Accelerate Product Adoption by Understanding Customer Motives

Consumer attitudes are temperamental, constantly shifting in response to factors ranging from cultural trends to the state of the economy. If you’re in the business of innovation, it’s difficult to know how these factors will impact the adoption of your product.

Utility alone does not determine the success of a new product. Success also depends on emotional and social factors that affect consumer adoption. Consider the example of IoT consumer products, such as smart door locks, security systems, medical monitoring, and water leakage sensors. Manufacturers and insurance companies have promoted the functionality of these devices, but many consumers still have privacy concerns about IoT. A lack of understanding about the desirability of such products has led to a lower level of adoption than the industry expected. 

Gathering insight into customer motivations is crucial. Businesses need to grasp their target market’s real desires, fears, and pain points. Customer motives are ever-changing. The social stigma and negative news coverage that contributed to the failure of Google Glass might be quite different when the Apple Vision Pro goes mainstream. That’s why it’s beneficial to approach consumer insight as a continuous process that informs product development at your company. So, let’s look at ways to gain insight into consumer attitudes.

Monitor the product adoption curve

How can you spot if public opinion is shifting toward a technology relevant to your business? One way is to read market insight reports and tech news websites. But what if your interest is a niche technology, or you simply don’t have the time?

ITONICS makes monitoring easier with the Strong Signals feature. You can specify your topic of interest on the platform, and ITONICS will alert you via email when there is a spike in related news coverage. It might be a sign that the technology is getting interest from opinion leaders and early adopters. The software clusters news articles together, providing a quick overview to make sense of the spike. You can then easily share it with your team and focus on driving innovation instead of monitoring news manually. 

Gather customer needs through a feedback portal 

Companies with a customer-centric approach to innovation make an effort to interpret feedback and understand market demand. You need an efficient way to regularly gather and analyze customer opinions to understand current needs and anticipate future expectations. 

The External Gateway is a feature in our Enterprise package that makes this possible. It’s a configurable form that integrates with the ITONICS ecosystem. You can customize it to receive client feedback and embed it in a public webpage for your target audience to access. When information is submitted, it is saved as a new content element inside the software. 

Automatically centralizing and organizing these submissions in one place allows your team to quickly visualize patterns and evaluate and incorporate feedback into product development. This supports a rapid prototyping approach to test new products and iterate based on client feedback. Incremental innovations are often customer-driven, so it’s smart to engage with clients continuously and respond to their evolving needs.

A toolbox of methods to explore customer expectations

We’ve put together a toolbox of best-practice methods on the ITONICS Radar below to help you understand customer needs. Many of these techniques, popularized by startups, support the innovation process. Each method is interlinked with solutions and use cases from the ITONICS Innovation OS to show how you can put it into practice. Explore these methods and try the ones that suit your team and objectives. 

Businesses can stay ahead of the curve by using methods like these to understand customer needs. The  ITONICS Innovation OS centralizes your company’s product development on one purpose-built platform. Book a demo to see how ITONICS makes linking projects to insights about consumer expectations and market trends easy.