Bloghound

One of the values of listening to customer conversations all the time — vs. doing research projects — is that you get answers to questions you didn’t even know to ask.

One example of this comes from Jim Nail of Cymfony, on this podcast with Paul Dunay of Buzz Marketing for Technology.

Jim explains that Sony was trying to figure out whether people were waiting to buy hi-definition TV’s because of the two competing standards — Sony’s Blu-ray and HDTV. During the course of listening, a surprising insight emerged. Customers weren’t so much concerned about which format was better. They just didn’t like Sony. They felt that Sony had failed several times in introducing new standards and, as a result, probably wouldn’t get it right this time.

Plus they felt that Sony is a greedy, arrogant company with proprietary formats they push onto consumers.

Wow. While Sony certainly probably didn’t want to hear this, better to know so they can act. If they were doing traditional research it’s highly unlikely that Sony would have asked this question.

Through listening bigger more important issues often arise.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.