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Voice of the Emergent Customer

Are some customers better than others at developing new concepts? Professor Donna L. Hoffman at the University of California Riverside thinks so. Emergent customers have a unique ability to “wrap their head” around a new concept and improve it. She created a scale to identify them so companies hear the voice of the “right” customer during new product development.

Emergent customers are better at imagining how concepts address latent unmet needs. Dr. Hoffman describes it as a “unique constellation of personality traits and processing abilities that enables such consumers to engage in a synergistic process of visualization and rationalization to improve product concepts.” Those characteristics are:

Openness to new experiences
Reflection
Experiential and rational processing style
Verbal (rational style) and Visual (experiential style)
Creativity (self perceived)
Creative personality
Optimism

The study included 1124 respondents and compared performance of those identified as emergent customers against those of lead users, early adopters, and a control group. The emergent customers significantly outperformed the other groups.

How would you put this to use?

Market research firms could use the scale to screen research candidates. Emergent customers focus on improving concepts, while “non-emergent” customers judge marketplace acceptance.
Companies could learn about their emergent customer’s behaviors and beliefs. Do they buy more, use more, or pay more for certain products? Do they use products in a different way? Do they influence other customers?
Companies could set up advisory panels of emergent customers to watch for opportunities and threats.

How would emergent customers perform using a structured innovation method? It is tempting to assume they would do better using methods like S.I.T.. These people are more motivated and optimistic. They are more hopeful about the output of innovation workshops and are likely to push harder. Star performers “Google” their mind to make innovative connections and associations in rapid fire fashion. This relates to Dr. Hoffman’s factor of “experiential and rational processing style.”

For innovation workshops, my “dream team” would include a mix of emergent and non-emergent participants. Perhaps the ideal scenario is pairing them together. As the emergent thinker pushes ideas into new territory, the non-emergent thinker can offer quick feedback. Innovation is a team sport after all.

Researchers have long noted that the “voice of the mainstream customer” is not that useful in developing new products. Instead, finding the Voice of the Emergent Customer could be a new source of competitive advantage.

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View Comments

Sean Grace says:

March 15, 2010 at 2:31 pm

This is very interesting. In addition to innovation workshops including both Emergent and non-Emergent customers, Emergent customers would definitely be useful in certain focus groups where the goal is to exchange new ideas and decide what is missing in a given concept, rather than simply commenting on their liklihood of purchasing it.
These conversations could offer valuable insights for use in future quantitative research with the more general population of customers who evaluate concepts in the more traditional sense.
For bigger companies such as P&G, it may be wise to segment employees this way as well, and then hold the innovation workshops you spoke of to get the most out of the workforce.