Horses, customers and products: customer involvement in the search for innovative products

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.”

This line, attributed perhaps mistakenly to Henry Ford, is clearly an exaggeration, but it is also useful food for thought. Choosing where to direct research and development is a very delicate matter, because it can lead to success but also to ruin. Often the greatest risk is not failing to build a new product but committing effort and resources to the wrong product.

The conclusions drawn from research on how customer involvement affects the quality of the search for innovative products are mixed (Campbell and Cooper, 1999). In their study, projects developed in partnership with customers did not prove, on the whole, more successful than those carried out in-house, whichever measure was used (“Do Customer Partnerships Improve New Product Success Rates?”, Industrial Marketing Management).

Dialogue with customers in defining requirements and features is common practice, but it entails two fundamental problems:

1. As Ford (perhaps) suggests, the customer has no view of the development possibilities and will push for specific improvements tied to their own business rather than for a drastic change of direction. Many studies are available on customer resistance to innovations. The goal-setting model defines five stages in the acceptance of something new (initial response to the innovation, perceptual and appraisal processes for goal setting, emotional acceptance and resistance, coping responses, decision), with a decreasing level of resistance (Richard P. Bagozzi and Kyu-Hyun Lee, “Consumer Resistance to, and Acceptance of, Innovations,” 1999). This means that customers involved in the initial definition of a new product will tend to be far more conservative than necessary. For products with a lower level of innovation, on the other hand, things change and involvement is desirable from the first stage (Neale and Corkindale, 1998).
2. In the later stages, when the idea already defined is being developed, companies rarely consult customers. Yet this is the moment when customer feedback becomes most valuable, when an innovative idea has to be fitted into an existing environment. Consulting customers at this stage makes it possible to work on the aspects that might provoke resistance from the market.

As Leonard-Barton (1995) suggests, the characteristics of the customers involved can be a factor in the product's success, since customer participation activities can be influenced by experience and by personal traits.

What we must strive to understand when we talk with our customers is not what they want from the product but what problems they have that we can help them with. Research and development should be driven not by specific requests but by a study of needs.

The use of CRM systems often puts in front of the business owner an excessive number of requests for changes or improvements to the product. Trying to provide a solution to everything that is asked for scatters effort and makes us lose sight of the features that matter, the ones that define our product in the eyes of customers.

(Alberto Viotto)