Blog Post 10

Lately, it seems as though my education has been most useful in teaching me how to think, rather than what to think about. If my major was more geared towards strict memorization of a topic to be successful, such as knowing the name and function of specific body parts for a biology major, or a number of formulas for physics/engineering majors, I might not have to make that claim. But business, being the way it is, is taught better in theory. Very rarely would it be useful to run through examples and say “this is exactly what you need to memorize” or “this is exactly what you need to do”. Never the less, what I have began to take from my education is a process and way to apply knowledge, a way to look at a problem or situation, and solve. The classic liberal arts education, while in some ways seemingly useless to my professional life has proved invaluable in simply the way I look at the world and analyze what is actually going on, politically, personally, societally, and so on. Appreciation and understanding of sociology, an appreciation for philosophy and history, have built my critical thinking skills and frankly my patience when presented with a problem. Which leads me to what I have found the greatest take-away from the consumer insights course (and thus the project), is the general thought process of gaining insights that we followed. Starting with segmentation, expanding to experiences, planning and retrieving insights, evaluating the insights, and then using the entire process for something useful has proved to be a way I never thought of solving or looking at problems before. Seeing how each step in the process logically follows another, and why it is actually important to do it this way will be my biggest takeaway from this course. Starting with a product idea first and then testing each step to see if it will be successful may cause you to ask the wrong questions, interpret the answers in a particular light, and miss some of the subtleties that are there if you truly look. I am also a person that firmly believes the “why” is more important than the “what” or the “how”, and so this process may have seemed tenuous, time consuming, and unimportant without experiencing the process firsthand. Likewise, the self analysis section, actually writing and presenting concerns and learnings from each step was a nice change; it provided a way to analyze what to do going forward more critically and how to improve in the future.

Ways to gain insights from the selected focus group would be my next most important takeaway from the project; mainly, how difficult this process can be, and ways to improve the process. For our own group, we created a survey and asked respondents to select some items from a number of collages. While it makes sense to always make it as easy and comfortable as possible for respondents to take a survey or anything else, we missed something along the way. We developed each at separate times, and thus some respondents were given the survey and collage at different times (thus were likely to respond to the first, but not the second item given to them). Likewise, simply putting our survey on surveymonkey, instead of in a word document was boneheaded. Seeing some of the troubles other groups have had in gaining their insights, it made me realize how crucial it is to plan everything meticulously, and stay away from doing anything on the fly. I can’t really explain why this was not apparent and glaringly obvious to me before, but going through a few hassles has made it abundantly clear. Our group even chose a segment we had immediate and personal access to, was large in size, and well connected with, yet still had our troubles.

I feel as though the group environment really spurs on the learning process in this project. Because of the scope of the project, it is incredibly unlikely anyone would be conducting research of this magnitude on consumer insights or much of anything without a decent number of coworkers. Furthermore, having different insights from a diverse group actually helps the way that you interpret the information (even just balancing male and female perspectives, especially when dealing with couples, as our segment did). Luckily I was in a motivated group who was easy to get along with, and we all could compromise if need be. When picking segments Courtney had suggested Tweens, which would have been an interesting segment undoubtedly, but researching and getting into a tween’s mindset would have drove me insane, so we nixed it. Each presentation phase brought somewhat of a sense of accomplishment, so I feel segmenting it as it was, and having the status reports added some importance at each step.