blog 6 - Reflections on Insights and Prototype Project FALL 2009 <3

One concept I learned this year in our customer insights class was the idea of “holistic living” and marketing in a way that covers every aspect of the five senses. Many times in marketing, I catch myself focusing on the product or service itself and how to market the item, I forget that the way it looks, smells, sounds, feels, etc. all play a major part in the attractiveness of the product. I never knew what holistic meant until stepping into Professor Wall’s course. The idea of creating a full experience for the consumer got me excited to learn more. One of the articles we read in class was an experiment on whether the design and look of the packaging caused people to think what they were buying was better quality. Consumers are more likely to think that the coffee tastes better when it’s in a fancier cup and packaging. In our project where holistic living played an essential role there was the idea of understanding our target market, what their bathroom looks like, and what they want/need out of life. Understanding our consumers in every spectrum really helped me to understand what kind of experience they were looking for in the bathroom. We created an amazing toilet seat with many accommodations for the elderly aged couple, but the entire idea isn’t going to sell quite as well, if it was not presented with the idea of how an elderly aged couple’s bathroom looks and smells like and how the product fits into that room. The concept of “holistic” living was enlightening for me to the point where I would share the idea with my non-marketing friends outside of class. I also think this concept will be tremendously useful when I enter the real world after graduation.
A concept or skill I thought was very applicable was the qualitative researches we learned about in class and applied in our image/picture collages. Since we had already done an individual assignment creating our own image/picture collages, it was easier to instruct our interviewees on how to do create one. After we got back our results, we sat down as a group and analyzed the photos and what we felt they meant through underlying meanings or even direct thoughts they were having when they took the sink and shower pictures. We got an idea on the type of people they were just by the decorations on their wallpaper, or the way they organized their things. There were so many things we could draw from just looking at a couple of pictures they took. I enjoyed applying our class concept to our project, because it helped a lot and it made me feel like a real marketing researcher. Being able to do these various hands-on activities with research made me more confident in my learning process and I also learned through the mistakes I made all throughout the project.
Like any project, the beginning was not rushed since we hadn’t started yet, and all other groups were starting on the same page as us also. We got together as a group and worked productively, yet we also conversed and took our time during our meetings. My emotions during this time were eagerness and confidence. I was excited to start our creative thinking process and felt confident that we could do it. As the semester progressed, we continued to work at pace, yet leisurely. During this time, we created a more comfortable and solid working relationship. We even met together on a Thursday night one week without realizing we didn’t have anything to do, so we sat in the atrium hanging out and watching Youtube videos together. I enjoyed their company and we had a great time laughing and joking around. I enjoyed meeting with our team because I enjoyed the lively team environment. Overall, although the personalities in our team were very different, especially coming from different backgrounds, we got along very well. Our different perspectives contributed to a diverse group dynamic, which helped bring in unique ideas for our prototype. We were not subject to group think, since there was no majority group that agreed on the same thing. Near the last week before our presentation, like every team, our discussions became more heated as each of us became more pressured with the time constraints. We pushed through the final couple of days meeting together for long periods of time discussing our prototype and preparing our Powerpoint slides. During this time, I was more worried and stressed out. I was afraid that we weren’t going to be as good as other teams and thinking whether our prototype was even innovative enough. Until we started practicing our presentation and going over the specs of the prototype, did it actually hit me that we did have great accommodations for elderly people. I think I was so focused on the details that I didn’t take a step back and look at the prototype as a whole, especially as a whole experience. Once I started to see how the entire holistic feeling linked in with the toilet seat prototype, I started to enjoy it for what it was. Overall, I feel like having a team contributed a lot to my learning because it not only teaches me how to work with different personalities, but the different perspectives increased creativity, which contributed to creating a great product. It also increased enjoyment because I’m a fairly extroverted person in which I receive my enjoyment by connecting and working with people. If I had to do everything by myself, it wouldn’t be as enjoyable. Fostering that team morale and encouragement is what helps us get excited about our product and the class material.