Meeting the consumer’s current needs isn’t enough to guarantee success. According to Forrester Research, a marketer must also anticipate future needs. In a recently released report, Forrester analyst Christine Spivey Overby dubs this proactive approach “consumer-focused innovation” and outlines its three basic principles:
1) “Consumers are active co-innovators.” According to Overby, “more and more, companies are using consumer insights to shape innovation from an embryonic concept to market testing.” By way of example she cites Nestle’s “relationship centers” in France and Japan, where nutritionists, marketers, and execs respond to more than 200,000 queries and requests from consumers every year.
2) “Consumers’ latent needs are as important as their explicit needs.” This is a corollary to the rule of marketing that advises taking focus groups with a pillar of salt, since consumers often don’t consciously know–let alone can tell you–what it is they want or need.
3) “Experience trumps products.” Starbucks is the oft-cited example here of how a company can distinguish itself by the experiential circumstances in which it wraps its products. Or as Overby says, “Consumer products firms will avoid the commodity death spiral by selling experiences–not products.”
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