Anticipating Customer Needs

  Last week saw a lot of group discussion and team work as part of the Fashion Channel Case. I got a bit of the taste of the kind of dilemmas that can be faced by a marketing manager and the potential resources at his/her disposal in solving them. It was interesting to hear the different perspectives that each of us brought to the table and the team work was awesome. There is a world of information around us, the key is how we use this information in an effective and practical way in building our strategy and plan.

 This week, it is more of reading and watching the videos. 

I read :

·                     Chapter 6 of Text 

·                     The Cleopatra Case

·                     Apple and Innovation: From Ruins to Riches

I watched:

·                     Rory Sutherland Video

·                     David Bell (Chyrsler) Video

·                     Prof Talbott’s Videos on Products and New Product Development (Part 1 and Part 2)

I was pretty inspired by David Bell’s words -

“Listen to the customer, then anticipate and go one step farther, surprise them by leading them – It is all about surprising them – taking them to a place where they didn’t know that they wanted to go, but may have given some signals that it may be cool”. “Customers are good at telling u everything they don’t like, but they don’t articulate well what they want. Listen to what they don’t like and surprise them by leading them.”

  This is definitely easier said than done. In today’s competitive market, it is very hard to identify that one key element that can distinguish you from the pack. Also, even if you find that niche, your dominant position is short-lived as the other players soon catch up and the competition heats up all over again. We can see this as one of the factors in the TFC case as well. The success of the TFC channel inspired CNN and Lifetime, already successful players in the entertainment business to expand their horizon into the Fashion world as well. So if you are successful, it is just a matter of time for competition to catch up and this in turn should keep you motivated to continue innovating so that you can continue to surprise your customer.

  Looking around us, we can see how quickly products or technology get outdated. I would like to take the example of an audio system. From radio, we evolved to cassette players, CD players, MP3 players, iPODs and so on. Progressively, the cassette players are becoming obsolete. My car does not come equipped with a cassette player, it only has a CD player. I don’t think any of the stores are selling audio cassettes for the new movie songs, they have all moved to CDs.   Similarly, the rotary dial telephones are almost obsolete. They have been replaced by the touch key pads that use DTMF signaling as opposed to the rotary pulse dialing.