Voice of the Emergent Customer
Are some customers better than others at developing new concepts? Professor Donna L. Hoffman at the University of California Riverside thinks so. Emergent customers have a unique ability to “wrap their head” around a new concept and improve it. She created a scale to identify them so companies hear the voice of the “right” customer during new product development.
Emergent customers are better at imagining how concepts address latent unmet needs. Dr. Hoffman describes it as a “unique constellation of personality traits and processing abilities that enables such consumers to engage in a synergistic process of visualization and rationalization to improve product concepts.” Those characteristics are:
- Openness to new experiences
- Reflection
- Experiential and rational processing style
- Verbal (rational style) and Visual (experiential style)
- Creativity (self perceived)
- Creative personality
- Optimism
The study included 1124 respondents and compared performance of those identified as emergent customers against those of lead users, early adopters, and a control group. The emergent customers significantly outperformed the other groups.