Products for Culture
Many of my clients are not really sure why they do consumer research. It seems like a good idea – if we’re making products for people, we ought to go out and meet some of them. They’ll tell us what they want, or we’ll see what problems they’re having. But the “magic,” the “design thinking” – how do we get that out of consumer research?
I’ve been thinking about design as the process of interpreting a culture, expressing it into an object, and inserting it back into the culture. This is different than the mindset companies usually have, which is that products are products of culture. No, instead think of a product as the way a company lives within a culture.
The challenge for a company is to create products that can pass for native. The products must use the common language, use common references, and express shared values. We don’t want the culture to reject the product as a the foreign object. People buy products that fit into their culture, or represent a culture they aspire to. Market segmentation and other tools of marketing are no more than (and no less than) processes for understanding and discriminating between consumer cultures.
This tells us what to do with the research. Sure, we need to understand what people do, but it’s just as important to know how people live. Because if we’re going to wrap our technology in a product, we’ll need that product to be accepted as already belonging.
Question for you: How does your product fit into your customer’s culture? Does it change the culture?
Follow Me