TEI 008: Customer Research Approaches – with Market Researcher Brian Ottum, PhD

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you another episode of...

The Everyday Innovator

The podcast is all about helping people involved in developing and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

Our Guest:  Brian Ottum is a market research specialist with 30 years experience in new product development. He started as a chemical engineer and joined Procter Gamble, contributing to Charmin, Pampers, and other products you know. He went on to earn a PhD in Market Research. Today, he helps Kimberly-Clark, Johnson Controls, Thomson Reuters and other companies with product development. BTW, he also is an amateur astronomer, star gazing since he was 12 years old – and he is serious – while he lives in Michigan, last year he built a remotely controlled telescope station in New Mexico to take advantage of clear skies.

Highlights from the discussion include:

• Qualitative and quantitative approaches to customer research.
• New product development projects can take on a life of their own and be difficult to make adjustments to once they get rolling – hard to stop the train.
• If you have customer data that suggests a product will not be successful, it is much better to kill the project quickly than to continue wasting resources on it. The earlier the better. However, this can be a challenge and requires courage.
• Choose metrics wisely – too often they can be used in unintended ways.
• Test everything. Never carry ideas into development without first testing them with consumers.
• Best qualitative research tool is ethnography – observing customers.
• Best quantitative research tool is conjoint analysis.