Say Cheese!

Now this is an example of innovative, yet perhaps irresponsible advertising.

This is an ad in South Africa for Audi's new 4.2L V8 twin turbo 450 bhp RS6.... in front of a speed camera! Hilarious!

X: The customer IS always right.... right?

For the final “official” blog entry for this class I wanted to offer a few thoughts on the customer insight process overall (and in no particular order):

- Gathering insight: easy to brainstorm about but harder to do in practice. While there are many different ways you can gather data actually acquiring the data can be challenging. People all pretty much hate surveys, be they short or long, multiple choice or free form. I pretty much think ETS is to blame for this! All those SAT’s and ACT’s have made people instinctively hate filling in little blanks with a number 2 pencil. Interviews are also tough to conduct and even more tough to code into meaningful data. Perception and biases comes into play when the data is not empirical.

- As our innovations prof told us, the market will reference themselves when making purchasing decisions. When you are providing a product or a service you have to ensure that it works as advertised or the negative word-of-mouth will kill your business. The market is not fickle, per se, but they do respond to positive and negative feedback from one another.

- Segmentation and differentiation are keys to having a successful product or service. If you try to be everything to everyone you end up with the Pontiac Aztek (which is bad by the way!). By picking particular segment of the market to serve and sufficiently differentiating our product offering we can be more successful!

What not to do!!

- The customer may not always be "right": Often a customer does not know what they need/want. You can gather data and identify potential market opportunities but that in and of itself does not identify a particular solution. And even once the solution is identified it does not mean the customer will be willing to buy it. The marketer must convince the consumer that their fridge smells so they are coerced into buying baking soda for the fridge!!

Control your iPod with an umbrella

Control your iPod with an umbrella - Engadget

File this one under: You know you have run out of ideas for peripherals when...... (man this is dumb!)