Dish One: Introduction

 

Dear Kind Readers,

Hi there!  My name is Madalene and I'm a junior studying Marketing at William & Mary.  

I was first introduced to design thinking and customer insights in a course I took last semester, Intro to Innovation and Entrepreneurship.  This was one of the most interesting projects I was assigned:

My team and I frantically held a quick brainstorming session, then decided that we would make bookmarks to sell---we knew those were items we could easily make in just one day, plus we already owned all the supplies so the cost of production would be small.  Whichever team generated the largest profit would win some extra credit, so low cost was very important to us!

You wouldn't find my bookmarks at Barnes & Noble, but I felt like they were cute enough to sell for a dollar each, especially since we were giving most of the profits to charity.

Some of the bookmarks I made for the project

However, despite reaching out in multiple campus group chats with 50+ people, there was only one person who was interested in my products: my mom.  What in the world, I thought to myself.  People won't even buy them as a donation to charity?

The thing is, I had forgotten the most important part of innovation and design thinking...your focus should be on trying to solve a customer problem.  My team didn't have any problem in mind; we simply made stuff that we thought people would buy just because we asked them to.  I almost made the same mistake on my second day of Customer Insights for Innovation (the class I'm taking now)...my team had to come up with a retail innovation and we immediately started brainstorming a solution instead of a problem.

The team that ended up generating the most profit for the assignment had created a small business where they crocheted miniature plushie keychains.  At the time, I was dumbfounded.  Why would anyone spend ten to fifteen dollars on a keychain they don't need?  Especially since many of us are living on campus without a car!

But as I sit in Professor Manuli's Customer Insights class, months later, the answer now seems obvious.  This project was assigned during final's season, so customers weren't actually buying keychains---they were buying stress relief.  The crochet animals provided both a "cute factor" and a satisfying squishiness that took students' minds off their pressing exams.  The seemingly useless knick knacks were solving a problem!  Our bookmarks, on the other hand, weren't doing a thing.  Most readings and exam prep are done online now, so no one had any use for them.

If my team and I had thought in terms of empathy (something Tim Brown considers an element of the design thinker's personality profile!), we could've brainstormed our own product or service that students could use during that stressful time.  But nope, we thought in terms of what's the cheapest thing we can make in the shortest period of time.

This semester, I'm going to put customers and their problems first, not my own convenience.  I’m still going to make some mistakes throughout my assignments, but I’ll have Madalene’s Insight Inn to vent and reflect on them instead of simply getting frustrated and moving on... I guess this little hub is meant to be a place of rest for me more than anyone else, but I do hope you'll find this site to be a nice break from a busy day!

Thank you for choosing to join me on this insightful adventure.