Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

172 BRAND RELEVANCE
service is generated. The problems are then prioritized by asking a
group of one to two hundred respondents to rate each problem as
to whether (1) the problem is important, (2) the problem
occurs frequently, and (3) a solution exists. a problem score is
obtained by combining these ratings. A problem research study
of dog food found that buyers felt dog food smelled bad, cost too
much, and was not available in different sizes for different dogs.
Subsequently, products responsive to these criticisms emerged.
Another study led an airline to modify its cabins to provide more
leg room.
Another approach is to look to customers who have requirements
that stretch the boundaries of the current offerings. Intel,
for example, began designing microprocessors as a result of a
need of a Japanese customer who was making a calculator. The
innovation this project generated became a huge growth platform
that powered Intel for decades. HP for many years used the
“ next bench ” model, by which an engineering colleague would
articulate an unmet need and existing instruments would not be
adequate for the job. The result would be a new instrumentation
product that solved the problem.
Eric von Hippel, a researcher at MIT who studies customers
as sources of service innovations, suggests that lead users provide
a particularly fertile ground for discovering unmet needs
and new product concepts. 6 Lead users are those who face needs
months or years before the bulk of the marketplace. A person
who is very into nutrition, for example, would be a lead user
with respect to health food. Lead users in regard to offi ce automation
would be fi rms that stand to profi t from technological
advancement. Lead users are positioned to benefi t signifi cantly
from an offering responsive to their needs.
Ethnographic Research
Sometimes customers may not be aware of their unmet needs.
They may be so accustomed to the implicit limitations of existing