Markets have become more and more fragmented, so keeping our visual communication consistent, focused and appropriate is even more important. Visually, the customer is bombarded with colours, images, impressions of your companies and your services.
We should never forget that we are trying to keep pace and communicate with an increasingly demanding and often fickle customer. It becomes increasingly hard to keep pace, particularly when we continue to place a lot of reliance on research methods which have been around for the last 60+ years. While we continue to do this, it is likely that our understanding of our customers will steadily slip further and further backwards. These research methods may have been appropriate to a slower pace of life and a customer who was less frazzled and beset by a variety of media stimuli. In an increasingly frenetic world of every diminishing development timelines, they are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
We also need to keep in mind the stimuli which are around our average consumer on a daily basis. All our customers have highly sophisticated inputs through their smartphones, electronic devices, social media, television, film and the press. So how do we convey new design concepts to them? Often we use quite primitive and boring means. So they aren’t excited by a new concept? So is it the concept or the expression of the concept? It is current dogma that a customer will never understand or find relevance in a truly breakthrough concept or product. Maybe that is true, but I tend to believe that the fault lies more with the inability of research to communicate the experience of a new concept and how it fits with our customer’s lifestyle. Research needs to begin using the technologies available through multimedia and virtual reality to help our customers experience new products and services.
Brilliant Reflections/Consumer Research Specialists 