Tapping into customer insights is a hugely underutilized approach in many companies. In my latest newsletter I tell the story of how a potato products company invited consumers into the business, and learned about potential for new products that was invisible to internal people. You can read about it here.
Lego went even further and actually recruited customers, thereby fixing a fundamental problem.
Previously the company had gone to great lengths to hire the best designers it could find.
That makes sense, right?
The problem was, as good as they were at design, these people didn’t ‘get’ Lego. They designed brilliant things that Lego users weren’t interested in.
Then the company realised something: they had an under-appreciated resource in the shape of a sophisticated adult user community.
They turned the problem on its head: maybe some of the adult user community were designers?
Some were, and they were recruited, designing winning products.
Andy’s Advice: Think of your thorniest problems. Is it possible that you have under-appreciated resources (often among customers or employees) that could solve those problems if only they were asked?