Category: Design thinking

On 29th November 2019, I presented an innovative way to combine the moving motivators from management 3.0 with the empathy map and the customer journey to create product which are tapping into the customers emotions.

The pitch of the workshpo is to create a cook book that a single dad father would purchase to create an unforgetable birthday experience for one of his two daughter. The cook book can contain more than cooking receipees. You can add an online experience, offer for goodies, services for animation and decoration.

The workshop takes place in 3 parts:

1. Evaluation of the customer motivations
2. Mapping the motivations to emotions on the empathy map
3. Address teh emotions with features sorted on the customer journey map

To categorise the intrinsic motivations of the customer I used the moving motivators cards from Management 3.0. In 10 cards it allows to create a picture of the drivers of the customer: his goals, his will to be connected to others, his desire for order and method, …

Once we have designed the customer profile, we associate the motivations with an emotion. The desire for status recognition can be expressed as Pride. The emotions are connected to a type of empthy on the empathy map to visualise how this emotions is experienced by the customer: is it an intelectual emotion, somthing the customer thinks about, something he sees in his environment and surroundings, something he is used to say, something he is used to ear, something he does or something he experience deep in his heart.

At this stage we still don’t have a proposal for a product. After the motivations are transformed into emotions, the workshop participant are going to brainstorm on features that would be able to address the emotions of the customer. Each feature then has to be mapped with one of the phase of marketisation of a product:

1. The acquisition phase corresponds to the early adopters buying product which are addressing a niche market. Teh customers are ready to take the risk to buy a product because it offers at least a unique feature they can’t find on the market.
2. The adoption phase requires from you to create a product which is able to compete with the market offer. In this phase you have to sell features which are the minimum expected for that category and offer a differentiator
3. In the retention phase you already built your customer audience, you have to create new features to either develop your customer base or retain teh existing customers with new versions of your best selling products.
4. The monetisation phase gathers the key market players who need to generate revenue withthere flagship products by creating variation of their best selling product and starting to address new market segments.

As example of product proposed by the 3 groups of participants in XP Days 2019, the book of the second group proposed to add a CD of songs and lyrics to sing with the kids during the party. An other group of participant proposed an online experience to celebrate the event and share online and get recognition on social media for the great experience offered to the kids during the birthday.

In 90 minutes, each group pictured a target customer with his motivations, transformed the motivations in emotions to address with innovative product features and created the market strategy to deliver their product to their target market segments.

I created this workshop to enable companies creating their customer value proposition to focus on the emotional and social jobs of the customer. It is far to easy to concentrate only on the customer functional jobs and disregard the 2 other jobs. Thanks to the social media, product design now often include the online sharing experience, which is par of the social job, but social design of product should not be limited to the online experience. This framework also offers a way to address any time of emotions.