🔍 Customer Insight
Course Outline
Course Overview
Often new products or businesses are launched without fully understanding what the customer or consumer really wants, resulting in market failure. Customer insight is the process of discovering what the customer wants first, before developing a new product or service offering. The three step approach used in this course– issue, information and insight– focuses on the front-end of the design thinking process starting with the research topic and then moving though a customer discovery process leading to the development of new customer insights.
A key principle in our approach is to always remain open to listening deeply to the unexpected, strange words or actions of the customer that may go against the “common sense” of the industry—information we often tend to ignore. We collect these strange bits of information together for “decoding” into terms we understand better, then synthesize them into useful new insights representing previously undiscovered customer needs that will form the basis for new product, business or strategy development.
Who Should Take This Course
- Team members working on new product, business or strategy development
- Individuals in marketing, sales, R&D and other functions who need to understand what customers or consumers are really thinking and feeling about an organization’s product or service
- Individuals specializing in marketing research who seek a qualitative method to uncover deep new market insights in a creative, yet organized fashion
- Global marketing team members and managers who need a consolidated, replicable process to use on global market insight projects
- HR managers seeking a qualitative way to uncover what employees really think
Why You Should Take This Course
- Understand how organizational employees tend to be biased in favor of customer or market information they already hold to be true.
- Learn how you can open up your mind to new, often initially incomprehensible, market information that you may have ignored before as “outliers.”
- Practice using tools and techniques to code-crack this new information
- Learn how to synthesize your new understanding from code-cracking into customer insights
- Bring back your own personal action plan on how you will use your new skills in your work
- Get a Certificate in Customer Insight upon completion of course
What You Will Cover
Overview of the 3i Framework
Guidelines for Customer Insight Development and Facilitation
Issue
- Customer issue
- Market topic
- Future areas
Information
- Mining existing data and market research
- Ethnography
- Collages and other projective techniques
- Group and one-on-one depth interviews
Insight
- Collecting unexpected information
- Code-cracking techniques
- Synthesizing previously unseen insights
- Presenting the new insights
Personal Action Plan
How You Will Learn
- This course may be delivered in face-to-face, live online, hybrid and on-demand video formats with customized content and schedules to fit organizational needs.
- For organizational clients, groups can work on assigned topic/issue areas for continued development after the course ends or can pick their own topics by group choice.
- Throughout the course the instructor provides easy-to-understand examples for each tool and ample tips on how to facilitate teams.
- The course includes extensive group practice using the tools introduced, with extensive instructor and peer feedback.
- The course can be delivered in English, Japanese or Portuguese.
- For live online and hybrid courses, the Miro online whiteboarding platform is used with custom templates in conjunction with Zoom (or other client-designated video conferencing platform).
- The course may be enhanced by including additional tools or further modules, for example:
- Creative problem-solving tools for developing new product ideas based on new insights
- Transcultural insights methodology added for specific foreign markets
- Multicultural teamwork modules added for working together with overseas marketing teams
About the Instructor
Henry Andersen is a former Professor of Global Management for the MBA program at Meiji University, one of the top universities in Japan. He now teaches, though his own company TDA Associates based in the US, courses in creative problem solving, multicultural teamwork, customer insight, wise thinking skills and global wisdom leadership.
As a consultant he has helped build the customer insight and innovation capabilities of organizations like Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestle, Philips, Pfizer, the US Navy, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Kirin and Sumitomo on four continents.
Prior to academia and consulting, he was an international marketing, strategy and innovation executive working for companies like Sony Pictures, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Scott Paper (now part of Kimberly-Clark) while based in the US, Japan, Brazil, the UK and Holland.
He has a BA in Japanese from Harvard, an MS in Journalism from Columbia University and an MBA in marketing from INSEAD in France.
Andersen developed his own creative thinking methodology called transdisciplinary analogy (TDA) while working at Mitsubishi to help them solve both technical and marketing challenges they faced. His methodologies have been featured in the international business press, academic publications, and in a number of books on creativity and innovation published in over six languages.