies: one is companies like Google , Tesla , and Facebook that rely on new technologies, new products, and innovative functional values; the other is ideologically innovative companies like MUJI , Starbucks , and MINI. Their success should be attributed more to the fact that they have proposed certain values, advocated a certain lifestyle, and dominated the almost red ocean business world by continuously leading people's ideology.

One of the purposes of writing "Insight" is to guide those brands that do not have technological innovation advantages to become the latter through ideological innovation. To do this, we must learn to understand people’s ideological needs.

In this regard, just like understanding the pain points of product functions, marketers should first focus on the concerns in customers' ideology. For example, when I was working on another case for "Benwei Chupin", a high-end baking brand positioned in shopping malls and targeting young women, during the user insight process, we discussed with target customers what kind of design styles should be more integrated into future shopping malls, and what negative emotional topics customers often encounter in their daily lives.

On the surface, some of these questions seem to have no direct connection with the mission of new brands, but in fact these surveys are precisely to consider how new brands should bridge the inner conflicts of customers through targeted store design, products and content, so as to better meet their emotional and ideological needs.

To understand consumers’ ideological needs, there is a very important premise, which is that we must understand that the “marketing offerings” that brands provide to customers are not just products, but also include emotional experiences that can meet their inner needs.

Knowing this, marketers should be more sensitive to the emotional expressions made by different brands in their own markets to meet people’s emotional needs.

For example, in the liquor market, Jiang Xiaobai has done this very well. Jiang Xiaobai did not develop a better liquor. It simply pulled itself out of the round-table wine culture that boasts of "a long history", "enduring classics" and "years of true love", and stood out through the image of "youthful wine" and the "simple and pure" lifestyle proposition.

This example shows that in order to understand customers’ ideological needs, we must first understand the mainstream emotional expressions in the target market, because new emotional needs are often hidden behind consumers’ boredom with mainstream expressions.

Consumers' ideological needs are often hidden in emerging subcultures. They may appear in popular movies and TV series, or in novels, pop music, or even online hot spots.

For example, two years ago, there was an article in the circle of friends . Based on his own life experience, the author expressed his reflection on the life state of "doing nothing all day and talking about health preservation", and advocated a more powerful "ageless" life, which caused widespread heated discussion for a while. In fact, judging from the dissemination effect of this article, it has sent us a strong signal of certain ideological needs.

Unlike insights into users’ functional needs, insights into ideological needs are usually not too “specific”, so you don’t have to worry about going off track. On the contrary, simply talking about the product itself can easily limit our thinking and prevent marketers from seeing more macro things.

Users' emotional and ideological needs are not elsewhere; they are always hidden deep in people's consciousness. This means that we should strive to reveal some of people's deep feelings through user insights, because this often contains important opportunities for brand innovation.

Source: Yujian