After talking to some of our potential customers we came out with some really helpful info. Not only did we get info about our product, but talking to our potential customer base gave us insight on the market, their pains they face every day, other products in the industry, how the industry works, and what measures they have already taken to improve safety. With that said, we asked 8 questions that we thought could improve our product, help clarify what our target audience is interested in and looking for, and the potential of our product.
The questions we asked were as follows:
1. What measures have you taken to increase safety awareness and accident prevention in the past?
2. What changes would most improve our new product?
3. What do you like most about competing products currently available from other companies?
4. What changes would most improve competing products currently available from other companies?
5. If our new product were available today, how likely would you be to use it instead of competing products currently available from other companies?
6. If you are not likely to use our new product, why not?
7. What would make you more likely to use our new product?
8. If our new product were available today, how likely would you be to recommend it to others?
Our answers varied between our customers, which was good because it made us re-think certain parts to our product and BCM, which ultimately will improve our model.
For example, for question 1 some of our interviewees said they had taken driving school or have their drivers take a driving course. On the other hand, I had two who said that they hadn't done anything in the past to better the safety of their trucks/drivers.
Our product itself was seen as very good and no one I spoke to gave me anything to improve our product, they said that it was good the way it was. With that said, we'll always be innovating our product to improve it with customer input. Not only did they say we had a very good product, but they all either said or hinted at the notion of buying our product and/or recommending it to others.
As for other products that were similar to ours, they couldn't think of any. The only thing remotely close was a general safety product which monitors everything on the truck, so the tire tread, when you need an oil change, etc, but it had nothing to with the lighting of the vehicle. So as far as we know, if we get our product out to the market, we'd be the only one. As well, one of the problems they had with that product was it was too intense (too much info to handle) and the thing they wanted was that the product has to be simple to use.
What would make the customers use our product? Most of them said affordability. We initially thought to price our product high to give it a "high value" image, but we'll definitely re-consider that model. As well, they wanted simplicity, so our "plug-in-play" idea has been proven to be quite effective. Also, they want the maintenance to be minimal so to keep the costs down for the company.
To conclude: talking to our target customers have been really helpful. We learned a lot of new information and confirmed some of our own hypothesis. We'll continue to do market research in the future as every business should be.
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