Blog Assignment 6

The Use of Personas in Product Development

For the first paragraph I would like to talk about creating personas to represent costumer segments and how to use them in the development of a new product. Before the class, when one thinks of creating a product for a segment one thinks of solving a problem they have. The focus is on the problem or the service, but after working on this project I noticed that it is not one or two things that are important, like tastes and say price preferences; it is everything. This is a bit difficult to explain, but what I am saying is that I learned to appreciate the actual practical advantages of using full investigated personas to develop new products and services because if you don’t focus on the whole person you will miss important details and your product will be a failure.  For example, as I already mentioned during the presentation, our tween persona Katy was incomplete without including her mother. Sure, we could have created a product that our persona would have loved and wanted to buy, but it would have been impossible for her to buy because her mother would have never allowed her to use it. We could have made so many mistakes if we had just focused on the problem and not the entire person. Moms worried about the kind of tips we would give tweens, they worried about body image issues with the scanner, and other stuff. In the end we had to work around those problems and create something that would satisfy both. For example all the mothers we talked to limit their daughter’s access to Facebook. With that in mind we redesigned our communication feature to make it a safer alternative to Facebook. Using the smartphone’s ability to detect each other with Bluetooth, our version only allows you to add people you know personally so no strangers can become “friends” with our persona.

Process Mapping

And for the second paragraph I would like to talk about Process Mapping, although I have to admit I might be cheating somewhere because I put it here for the same reasons I put using personas. After studying our tween persona we discovered that all the purchase processes at some point had to go through the mom. This is what gave us the clue that maybe she was really, really important. I had seen before how the process was important in Pricing and Distribution Channels class, but this was different; in here we looked outside the persona and also looked at its surroundings. We mostly focused on what kind of information the buyer needed to make a decisions and if he or she would need training using the product. Process Mapping is a more complete way of viewing the entire purchase from the moment of becoming aware of the product all the way to actually purchasing it.

What part of the project was of no value?

Can’t say any part had no value, but if I had to choose the part where I learned the least I would have to say it was while building the prototype. Most of the learning for this class happens in discovering how and why the persona does what it does. By the time you have a persona researched and a product idea to make its life better, there was very little left to learn at least for me. I thought the part where we built a physical and a digital prototype we were just putting our ideas on something, but the part with the most value for me was everything from the beginning to the part where we created the concept of the product. Everything after that involving the creation of the physical manifestation of the product was just work, but no learning of anything new there.

The emotions I felt during this project…

I guess the first one was rejection towards the project because I have very little interest in the fashion and make up industry and even less on tweens as a segment. But in the end I think this helped learn more than I would have learned with a segment closer to my areas of expertise. Working on this segment forced me to actually learn about a persona I knew nothing about.

The second feeling I remember was frustration because we had done a few interviews and we had yet to find a big revelation that would take us to a new idea for this persona.

In the end I do believe working with a group contributed to my learning, and not only because as a male there were things in this project I could just not do… like following tweens around the mall. But everybody had a way of looking at this and I think between the four of us we came up with a much better product than one of us alone could have imagined. 

Blog Assignment 5

For this blog assignment I will answer the first question. Now one of the key issues here is that at least in my opinion the use of social media or the ways social media is used depends on the industry. To see an extreme example of what I am saying, just look at B2B companies: A B2B company would just be wasting its time meddling with traditional social media like Facebook. That of course doesn’t mean that they should not use social media, just a different version.

For example there is a B2B company called National Instruments; this firm creates software for engineering and research. National Instruments has incorporated some of the principles of social media to make their products better. Even though their clients are technically other companies, it is people who use their software to do their work. National Instruments started by creating a forum for engineers and scientists to ask how to do certain things with the software, but more than that this forum allows other scientists and engineers who do not work at all for National Instruments to answer their queries. This improved customer experience tremendously because before the forum existed National Instruments had problems solving their customer’s problems. Imagine having to answer the questions of a nuclear physicist trying to measure radioactive half-life and the next day the questions of an engineer building a bobsled cart; it is impossible for the firm to hire experts in all the fields its software is used. What it is possible though is connect the bobsled cart engineer with another engineer who already worked on a project involving aerodynamics and similar problems.

Furthermore, National Instruments expanded their social media efforts and started to incorporate the engineers and scientists who hanged out at the forum into their product development process by having them interact with National Instrument employees and allowing them to suggest new features for the software. Other users can comment and vote on which of the proposed features they like best. This way National Instruments has managed not only to improve their product but also found a great way of gaining marketing insights from their user base.

Could this approach be replicated by other companies? Maybe; it completely depends on the type of product and even the type of customers a company has. In my thinking every industry is different, every market is different and maybe even every brand and product are different and require each a unique approach with social media. This makes it hard for me to come up with general recommendations for businesses to use social media, unless of course you count “Make sure this works for you before you do it” as a recommendation.

For example, National Instrument’s approach of creating their own forum works for them because what they wanted to accomplish needed functionality that is not available in Facebook. Other companies with different goals might find more value in using Facebook than creating their own social media space from scratch. Also, National Instruments didn’t want nor needed everybody talking about their products, just some of the highly specialized and trained scientists and engineers who already use their product.

Even among B2C companies, the social media strategies should be tailored to the unique properties and goals of each product or service. There is a very interesting digital comic book reading app that allows readers to comment on the comic book they are reading, but not in a regular comments section, but on the comic itself. You can comment on a single panel or line of dialogue and everyone who uses that app and is reading the comic can read your comments and chat with you through the comic. Personally I think this improves the comments feature enormously because you can focus your comments on specific pictures or dialogue and makes it more immediate to the people reading them. This is a social media feature that can only work with comics, and maybe books. Again, what makes it genius is that it was tailored to the product. Sadly this app was a failure because the company behind it never managed to convince any of the big comic companies to back it.

It would be impossible to cover every industry in my write up of this assignment and write what would make social media successful in each one, but I think I have made my point that there is no catch all strategy or method. The best way is to look at the product, look at its users and look at the goals you are trying to achieve; after that take it all and make something that works with that. 

Blog Assignment 3

Idea for the Topic:

After some long and serious thinking about m paper topic, I believe chances are I’ll be tackling the issue of digital books, perhaps even concentrating on e-reading software itself.

The part I am most interested in researching is why some people choose to switch to e-books and why some resist doing so. Also, I would like to go into the limitations I have found in current E-reading programs and see if these have any influence in people’s decision to start reading e-books or stay with paper.

Why is this topic interesting to you?

Two years ago I was very reluctant to the idea of digital books. I loved paper, I still love paper actually, but since I started the MBA program and had to share a small living space with other people I have noticed there is a big problem with physical books, and that is that they take space. It may not seem as much to some people, but if you are a pack rat like me who likes to drive all the way to Half-Price book stores and buying anything that has an interesting description in the back, or just an awesome cover, your living space starts to get taken away by piles of unread books.

Not the only pile I have, just the most presentable.

Another thing related to the MBA program that moved me to buy an iPad is the number of readings we have to do for each class. Usually I printed out the articles and carried them around in the back up and did the readings at school, and then the articles remained in my backup for a few weeks, until I did some cleanup. Said cleanup of course was just taking out the bunch of papers out and leaving them in a pile. The pile is still here in my room, and I have no idea from what class most of those articles and cases cam from, I have no idea where I am going to put it and I think I will end up throwing them out even if that means losing my notes on them or losing the whole article if I never had a digital back up in my computer.

On one hand I don't want to get rid of these papers, especially if they came in a really expensive packet. But I don't know what to do with them.

 With an iPad, I can keep all the articles and cases I want in one place, well ordered in folders and subfolders with highlights and even annotation in the margins.   

Even though e-readers have made my life a lot easier in some ways, I have found several limitations in the most popular programs. For instance, the Kindle iPad app offers almost no options to organize the books in your iPad. The software tries to capture the feeling of a book rack, but sadly it also has the functionality of one. The functionality I ask for may be, possibly, something the common reader might not want or need since they might at best carry five books with them at any given time. But if you are in an academic setting or you need to have and peruse through several text books for reference then better organization is a must. Another thing that would greatly benefit my interaction with digital books would be the ability to have bookmarks with tags. Back when I worked developing software, I used to put tags in my language books so I could easily find how to do certain things with each language. So far I have not been able to find anything similar in digital documents or books.

My big interest here is to find a way to improve the experience and see if my ideas on how to make it better would have any value to people other than myself.

What is the connection to the gathering and identification of customer insights and/or the design of valuable customer experiences?

The connection is that my focus is finding why people switch, why they believe it is a better experience than paper books. An interesting article I read the other day said that reading books in Kindle or iPad is replacing watching TV in some people’s lives as the activity they do most nights. This is interesting because it means these people were not reading paper books before. I would like to know why they are reading books now.

My secondary focus would be to find a way to improve the customer experience if I can detect certain needs that are not being addressed by the current readers.

Cite and briefly describe at least one article that is related to your topic.

I have found two academic articles so far.

One comes from Mintel and it is about the current book industry. It has a section on e-books and it explains some of the benefits people have found in reading free e-books over going to the library.

The other one is called Social Cognitive Theory and Adoption of E-Book Devices. As the abstract says “The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that will lead to a person adopting an e-book device. In this paper, a social cognitive theoretical framework is utilized to understand an individual’s intention to adopt an e-book device like the Kindle, Nook or iPad. A conceptual model is proposed, which focuses on the antecedents to a person’s adoption behavior and is empirically tested through a survey of Australian youth.” Sounds like fun.

I would like to find more articles focused on functionality rather than correlations on purchase habits, though. 

Blog Assignment 2

The customer experience I have chosen for this blog entry spans a few decades and starts even before I was born, but bear with me. Now, when you are a comic book fan you can be a huge fan of DC Comics (Batman, Superman) or a big Marvel Comics fan (Spider-Man, Iron Man). Personally, I prefer to read DC Comics but I have to say Marvel provided a much better and more personal experience. It’s a shame that most of their comics during the 80s and 90s were written by badly paid interns and other illiterate scum instead of actual writers, though.  

Still, I have to give credit where credit is due: Marvel from the 60s and all the way to the mid-90s was really good at creating an experience for its fans, and it’s all thanks to one man. This man here:

Stan “The Man” Lee

Stan Lee is the co-creator of Spider-Man, Hulk, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Iron Man and he worked as Editor in Chief of Marvel Comics for many years; but even if he had never written anything he would still be remembered as the best huckster who ever lived.

Stan Lee became Marvel’s living mascot, motivational speaker and spokesman; he excelled at these functions by exploiting some of the Strategic Experiential Modules in ways that are downright genius.

The SEM that I can identify as the pillar of Stan Lee’s contribution to the Marvel brand is Feel. Stan Lee had his own column which appeared in every comic published by Marvel where Stan talked about what projects Marvel was doing at the time, but he didn’t just talk like a salesperson spewing about new products; Stan talked like a man with a mission, like he was part of something greater than just a publishing company and everybody who read the comics was invited.

One of the greatest things Stan Lee ever did for Marvel fans was to make them feel as something more than customers or even fans. In fact, when Stan Lee speaks to Marvel fans he doesn’t even call them that, what he calls them is “True Believers.” He made fans believe they were part of something greater and not just consumers of a product. They were not just Marvel fans; they were card carrying members of The Merry Marvel Marching Society. They actually had honest to God cards saying that. For one dollar you could join the society a get a card, official MMMS documents, a record with Stan Lee’s voice welcoming you to the society, pins, buttons and other stuff.

The most fascinating aspect of this character Stan Lee plays in public is that I can’t recall one single instant where he has broken out of character. Not one! Stan Lee is always smiling, always has a positive attitude and he would always finish his speeches with either one of his two catch phrases “Nuff said!” and “Excelsior!” He still does this today with his twitter account. Here is a good example of Stan Lee being Stan Lee, an interview with Conan O’Brian from 1995.

Another SEM Stan Lee liked to use was Think. Back in the 60s Stan was writing several comics every month and he had a lot of problems keeping his stories straight, which lead to some inconsistencies and plot holes once in a while. For this Stan Lee created the famous Marvel No-Prize. In case a fan… sorry, excuse me. I meant in case a True Believer found a plot hole in one of his comics, he was encouraged not to complain, whine and moan about it but to come up with his own explanation of why that happened. So, for instance, if Spider-Man suddenly forgot he could use his web to make a parachute for himself, a True Believe had to come up with a rational or semi-rational explanation of why Spider-Man suffered from temporal amnesia (maybe Doctor Octopus hit him really hard in the head a few pages back?) The True Believer with the most creative explanation would win a No-Prize, which as the name implies is no prize at all. Well, not unless you count the Stan Lee’s approval of your ability to come up with silly solutions for his bad writing.

The last SEM that relates to Stan Lee’s work is (no pun intended) Relate. One of the things Stan Lee had noticed in the 60s was that not only little kids were reading comics back then, but also high school and college kids and yet there were no heroes they could relate to. Superheroes back then were millionaire playboys, super smart scientists or god-like aliens and suddenly Stan Lee creates this superhero who is just this geeky high school kid called Spider-Man. It sold like hot cakes because it was the superhero they would be if they got bitten by radioactive spiders.

It’s hard to argue with the success Stan had, especially with the kind of loyalty he managed to cultivate in his legion of true believers. There was even a point when they were buying every magazine published by Marvel whether they liked it or not. It didn’t matter if it was any good or not, as long as Marvel published it they would buy it. This led to the creation of the term Marvel Zombie, although I guess they prefer to stick with True Believers.

Well, I guess there is only one way to finish this blog assignment, and this is how:

Blog Assignment -1

Meet Juan

1. What do you think and feel?

Juan likes to customize and individualize things. Like the quote from Full Metal Jacket says “This is my rifle; there are many like it, but this one is mine.” This is very important for him because he doesn’t feel something is his unless he can add a personal touch to it.

What worries him is for necessary items to stop working at an important moment, like losing his internet connection the night when he has to send out some homework via e-mail, or a car breaking down in the middle of nowhere. For Juan reliability is essential when making a decision.

2. What do you see?

Juan is a grad student in a B-school and he is constantly surrounded by people from all over the world who are very smart and have more than above average income. After all of his undergrad friends went their own way and ended up in different countries and even continents, Juan’s current group of friends are all current UT grad students.

Juan doesn’t like to follow news to keep informed about the latest trends and he learns about new offering in the market by hearsay. Juan believes there is usually too much going on to keep track of it so he prefers to ask people or google about solutions to emerging problems instead of trying to keep up with everything. Juan also likes interesting stores where he can browse and he finds that it is another good way of learning about new products.

3. What do you say and do?

Juan likes to stand out by being funny or saying something insightful in class. Whether he achieves this or not is another matter entirely. He is constantly frustrated as an MBA where looking boring seems to be considered a plus and he prefers to keep an appearance that while not extravagant, seems to differ from what people expect of business people at least with his casual clothes.

4. What do you hear?

Juan is not the kind of person who lets the majority decide for him and has no problem liking something nobody else likes; although if it’s too unpopular he will keep that information to himself. That being said, Juan will hear the opinion of people he respects, but that’s only a small group of close friends.

5. What are your pain points?

Juan’s biggest frustration is that he has to lose time every day in minutia and not put more time in his work or things that interest him. You could even say his biggest frustration is the lack of time he has to enjoy things. If Juan could stop sleeping and use those extra hours he would do it, but sadly that is not possible.

6. What do you hope to gain?

What Juan seeks is new experiences, innovation and things to make his life easier. If something manages to save him time or make his life more organized, that is considered a triumph.

Test.