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Customers of the Future

Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Feb 09, 2010

Last week I watched WarGames with one of my sixteen-year old sons (I keep two around the house, in case anyone ever needs to borrow one). It was wonderful to see Matthew Broderick messing around with old-school technology -- command-line interfaces, dot-matrix printers, modems that required you to place the phone on them, direct-dialing of other computers, voice synthesizers: all stuff that was very ahead of its time for 1983, when I saw the movie in the theater, but tech that is now incredibly passé.

I related to Broderick's character back then. I was an early "digital native" -- I had a microcomputer in my bedroom in the 1970s (TRS-80 Model I), before most people even understood there was such a thing as a home computer. The other day I came home and there were three sets of teenagers in the basement, one group playing Dungeons & Dragons, one group playing Axis & Allies, and one group playing a video game. All things that I did as a kid that no generation before mine did.

"The future is here today. It's just not evenly distributed." So said acclaimed science-fiction author William Gibson. Which small group of your customers is already living in the future? What can you learn from them? If you realized that they represented the shape of customers to come, how would you change your business today? What growth could you unlock for your firm by being the first in your industry to serve this group?

It's not hard to find the customers of the future. Look to the macrotrends shaping our world and profile those customer segments furthest along in adoption of those trends (e.g., ethical consumers, information addicts, active seniors). And look of course to the young. I'll never forget one 18-year old summer intern back in 1998 who introduced me to MP3s, instant messaging and blogging.

Oh, and which old technology from WarGames most surprised my son?

The pull tab from a soda can.

He'd never seen one before. We must look pretty old to our customers of the future.

Tags: Market Research

Comments

Excellent post. As a "40" something IT professional working in the Market Research industry I often worry about keeping up with all the young guns and their new fangled ideas. Luckily for me, like most IT nerds that I know, I'm still very much a kid at heart and love new toys, gadgets and ideas. And while my eye is always towards what the future may hold in terms of how best to utilize technology for market research, I am also keenly aware that a large segment of our target audience is part of my generation. Creating "flasier" applications to collect questions can often times turn off as many respondents as it excites, so I do try and strike a balance. It would be interesting to see data collection methods broken down by "age". While it would be a cost nightmare to build different collection methodologies for different demographics, specifically age, I often think that getting data from people in the way that is most "known"/comfortable to them makes for better data.

Again, nice article...makes me want to sit down and "play a game".

Posted @ Tuesday, February 09, 2010 8:26 AM by Ken

I actually think many flashier surveys are much less valid surveys, regardless of the age of respondents. Most of these new models need more testing:

Web 2.0 Formatted Surveys: Bad Data without Improved Engagement. Of course, we owe it to the customers of the future to get them methods they like that work well.

Thanks, Ken - I confess to hearing a voice synthesized "Do you want to play a game?" in my head as I wrote this post!

Posted @ Tuesday, February 09, 2010 9:55 PM by Jeffrey Henning

The data I've seen for let's say a "flash" vs. a "standard" survey seem to be all over the place in terms of what the responent thinks or positive/negative impact on the users experience.

Of course this could very well be people making the data say what they want it to say (i.e. your survey engine is mostly flash then you try and make the flash seem important).

We do some flash programming here but my rule of thumb is that the flash application should either make the respondents life easier to answer the question or you build the flash application because standard questions won't cut it (i.e. need to build an online restaurant menu where respondents can choose products from the menu).

So I think there is a place for specific questions to be "flashier" but would certainly never do an entire survey that way.

So I agree with you that you need to be careful when a client thinks they want "flashier". We've had them ask if we could "spice up" simple yes/no questions and we push back and assure them it's really not necessary.

Now if we could just convince them to shorten the survey length we might could finally have a positive impact on how respondents feel about taking surveys.

Posted @ Wednesday, February 10, 2010 9:04 AM by Ken

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