TEI 008: Customer Research Approaches – with Market Researcher Brian Ottum, PhD

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you another
episode of... The Everyday Innovator The podcast is all about
helping people involved in developing and managing products become
more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.
Our Guest:  Brian Ottum is a market research specialist
with 30 years experience in new product development. He started as
a chemical engineer and joined Procter Gamble, contributing to
Charmin, Pampers, and other products you know. He went on to earn a
PhD in Market Research. Today, he helps Kimberly-Clark, Johnson
Controls, Thomson Reuters and other companies with product
development. BTW, he also is an amateur astronomer, star gazing
since he was 12 years old – and he is serious – while he lives in
Michigan, last year he built a remotely controlled telescope
station in New Mexico to take advantage of clear skies. Highlights
from the discussion include: Qualitative and quantitative
approaches to customer research.New product development projects
can take on a life of their own and be difficult to make
adjustments to once they get rolling – hard to stop the train.If
you have customer data that suggests a product will not be
successful, it is much better to kill the project quickly than to
continue wasting resources on it. The earlier the better. However,
this can be a challenge and requires courage.Choose metrics wisely
– too often they can be used in unintended ways.Test everything.
Never carry ideas into development without first testing them with
consumers.Best qualitative research tool is ethnography – observing
customers.Best quantitative research tool is conjoint analysis.