I love the concept of persona and ethnographic research !

My background before MBA was e-commerce marketer in a subsidiary company of LG, called LG Home Shopping. As I was involved in launching a new e-commerce business for expanding our company’s the current business area, I worked with a lot of designers. My company was such a big customer oriented company that we had more than 6 million customers in our data base and more than 500,000 daily unique visitors to our website. Therefore, constructing webpage that satisfy our target customer, women who are in their 30s, was one of the most important tasks. At that time, it was difficult for us to build such a customer oriented web page, but what if we built a persona for our target customer?

During this course, the concept of persona was very interesting and useful for me as a person who worked at e-commerce industry. I already have heard of this concept before, but did not dare to think of actually applying it to a real world work because it sounded little bit vague and unrealistic to me. However, as our team developed our persona Chris, I felt that a certain techie in my mind was structuring to a real techie customer. We chose to create a persona called “techie” because this demographic is very open to innovation. However, it was difficult to build a persona, who represents all the types of people who fit into the framework. I think this is common situation in a real world, so we defined the nerdiness of our techie with techie bell curve to better understand what our target is and validated it in the survey and the interview later. It was certainly a creative step beyond traditional segmentation, which mainly focused on demographic facts. What I like most about the persona task was that it also reflected the sophisticated details for our target customers, which can be a crucial factor in the e-commerce.


Another thing I felt useful was ethnographic research method. I am familiar with traditional research method which our team also conducted. We did e-mail survey and face to face interview to get to know our persona’s desire and needs. However, when we conducted photo journal research, the unexpected results started to be discovered. In the survey, they seemed to be price sensitive, but in the photo journal, many techies pick cheap Wal-Mart or Chinese made products as one which they want to remove from their room. We also found out that techie’s main frustration comes from the clutters which take up their spaces in the room. One techie hated messy travel bags in a dressing room and another techie liked space saver shelf in his bathroom because it maximized the corner space. We discovered several useful insights from this photo journal research even though I did not expect that this method would be practical. Photo journal pulled techie’s unknown needs from their mind as they cannot answer those unconscious desires in the regular survey or interview.




Every step of the project was useful and helpful, but building a prototype was quite stressful and frustrating. As our prototype is man shelf that need complicate functions, it was hard to materialize the non-existing product. Furthermore, none of our team members were talented at artistic tasks, so creating a prototype was the most challenging task for us in a limited time and budget. However, I do think the process of creating prototype will be useful in a real world with enough time line, enough budget, and support from professional designer or sculpture.


Lastly, this project required a lot of feedbacks between team members. We sometimes experienced conflict each other because everyone has each one’s strong opinion and personal preference. When we could not reach to our conclusion which idea to develop to our prototype, it was good to listen to the outside opinion from the professor Stephen. Even techie’s response was quite biased, but we were sure that the professor’s response was subjective and trustful. Finally, with the professor’s mediation, we discussed again and were able to reach our conclusion. Working with team did help me to develop my theoretical learning from the class.

The power of the word-of-mouth marketing by social media: why 82% of Korean household has more than two refrigerators?

The article defines groundswell as “a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations." There are lots of such technologies as blog, social networks, virtual Worlds, wikis, forums, ratings, reviews, and tag. Traditionally, companies controlled the production and distribution of information while customers depended on the given information by companies. However, customers started to gather information and spread their opinion by using blog or social network service from several years ago.



It was interesting to know that Korea, my home country, has the most creators (38%) and the most joiners (41%), which is double as US joiners, according to this article. Korea also has slightly higher internet penetration rate and much higher income equality rate than USA according to UN. It means that Korean people are really easy to be influenced by each other because most of the people have the similar purchase power in terms of income and the country size is so small (1% of US area) that people are sensitive to what other people purchase and think. Therefore, social media has taken an important role in marketing as a very efficient tool for a long time. I do not know very well about US social media because I’ve been living in the US only for several months, so I want to share my knowledge and experience about the success case of using social media marketing in Korea.



82% of Korean household has more than two refrigerators: one standard refrigerator and another refrigerator for Kimchi, which is a very popular side dish that Koreans eat everyday like Western people eat cheese. However, even in 1999, Kimchi refrigerator penetration rate was only 10%! People thought that they did not need another refrigerator only for Kimchi because they can save Kimchi in a normal refrigerator. Then, how did the company, WiniaMando, achieve 80% penetration rate in ten years? If there is a refrigerator that ferments cheese to improve the taste and that preserves cheese at an optimum temperature so that you can store it over a year, would you buy the cheese refrigerator? People would be reluctant to pay for another $1,000 to buy cheese refrigerator even though they eat cheese every day. But what if you heard from a lot of people (not from advertisement) that a cheese refrigerator gave them a perfect taste and that the taste became more fantastic as time went by because of fermentation with optimum temperature?



WiniaMando created customer experience and used social media to spread the word of mouth. At first, the company selected 3,000 customers who had many visitors to their blogs and live in a rich area. Then, the company gave its $1,000 refrigerator for free to the selected people and let them write about the reviews in their blog and forums. The customers uploaded detailed photos of the refrigerator with experience about fantastic taste of Kimchi! Moreover, it was also known that every 3,000 people chose to pay for the refrigerator to keep it in their house after the given marketing period, among the choice between giving the free refrigerator back to the company and purchasing it for a discounted price without returning.



These kinds of messages from customers to customers can give more trust to people than the advertisement from corporation do. The company also created a club website separately from the company website and provided information on cooking, interior, and baby education, targeting housewives. WiniaMando hired several housewives who is very good cook and talented at interior and let them share their own way of cooking Kimchi or educating kids in the club website. Many housewives tagged this useful information to the cyworld (Korean SNS like facebook in US) and this led more visitors to the website. I believe that Kimchi refrigerator would not be able to achieve 82% penetration rate without social media marketing, which created customer experience successfully and spread the word inside the country.



*****Example of one customer review in her blog

Wal-Mart knows about customers' habit: advantages and concerns

Wal-Mart article reminds me several classes such as “Analysis of Market” and “Data Mining”, the classes which I have taken in MBA program. In the class, “Analysis of Market”, I learned several quantitative techniques to analyze the market. For example, we found out that young men, who purchase diaper, tend to purchase beer, too. This result is from data mining, which can discover a hidden pattern inside tons of data in the market.


It was really interesting that Wal-Mart increased its revenue by analyzing the past customers’ purchase data that several products such as strawberry pop-tarts and beer sell very well right before hurricane. Indeed, Wal-Mart are utilizing its 460 terabytes of data now. I do think that Wal-Mart has been successful at converting into an experience that serves as a competitive advantage for them.


I think one of the competitive advantages for Wal-Mart is the company’s culture of sharing all of information between employees based on its information system. Its employees can access to the data house to check which product sells most, how many inventories they have, and so on. These well organized and shared data technology enable Wal-Mart to control 3,600 stores in the US efficiently as if they simply control a single store. Without its information system, I think that its motto, ‘Everyday Low Price” cannot be possible becausae Wal-Mart has been eliminated unnecessary costs by utilizing its data technology.


Wal-Mart also shares its information on data with its suppliers. Suppliers will be able to check buyers’ demographic data, inventory level, financial data, and so on. They will prevent sold-out or stocking useless inventory. This system will help suppliers control their inventories efficiently and predict their sales tendency. I think this is a win-win game for both Wal-Mart and suppliers because Wal-Mart can provide good quality service for satisfying its customers’ need with customized products while suppliers can provide right products and proper number of products on time.


However, the privacy issues associated with all of that data and the amount of personally identifiable data they are able to capture do bother me. I experienced a related incident when I used E-bay Korea, which has more than 20 million customers. E-bay Korea was known to be very secure website, so nobody was worried about the private issue. However, there was a hacking from China and leak of private information of more than 10 million customers. Because my name, security number, and cell phone numbers were part of my information, I changed my credit card and password. I remember that many people sued against E-bay Korea, blaming this incident.


I believe many people do not know that Wal-Mart is capturing information about who they are and what they bought. It sounds like people are watched secretly by Wal-Mart. I definitely do not want Wal-Mart to have my information on my driving records or my creditworthiness. They have no rights to use my personal information if I did not agree with that. Wal-Mart said, “We take reasonable steps to protect your personal information.”. Even though the argument of Wal-Mart is true, there are lots of possibilities to expose customers’ private information. The current security technology is not perfect, so our information is on the risk of being hacked and forged. Since Wal-Mart is such a huge corporation, its impact on utilizing customers’ information is strong. A lot of companies and even government institution are seeking for RFID technology now, and we do not know if our private information can be free from surveillance anymore.

The Kindle Customer Experience: Why Kindle, not other e-book reader?

As the e-book market has been expected to grow fast, many high-tech firms considered entering this market. Actually, some firms such as Sony did, but customers did not change their way of reading books easily. It was only for the little group of early adaptors, not mass consumers.




According to Time magazine website (http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1929387,00.html?iid=tsmodule), E-readers have been around for more than a decade, but the devices weren't popular due to high cost, proprietary display formats and the reluctance of book publishers to sell digital versions of their best-selling titles. However, Amazon has achieved great success in this market by selling more than 1.7 million units of the handheld device in the U.S.

Why Kindle attract so many people? What do customers see and experience through Kindle? Why Kindle?

I was not interested in e-book reader at all even though I am quite greedy about high-tech products. I liked the way of reading real paper books and of studying text book with my pencil. I saw Kindle for the first time, when I visited Amazon website several month ago. Amazon was advertising its best-seller Kindle, using its middle upper space, which is the most important area in the main webpage. The beautiful and simple design of Kindle attracted my eye and it reminded me of my favorite brand Apple. It had Apple style’s touchable design! The price $260 seems to be reasonable, too. So, I started to look for the information about Kindle in Youtube and blogs, and became more attracted to Kindle. I might buy it in the near future.

Kindle’s marketing well focused on maximizing its strength on economical aspects of no monthly wireless bills, wide international coverage, and easiness to access the contents. According to their advertising motto, we can “Get Books in as Little as 60 Seconds”. How amazing it is that I can get book this easily and that I don’t need to carry all of my heavy novels. Moreover, Amazon can provide 240,000 unit of contents because it is the largest online book retailer.

I also surprised to read the article that Kindle’s main purchaser group is people who are in their 40’s. The old generations chose Kindle over traditional paper book? It is interesting because I thought that young generations who are in their 20’s would choose Kindle to experience new products even though they don’t like reading books. I became really curious about what people’s motivation to purchase Kindle is and who really are interested in this innovative product. Finally, I will also work in my report assignment about how Kindle is differentiated with other e-book readers and how Kindle business can be sustainable in terms of customer’s insight.

Blog 2 - Trust Market Research or Not

How much can we trust market research? Sometimes, we cannot trust customers because they don’t know what they want. Therefore, with the right method, pulling out customers’ unconsciousness and interpreting properly will be a key factor toward the good quality research.

People want to catch how others react from various products and cultures around them. However, human being’s instinct is too vague and unconscious. For example, in the blind test with two glasses of coke, most of people preferred Pepsi. Therefore, Coka Cola launched New Coke, which has similar taste with Pepsi, but the result was a failure. How complicated it is to realize people’s real thought and opinion!

We can recognize some problems of market research through this coke blind test. If they only drank one slip for the blind test, the result of this blind test can be different with when they sit down in a couch and drink a can of coke at home. Moreover, market research might be distorted because it is hard for people to tell difference between bad feelings and just being different. I think people will have prejudice when assessing products especially if the product belongs to the category where a certain strong brand accounts for huge market share. People will think that it is wrong or bad if the product tastes or feels different from the existing strong brand, which is a category killer.

The article, “Turn Customer into Innovation.”, was very interesting because I thought I need to satisfy the target customers’ needs as exactly as possible when I was working in a marketing position. However, in this article, it turned out that customers do not buy a specific product even after the company added the function that customer wanted. How frustrating it is as a marketer! The problem with listening to customers lied in the fact that customers’ knowledge is limited. Listening to the lead-users is still risky because the group is not representative. Therefore, outcome based steps are crucial to have implication from the market research.

I guess outcome based steps give right guide to consumers toward the insightful answers for companies. With this method, we can maximize the benefit of the market research because we are able to lead customers to the right direction and goal. We are sometimes possible to predict innovation points as we can pull out the innovation factor from customer’s deep understanding. In conclusion, this article reminds me how important the process of market research is because we cannot get insightful answers merely by asking problems and solutions to customers.

Finally, ZMET was shocking to me because I have mostly depended on verbal communication with customers when doing research. Except 5% of the area that can be expressed with voice, we need to discover customer’s thoughts through images and photos. For example, I heard that Dupont concluded that women do not like to wear panty stocking from a paper based survey. However, from ZMET test, it turned out that women actually think that panty stocking is uncomfortable yet looks sexy as women chose sexy photos such as luxurious car, silk dress, and thin leg.

I think that ZMET is very useful for discover the hidden desire or psychology of customers. There are significant amount of things that customers cannot dare to reveal in a survey. I also have an experience that I had to lie in a survey because I did not want to talk too private facts to other people. Though ZMET method requires deep interview and careful interpretation, I believe it is worth the costs because we need to focus on quality research rather than quantity as customer’s need become more and more complicated in the modern society.

Blog 1 - Create My Persona

Personality

The most important thing for Sijung and TJ is their marriage life. They met each other in an undergraduate class six years ago, and eventually got married three years ago. They still think that marrying each other was the best decision of their life. They discuss anything together and never keep any secrets from each other. They don't want to have kids yet because they wish to enjoy their life before having kids. Money, Career, and everything else are just a tool for them to live together happily.

She
When Sijung followed TJ to live in the US about a year ago, she thought that being a housewife is boring. That's why she started her MBA even though she was afraid of studying in a foreign country.
Sijung's is very concerned about leading a healthy life. She pays attention to balancing her meals with carbohydrate, protein, vitamin, and so on. She spends more money in buying organic foods to cook and eating at high-end restaurants (rather than buying luxurious shoes and bags).

He

Taejin is such a gentleman that he has never yelled at his wife. This couple rarely winds up in a quarrel because Taejin is very good at putting himself in his wife's shoes. He doesn't have a specific preference. He can eat anything and doesn't care about details. He usually does what Sijung wants to do. Consequently, Taejin entrusts his purchasing decision to Sijung.



Life Style

* Sijung and Taejin love animals. While Taejin loves dogs, Sijung is more of a cat lover. She used to have two cats before she came to the US.
* Both of them like to travel to warm countries because they love swimming in the warm sea and enjoy spa. They traveled 17 countries in total.
* Currently, they are living in a one-bed apartment. During weekdays, they spend most of their time in school. Because they own only one car, they usually drive to school together and come back around 6PM.
* Taejin's hobby is playing video games. He has a number of game consoles such as Nintendo Wii, X-box, and PS3. During weekends, he sits in front of the TV and plays games while Sijung reads comic books, sitting next to him.

* Taejin and Sijung are a big fan of Apple. They own most of Apple's hit products such as iPod, iMac, MacBook, and iPhone. They think a product with good design is worth the money.