The outside voice: Your product isn't as great as you think with Jeff Vlahovich

In this episode of 'Now that’s Significant,' hosted by Michael Howard, Head of Marketing at Infotools, we are joined by Jeff Vlahovich, an insights and analytics leader with extensive experience in financial services and media tech.

This discussion explores the importance of adopting an outside perspective, particularly in understanding that our products and services may not hold as much importance to customers as we believe. Jeff shares insights from his career, emphasizing the need to genuinely understand customer needs and avoid the pitfalls of overconfidence and internal bias.

Key takeaways from this episode include:

1. The Outside Voice: Jeff introduces the concept of the 'outside voice,' inspired by Daniel Kahneman, which encourages companies to seek external perspectives to gain a realistic understanding of their products' significance to customers, rather than relying solely on internal views.

2. Customer-Centric Approach: Many organizations claim to be customer-centric, but true customer obsession involves deeply understanding customer needs and challenges and continuously aligning every aspect of the business to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

3. The Perils of Optimism: Teams often suffer from over-optimism, neglecting competitive realities and external benchmarks. This bias can lead to unrealistic expectations and ineffective decision-making, highlighting the need for diverse perspectives and devil’s advocates in discussions.

 4. Listening to Customers: While direct customer feedback is valuable, understanding their broader context and challenges is crucial. This helps in creating solutions that address their real needs, rather than simply acting on articulated desires.

5. Pre-Mortem Techniques: Conducting pre-mortem exercises helps teams anticipate potential failures before launching products or campaigns, enabling them to address possible issues proactively and increase the chances of success.

Don't miss out on more insightful discussions and expert perspectives. Check out other episodes of 'Now That’s Significant' on major podcast platforms to stay informed about the evolving landscape of market research and consumer insights.

***

Infotools Harmoni is a fit-for-purpose market research analysis, visualization, and reporting platform that gives the world’s leading brands the tools they need to better understand their consumers, customers, organization, and market.

www.infotools.com

Established in 1990, we work with some of the world’s top brands around the world, including Coca-Cola, Orange, Samsung, and Mondelēz.

Our powerful cloud-based platform, Harmoni, is purpose-built for market research. From data processing to investigation, dashboards to collaboration, Harmoni is a true "data-to-decision-making" solution for in-house corporate insights teams and agencies.

While we don't facilitate market research surveys, we make it easy for to find and share compelling insights that go over-and-above what stakeholders want, inspiring them to act decisively.

One of the most powerful features of Harmoni is Discover, a time-tested, time-saving, and investigative approach to data analysis. Using automated analyses to reveal patterns and trends, Discover minimizes potential research bias by removing the need for requesting and manually analyzing scores of cumbersome crosstabs – often seeing what you can’t.

Discover helps you easily find what differentiates groups that matter to you, uncover what makes them unique, and deliver data points that are interesting, relevant, and statistically significant, plus see things others can’t. Add to all this an impending GenAI feature, and you have an extremely powerful, future-proofed tool.