Your challenge
Engineers and product managers often design what they think prospects want. Ground your company's product or service development with irrefutable findings about your target market and its representative prospects, gathered directly from your market.
How we help
We can help develop a model of what your "whole product" needs to be, based on market interviews.
A whole product model incorporates a generic product (or "core" product) augmented by everything else needed for target prospects in a given market to have a compelling reason to buy. The core product is the tangible product that the customer experiences. The whole product typically augments the core product with additional elements required for the product to have compelling value to a customer. For example, if a personal computer is the core product, then whole product would include software applications, training classes, peripheral devices (mouse, keyboard, printer, etc.), and internet service. Without these additional product components, the core product would not be very useful.
The key to successful whole product definition is a detailed understanding of the wants and needs, both tangible and intangible, of prospects in your target segment(s).
- We begin with your current market segment and target customer intelligence, using research to add detail where needed
- We form educated hypotheses about what your ideal offering might look like for your target customer, based on insights from where they seem to be on the technology adoption life cycle, budget considerations, political issues involving purchase decision hierarchy and other factors
- We conduct interviews with prospects and market influencers, as many of them face-to-face as possible, to validate our hypotheses
- We analyse, prioritize and rank our findings, presenting them in a way that make sense to your engineering and product management teams
Our methodology recognizes that complete products are comprised of core technologies (usually produced by engineering) and additional layers of value (tangible and intangible elements usually added by product management). We counsel clients to allocate proportionate resources to both.
Timeframe & Fees
Normally a 3-4 week engagement. More exact timeframes and fees can be estimated after learning more about your specific business issues and state of your current strategy. Contact us to discuss your company and how we can help.