Explore your Customers' Hidden Needs

The voice of the customer should always be at the heart of every business decision and successful product innovation. However, if customers themselves struggle to even realise what their hidden needs are, how can businesses uncover them and make successful innovations that really matter to them?

The traditional customer surveys don’t work

Understanding customers’ real and hidden needs is not easy, no matter how carefully you listen to them. Since they exist at the subconscious level, these needs are difficult to identify, recognise or describe, recognised or described, hiding the things that customers really want from us.

A new approach, focused on hidden needs analysis, is emerging, in tandem with the social sciences. The philosophy behind hidden needs analysis is simple: asking direct questions is insufficient, and radically new approaches need to be taken. Psychology and anthropology techniques can provide another piece of the puzzle to understand what drives customers’ excitement. According to the Kano model, only if you fully deliver on customers’ excitement attributes will their satisfaction levels be high.

Uncover what’s hidden

An effective but little-used method to “uncover what’s hidden” is the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT), a creative interviewing technique initially developed by psychologists to detect individuals’ perceptions, cognitive models, and personal constructs. In consumer research, RGT has the potential to uncover unconscious constructs in a new and powerful way.

RGT entails a structured interview process, which begins with identifying the evaluation subjects (for example, different types of fruit). Three random elements from this subject are then given to the participants for comparison (an apple, banana and orange). The aim of this indirect questioning is to tease out perceived – but hidden – constructs or values from participants (juicy or fleshy) which are then used to rate additional elements from the same subject (strawberry and watermelon). These ratings are included in a matrix made up of the elements and the constructs that they elicit (strawberry as the juiciest, and watermelon as the fleshiest).