The latest issue of the McKinsey Quarterly has an article which discusses how to get an understanding of your customers in order to develop new markets and better understand existing ones.

It makes a few good points, and the sentiment is certainly correct. It’s a new world out there, and building markets based on assumptions, hunches and bad data won’t get a company very far.

However I take issue with the section on product development. As with much that is written about this area, it talks in general about observing customers being one avenue leading to new product design. Although it is clearly outside the scope of the article to go into details, ethnography, even when undertaken by experts, can give hazy guidance at the best of times.

The article states :

“A cell phone manufacturer looking for promising offerings in several profitable markets, for example, established customer segment panels, whose members were asked to maintain diaries detailing where and how they used PDAs and wireless devices. With this information in hand, the company’s brand and segment managers could ensure, at key stage-gate points in product development, that the teams of developers were truly meeting the needs of target customer segments in critical markets by proposing appropriate new-product and packaged-service ideas, such as business- or entertainment-oriented browser interface designs.”

I’d love to know how McKinsey proposes that these insights are ranked and quantified in order to provide some sort of priority for the design process. Also, exactly how did the brand and segment manager ‘ensure’ they met the needs of customers. Oh, and how much the customer panel process cost.

As a sideline, here’s my customer insight about McKinsey : It’s ironic that an organisation which preaches about customer insights and open innovation does not have a facility on it’s own site for people to leave comments or trackbacks. The tag-line for the Quarterly is “Required reading for the business elite.” Wake up guys.