Photo (CC) by Boegh, on Flickr

Innovation for the sake of innovation might not be the answer to building your business.

And yet today as we scan the business world, it would seem that the opposite is true – innovate or disappear.

So what’s the truth?

The truth about successful innovation is “it depends.” And it depends on your current customer and the potential consumer base.

Your business strategy needs to build on what the consumer desires. The consumer in question though is not only today’s but the person who has not yet shopped at your store as well as the consumer of tomorrow.  It must balance existing customers with consumers at large.

Successful innovation also includes lead time and a crystal ball.

Innovation doesn’t just happen. Even if you have a great idea, it will take several tries to get it right. So you need time to plan, develop and successfully integrate new ideas into your strategy.

And because time is moving forward, you also need your crystal ball to help select an innovation strategy that matches the forward path your consumer base will probably take.

A recent example of an attempted innovation that didn’t keep the customer in mind was the J. C. Penny focus on changing its business model from one of regular sales to one of fewer sales, lower regular prices, and a different product mix.

The idea failed as the new idea was not what existing customers desired nor did was it attractive to people who were not regular shoppers at the stores. It may have been a workable idea but perhaps the marketing effort didn’t connect. Reuters wrote about the experience, “Innovation is great for any business, but when that innovation upsets your customers, it’s time to put customer experience first.”

Bottom line, innovation is required for a business to remain sustainable. But the innovation must enhance your customer’s experience with your business. Fail to do that and you will fail.

Photo (CC) Dan Lacher, on Flickr

Market research focuses on understanding your customers.

There are a variety of tools to help you do that. Yet one of the most overlooked tools that offers a great deal and costs very little, except for time, is conversation.

Conversation is great in terms of getting to know your customers as individuals. What are their motivators, desires and drivers? What do they like and what do they avoid? What are their beliefs and what are their goals?

You can use this basic core information to build on your other market research results. It helps you do specific targeting of individuals and groups, something that technology has difficulty capturing.

Understanding customers at that level takes something more than what a survey often can gather. Even if you want to use a survey for gathering some of this information, you often run into two obstacles:

• Developing the right questions
• Getting customers to divulge such information because it is often private and hard to put into words

It goes back to understanding customer behavior. Often behavior is driven emotions or desires such as ‘a feeling of comfort’ or a smell that reminds them of home or something that just makes it ‘easy,’ ‘fun’ or ‘exciting.’ Those things are hard to quantify or capture in a survey. Conversations are a great way to get to this level of understanding.

Yet gathering this information is not done easily. It takes time. To do it well, be prepared to:

• After the conversation, take notes of what you heard. Don’t depend on your memory.
• Remember that this information depends on its depth and richness, which comes from building that data through time. It is a lifetime of conversations and building trust and relationships.
• Analyze what you get. Conversations don’t help if you don’t critically look at what the information is telling you.
• Maintain confidentiality. Conversations may lead to information that people do not want divulged. Tell people how you will use the data and that you will not disclose specifics but only use the information in a generic sense to help you better market your products.

Having conversations is a great way to learn about your customer. It gets deeper, giving you greater insight as to what the customer wants. And it has a great secondary benefit of building a relationship, something that will continue to pay off.

So get started today. Have a conversation