Today, I headed up to Stirling Management Centre to attend the “Be Inspired to Innovate” event held by EDTC. Briefly, it was a series of 6 workshops, all by entrepreneurs about how they took their product from idea, to prototype, and then to market.
One of the really interesting points was made by Kelly Forsyth-Gibson, inventor of ThudGuard (a safety hat for toddlers learning to walk – its looks like a scrum cap for kids).
She said that when she was doing market research for her product, she stood outside Toys ‘R Us to conduct questionnaires. She found that she parents were a lot more responsive and honest if she pretended to work for the company (ThudGuard), instead of mentioning that she was the product inventor.
In other words, she would approach people by saying:
“Hi, I’ve been commissioned by [this company] to do market research for this product. Can you answer a few questions?”
While this approach was more productive, she did joke that it gave her a bit of a complex because she had to pretend to work for the company rather than running it!
I thought this was a really interesting point and could be a very useful tactic in order to get good, honest customer feedback, especially if the customer don’t associate you personally with the product.
Next time you talk to customers, maybe it would be wise to take off your “entrepreneur” hat and put on your “employee” hat?
StartupCafe 
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