The Final Insight: A Reflection MKT 372

Throughout this semester, the project has helped me to realize many aspects to customer insight that I’ve never quite understood, such as ethical and privacy issues in gathering data and James Webb Young’s concept of creativity. By understanding these concepts, I feel better prepared to enter into a company and immediately perform high level customer evaluation. This insight gathering will prove invaluable in ensuring that my company’s product meets the needs of consumers.

First, I will focus on the ethical and privacy issues in gathering customer insight. In class, we discussed how consumers are very concerned with giving out personal, observable, and used data. As a result, as a marketing professional, we must carefully evaluate our research methodology for gathering insight to ensure we decrease respondents concerns. Additionally, we also discussed how customer’s concerns for privacy can result in inconclusive results. For instance, a customer may be fearful of looking negative; thus, he or she is unwilling to answer certain sensitive questions truthfully. Through the class project, I was able to better understand how to adjust to consumers’ privacy concerns. In my group’s case, we ran into the problem of asking consumers to let us enter into their private domain—their bedroom —and ask personal questions about their parenting style. Due to this personal nature, we learned to strategically ask our questions so that they seemed less imposing. For instance, instead of directly asking our respondents to take pictures of their bedroom, we strategically asked them to take pictures of their favorite/least favorite item in the bedroom. This questioning helped to eliminate the embarrassment people may have felt if they had a messy bedroom because they were able to take an isolated picture of a single item in the bedroom. In addition, we learned that due to privacy concerns certain data may not be entirely true. For example, my group asked several questions implying that the baby is still in parent’s bedroom rather than in his or her own room. This sort of question can result in skewed data because it leaves no room for parents who keep the baby in a separate room. Consequently, many parents may feel compelled to answer the questions even if they keep the baby in another room because they didn’t want to sound like bad parents for keeping the baby outside their personal bedroom. Consequently, some data may be skewed because of these parents’ answers to a situation that doesn’t really apply to them.

Second, I will discuss my increased understanding of James Young’s concept of creativity. Young’s perspective says that there are two key principles to creativity:

(1) Ideas are simple a new combination of existing elements
(2) New combinations are enabled through understanding relationships

While I have never considered myself to be a creative person, I’ve realized as I get further into my marketing classes that I may possess some hidden creativity. For instance, my group chose to create a new baby monitor that uses wi-fi technology to alert parents via cell phone, ipod, etc. that their baby needs attention. This product is intended to allow parents to continue their regular lifestyle without being tethered to the baby monitor. We believe this product would actually sell in the real market place (assuming a reasonable price point). The important learning point came from the fact that this product innovation was a “new combination of existing elements,” and we decided to do this combination based on the different needs of our segment, such as a desire for personal time, tech savy, and busy young professionals. No so called new ideas were in our product design; it consisted of a new combination of existing ideas. Thus, I have learned to look at creativity in a new way. Now I look at creativity as any way that meets a need that previously wasn’t being met. I think this definition will serve me well in the future because it keeps my ideas centric to the needs of customer. As a result, I am more likely to generate ideas that meet customer needs rather than ideas that seem “cool” or “innovative” in the office.

Third, the project overall gave me a valuable experience with collaboratively to better understand customer insight. As previously mentioned, I was able to complete the idea generation process involved in gathering customer insight. However, it was rather stressful because there were no checks on group members. Certain members had other priorities that were placed before school. Therefore, I was forced to become a more vocal leader that initiated tasks for others to complete. I believe this stressful situation helped to increase my leadership skills and adaptation to a weaker team. In addition, I enjoyed applying the concepts from class to the customer insight process, but I would like class concepts to be more explicitly included in the project. For instance, one slide for each project update could directly state class concepts. I believe this would force students to better apply particular customer insight knowledge to the project. Lastly, Professor Walls did an excellent job of helping us overcome little obstacles. Whenever we weren’t quite sure how to approach a particular option, Professor Walls helped us to use the proper frame of reference. Through his insight, I was able to better learn how to use similar techniques to solve customer evaluation problems in the future.