Your data is irrelevant. Time to use the Force.

Market research rots faster than bananas. This is especially true in a year marked by a global pandemic, recessions, market uncertainty, and worldwide instability. We can practically see the fruit flies...

It’s no secret that 2020 has brought massive shifts in customer buying and brand engagement behaviour. Everything is new now. Demographics, locations, buying patterns, acquisition funnels, online adoption, foot traffic, city footfall...

Everything we thought we knew about customers has changed. 

We need to change with it.

That is how we will rebuild our businesses and economies. 

Customers have no idea what they actually want.

Gathering reliable, relevant customer data sits at the heart of pretotyping. We’re not talking about surveys, polls or focus groups: they’re useless. All they do is gather opinion, and that’s the last thing you need. Customers have no idea what they actually want. So how do you work out what they care about? 

You ask Yoda.

Source

YODA is pretotyping slang (yes, pretotypers have slang. We’re just that cool 😎) for Your Own Data. Why is this important? Because Other People’s Data (OPD) is just as useless as opinion. It tells you nothing about your customers in this context, at this point in time. 

Beware other people’s data.

OPD doesn’t just stand for Other People’s Data. It can mean Other Period’s Data, Other Place’s Data, Other Product’s Data, Other Position’s Data...anything that isn’t data that has come from the very specific context you are trying to measure is OPD, and you need to forget it.

There are so many variables that affect data. You want to control them so that you are gathering the best market data you can. Otherwise, you run the risk of making important decisions using irrelevant data - which is almost as bad as using opinion.

Measure what your customers want

Luckily, you can work out how to generate YODA by answering one simple question: What experiment (or pretotype) can you run as quickly as possible, for as little money as possible, in order to figure out what your customers do with your product or service idea  in your specific context?

Maybe you set up a landing page that describes a new product or service you’re thinking of launching and asks people to register their interest with an email address (i.e. data). Maybe, like Tesla’s famous Model 3 pretotype, you ask people for a deposit. Or maybe - like us - you run Google ads promoting a product that doesn’t exist yet, to see if people click through.

There are dozens of ways to get YODA (sadly, though, none of them involve a lightsaber). The key is to design simple, low-cost, fast, easy-to-execute experiments that ask people to put some skin in the game (an email address, a deposit, some time spent watching a video ad…).

But what if it fails?

Skin in the game helps you gather reliable data, which you can then use to iterate your experiments. If the experiment fails? Congratulations - that’s still YODA, and it’s still valuable You can iterate your pretotype and try again, or if it keeps failing - kill the idea. No harm done.

How much is enough?

If your first (or second or third) pretotype validates your idea, step things up a notch. Ask people to put more skin in the game and see what the uptake is like, until you have enough data to validate your ideas. And how do you know how much YODA is enough to make a decision? There’s some quick and easy maths for that.

You can never step into the same market twice

Some events can change markets dramatically and overnight - like Apple introducing the first iPhone. Others change more gradually and over a longer period of time. But all markets for all products change all the time.

You cannot know with confidence if your target market has undergone a change without doing some experiments with it. Luckily, pretotyping is quick, low-cost, and simple, and allows you to get reliable data quickly, so you never need to rely on OPD again. 

Yoda would be so proud.

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Our online course teaches you how find YODA, run your own experiments. Perfect for product managers, developers, engineers, entrepreneurs, or anyone in innovation.

Change your innovation game and sign up for a free preview our course now. See you there.