Reflection: Week 12

Tuesday:

Tuesday morning my SMART project group met with Dr. Spotts in replace of a regular class period. During the meeting with Dr. Spotts, my group discussed insights we gathered from our customer discovery surveys. Some of the important insights we gathered include:

• Our target customer is someone who drives at least 3-5 times per week and for 20-40 minutes at a time

• Our target customer is someone who does not wear gloves when driving because they do not like to wear gloves.

• A cold steering wheel bothers our target customer, but they find it a mere nuisance rather than extremely bothersome.

• Our target customer is willing to pay between $25-$50.

Dr. Spotts also helped us define what type of product our steering wheel cover is. ThermoWheel is a convenience product. It enhances the driving experience. ThermoWheel is comparable to the heated seat feature in newer cars. People do not think they need heated seats. But, once people use heated seats they become a necessity. ThermoWheel, like heated seats, is a product that serves no functionality. Rather, ThermoWheel has an emotional aspect. It makes people comfortable while driving in the cold weather. Ultimately, distinguishing what type of product we are designing will help our group create a thorough poster for the engineering exposition.

ThermoWheel is considered an aftermarket part

After our meeting with Dr. Spotts, my group spent time in the library completing the remaining parts of our customer discovery memo. Using IBIs world, we learned that ThermoWheel is part of an industry known as the auto parts accessory manufacturing industry. Overall, this industry is highly competitive and earns low profit margins because of the number of substitutes available for different car accessories. The good news for ThermoWheel, however, is that there are no direct substitutes for the product unless the consumer wants to pay the car manufacturer to install a heated steering wheel—which we think most people are not willing to pay for.

Wednesday:

This was an important topic discussed in the videos posted on Kodiak!

Wednesday I carved some time out of my day to watch the market sizing vides Dr. Spotts posted on Kodiak. Some of the concepts introduced have been briefly mentioned during class or in the textbook throughout the semester. Here are some of the concepts I found the most interesting:

Top-Down Methodology: This is a way to determine your market size that starts with using secondary research. When analyzing secondary research, you are not looking for data that exactly answers your research question. Chances are, your exact research question has yet to be studied. After gathering assumptions and statistics from secondary data, you can begin to look at other credible research such as industry reports and government websites. After that, you can determine a rough estimate of your market size. This is the method we are using to determine the market size for our SMART products and our Shark Plan products.

• You should always check the statistics you find in secondary research with someone else

•  A shortcoming of this method is that it tends to lean towards high estimates of your market size.

Bottom-Up Methodology: This is a way to determine your market size using primary research. There are three primary steps to this method.

1.    Roll-up market participant sales—this may be hard to do as it can be difficult to find product sales data and there is usually a lot of it

2.    Conduct a weighted analysis of industry leaders

3.    Develop a customer survey

Overall, this method will lead to a more accurate estimate of your market size. This method, however, can be very costly as it requires primary research to be conducted.

Thursday:

Thursday was our first joint class with the engineering students in nearly two months. While we have been away from each other, the engineers have been working hard on ordering the parts to build our ThermoWheel and learning how to actually put it together. Meanwhile, the business students have been concentrated on the customer discovery process. The business students were tasked with becoming experts on our customers, which is something we feel we have achieved!

In class, the business students were able to explain the customer discovery memo to the engineers and discuss the insights our secondary and primary research provided us with. After discussion the insights, we created an empathy map that detailed our target customers’ thoughts and feelings. During class, we also completed a customer journey diagram. The customer journey diagram walks through each step of the pain-point that our customer faces without using ThermoWheel. It is our job, when pitching the product at the end of the semester, to state how our product enhances the customer journey.

There is still a lot of group work to be done!

Another important topic we discussed during Thursday’s class is the value proposition. The value proposition is a statement that explains how your product solves customer pain-points or improves their situation. In the value proposition statement, it is important to explain the specific benefits your product offers. Ultimately, your value proposition should convince your target market to buy your product instead of your competitors. Here is an idea our SMART project group generated for a value proposition:

            "Conquer the Cold! Every ThermoWheel is guaranteed to enhance your driving      experience in under 3 minutes! ThermoWheels are manufactured with a high resistance nichrome wire, ensuring heat is evenly distributed throughout your wheel. ThermoWheel comes with a non-slip grip cover to help you stay on top of your driving game while providing the utmost comfort"