Customer Anthropology

Customer Anthropology = approach used by businesses to understand their customers.

Description

From Dave Pollar at http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/06/21.html#a1565

"The essence of this approach is that customers often don't know what they need, so by spending time observing them using your products (and your competitors' products) you can often identify many business opportunities (and threats) that sales analysis, interviews and customer satisfaction surveys won't reveal.

If you're an aspiring entrepreneur, your first important task is to find an unmet need, understand why it is not currently being met, and assess whether you and your partners have the capabilities and resources to meet it. Customer Anthropology provides a terrific means to do this task. It allows you to see, first hand, what people need that isn't being provided by current products (users cursing, complaining, and working around deficiencies in the existing products is a great clue). And it enables you to see why the current products aren't meeting the need, which can help you determine why the very smart incumbent producers are missing the mark. Of course, you also need to understand the production economics and the technology limitations, but observing customers will get you off on the right foot.

Most of the examples of Customer Anthropology in the literature are business-to-business. Steelcase uses this approach to design effective workspaces for its customers, which are, at least directly, other corporations. Medical technology companies use this approach by visiting hospitals and medical facilities, and they're observing the doctors and staff, not the patients." (http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/06/21.html#a1565)