Views from the Hills by R. E. Stevens, GENESIS II (The Second Beginning) E-Mail views@aol.com

Be a Robot for a Day

The quality of results depends on how you do a job, the products you use, as well as the specific brand. For example, you may use Tide to wash your clothes, but the quality of the end result will depend on many more features than your Tide. It will depend on the types of soil, types of fabrics, water hardness, water temperature, washing machine, how the clothes are sorted, order of addition of clothes/water/detergent, pretreatment, product concentration, wash cycle, additives, etc.

Each of the above task variables plays a major role in the end result. Each consumer will have her/his own special way of doing laundry. Each consumer will have his/her own level of expectations. It is our job to know and understand how each task variable affects the end result and the number of users utilizing each configuration of the variables.

Task variation is not restricted to laundry. It is related to every product from toothpaste to computers, to dishwashers and dishwashing products, to cleaning of tubs and showers, to driving an automobile. If we want to truly know consumers we must know their "habits and practices" regardless of the product category. How can we improve our brands or create new ones if we do not know how the tasks are performed?

I have a suggestion for you if you are involved in consumer understanding, exploring new opportunities, looking for a brand improvement or even designing a "habits and practices" study. That suggestion is be a "Robot for a Day." I believe everyone uses their brands and competitive brands around their own homes, but as researchers we need to know and understand how other people use the brands. The "Robot for a Day" goes as follows. [For simplicity I will limit the protocol to household tasks and assume for the sake of discussion that the female head of the household is the person in the household generally doing the task.]

It's all about consumer and task understanding.


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