VicePresident, Principal Analyst
- The adoption curve (the hockey stick!)...70% of people are connected by...wait for it...household electrification rates from the 1930s. So all the technology adoption curves behave according to an adoption curve that looks like a hockey stick.
- How can we use this to forecast consumer behavior?
- Why do some people adopt technology sooner than others? [Enough question, we want answers!]
- The answer: eventually, obtaining technology becomes convenient enough.
- Put another way, when the technology becomes convenient enough, it is rapidly adopted.
- Point: people share a set of universal needs...satisfy these needs with convenience and you will win. [the challenge is idenitfying the need, not the device]
- What do people really need? How can you give it to them? What should you do to be ready? That's the agenda for this.
- What are universal human needs? [Well, Maslow is a start]...but he thinks Maslow was wrong in a particular way: they are not ordered...they are messy [and this is where we get to the individual, right? your order is not my order]
Here's the Forrester view of 4 universal needs:
- Connection--being connected to something bigger than ourselves [why politics and religion work for so many]
- Uniqueness--we are special [the individual!]
- Comfort--[hope?]
- Variety--[play and learning?]
- So what?: Everybody has all four...they just vary by individual. [of course the variety embedded in the term variety is, well, quite variable].
- Our needs shift over time, and we'll tradeoff our needs against themselves [ourselves?]...we'll trade comfort for variety for example.
- [haha...fictional tradeoff in choosing between a PC and a Mac..against the four types of needs].
How do you give people what they need [against these needs]?
- You win with convenience. It is a means of access to their needs..it is not a need unto itself.
- Convenience = All the benefits of you product/service minus all the barriers of it
- Digital camera example: $1669 sony 1Megapixel camera in 1998...digital print service online in 2003...17 models with 5 megapixels for under $100 at Walmart in 2008...Digital Camera penetration at >70% in 2008. [Convenience driven by the cheap revolution]
What do you need to do to succeed?
- Know your customer's target need profile [there's an average, but you have to leave room for variation or this is little more than another attempt to define prism-like clusters!]
- Know and increase your convenience quotient [and of course Forrester offers reearch to define the quotient for you]...the quotient is a single score between -1 and 1...it expresses the benefits - the barriers. [obviously useful for establishing directional baselines versus competitiors and alternative approaches from the same organization...can R+K establish a convenience quotient for our service offerings? Perhaps a meaningful approach to evaluating innovation at the agency?]
- Examples in customer service application of the cQ like evaluating FAQs, sending an email and calling an 800 number.
Summary, Audience Questions and Random Thoughts
- People share a set of universal needs--satisfy them with convenience and you will win.
- [Diane and I think it would be an interesting exercise to apply a Convenience Quotient exercise against some of our clients brands]
- Forrester shooting for a 12 question approach to identifying the four needs.
- A fair amount of qualitative/subjective data applied to the profile.
- Do you think needs analysis will carry across cultures? We have confidence these needs are universal.
- [the challenge is of course that defining these needs with specificity is where we are different].
- [Convenience is not the same as simplistic...if you enjoy complexity, convenience is not about simplifying things that are part of the complicated need...hiding the data associated with training for a marathon is not the same as providing convenient access to it and the tools to manipulate it...spreadsheet software, web applications are examples?].
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