Learn from your customers: Lead Users
Your customers may know better than you do what they need. Ask your sales reps to observe the innovative, unusual, often unexpected ways your customers may be using your products. Look to your customers for new ideas, especially those you deem as lead customers and pay attention, really, really, pay attention to what they are doing. Your customers' unanticipated applications might lead to new ways to market existing products or to tap latent demand for new products.. You just might learn something that you can market to all the rest of your customers. This is especially true of your lead users.
A lead user is a person or company who takes a product and adapts it to their personal needs to complete a specific task. A lead user will develop a need and alter a product often to complete the task in a higher quality or in a more efficient manner. Many lead users are ahead of the marketplace in general, whether it be months or years in the future. % In the lead user, we find the information to answer the customer need question much earlier and the companies with this information will be the first to develop, build, and sell this product in a refined form. By some accounts, nearly 80% of all new ideas come from such customers. .Lead users are primarily found in abundance in the highly technical fields such as medical or computer fields but they can be found in all industries. Lead users are much more common in these rapidly changing fields: Scientific instruments are 77% user designed, semi conductors 67%, tractor shovels 6% and plastics 0
Because lead users must benefit from the innovations they create, they must have a reason to share innovations with other companies. If they do not have compensation, they will simply keep it to themselves. It is the duty of the marketer to offer ways of compensation for the use of the lead users innovations. The first and most obvious method to obtain the information from lead users is to straight out pay them for it. Search out lead users and pay them periodically to see if they have new ideas or improvements on a product. The company can offer money to anyone with user ideas on a certain product. A problem with this is the access that other companies will have to the same people. A way around this would be to get an exclusive contract with the innovator. The innovator will be loyal and helpful to the company. Information from lead users may be obtained through donation of equipment and allow them to use it for free. Require that you have the right to check back at certain times to observe any changes or improvements made on the product since the last time it was observed. Using this method would keep one directly in touch with the changes that were made to the specific product that you are concerned with.
The largest advantage of a lead user is the simple fact that they are 5 to 7 years in advance in 80% of the cases studied. It is evident that this kind of lead time over the competitors can be very beneficial to a company that needs to be on the leading edge. If a company can develop ideas that would not have been discovered for 7 years, This can make a large difference in the success of a product. Because the lead user is a customer, he is going to be more in touch with what a customer needs are. This could prove to be much more accurate than market research
Several potential disadvantages exist in the use of Lead Users. A company can follow lead users so much that it will loose its own capability to innovate and become dependent upon the innovativeness of its lead users. They could become so obsessed with making what the customer demands, they will tend to cater only to that one customer's needs. This may not be the needs of the rest of the market by ignoring massive marketplace trends. Companies can overcome these disadvantages by maintaining a healthy R&D capability, a competitor monitoring system, and doing their own marketing research.
Learn from your customers; work with them; reward them; understand what they are doing with your products that you had not foreseen. As Spock would say, Live long and prosper.