I spent last week putting the final touches on a Voice of the Customer research effort we conducted near the end of 2009. As a product manager there is something very satisfying about coming back to the office with a list of potential ideas.
Listening to your customers is a great way to generate ideas. Some of these ideas will align nicely with your current thinking and some will present challenges. Then there are ideas that sound just plain crazy.
The just crazy ideas are usually the quickest to be dismissed. The idea maybe technically impossible or cost prohibitive. Often, it comes down to a belief that customers just won’t buy it.
However, paying attention to crazy ideas can pay off, and LEGOs are a great case study to prove it. LEGO (eventually) started listening to the 5% minority of their customers (adults) who had become enthusiastic fans of the product line. This minority set of customers were spending 50 times more a year than the 95% majority customer (the Gaspedal word of mouth marketing blog has a good overview of the LEGO case here).
