Humankind Customer Insight Project

CIP Report Research Journal

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By: Martyn Henderson

Table Of Contents

CIP Report Research Journal        3

Appendix A        8

Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes        8

Finding the Right Job For Your Product        9

An Anthropologist Walks into a Bar        9

Stories that Deliver Business Insights        10

Ethnography and Observational Methods        11

Why Observational Research?        11

Questions and Their Uses        12

Developing a Questioning Route        13

Moderating Skills        13

Preparing for a Live Interview        14

What Sticks?        15

Appendix B        15

T1: SWOT Reflection        15

I1: Observational Reflection        17

T2: Focus Group Discussion Reflection        18

I2: In-depth Interviews Reflection        19

T3: Client Briefing Memo Reflection        19

I3: Qualitative Research Themes Reflection        20

T4: In-depth Interview Guides Reflection        21

I4: Presentation Reflection        21

T5: CIP Report Reflection        22

I5: Journal Reflection        23

CIP Report Research Journal

HumanKind’s mission is to “sell handmade product by artisans in developing countries and share their story” Lyn Anne, the stores manager, passionately explained to us during our introduction to their business. HumanKind is a non-profit fair trade gift shop in the heart of San Luis Obispo’s downtown. Relatively successful, yet unfulfilled, HumanKind eagerly reached out to our class, representatives of the Cal Poly student community,  to try to answer one critical question: How can HumanKind motivate the average Cal Poly student to shop at their store? HumanKind currently struggles with acquiring the target market of college students in SLO that represent 45% of the city’s population. Our objective was to do inductive research and analysis on HumanKind’s existing business model in order to thoroughly understand how they can adapt to the untapped potential of a younger generation. HumanKind is well aware that if they can effectively market their fair trade values to college students at Cal Poly, their vision of promoting and expanding ethical production and fair trade policies to the greater San Luis Obispo population and outward will be very promising. Customer development is imperative for any organization’s business. In order to offer well validated recommendations to HumanKind, first we needed to gain insight on the landscape that this customer development can build its foundation on. This customer insight report explains the methodology that we used to gather the the qualitative data needed to propose an elaborate go-to-market strategy.

The first step in customer development is to build a toolkit around effective marketing tactics. Listening to the customer is all about understanding the psychological principles that help up extract pertinent information. We research a variety of marketing articles such as “Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes”, “Ethnology and observational methods”, and “What Sticks” to highlight a few. This preliminary research was all about “sensemaking” and analyzing customer development tactics that could help improve the quality of our research (Madsbjerg). The psychological insight from these articles helped us structure our research methods and allowed us to pointed true north as we proceeded into the next stage of customer development, observations.