On the Outside Looking In

For the past couple of weeks we have been working on the final presentation of our new business idea, the EZ menu. Before presenting this idea to the panel at Gryphons Den (our play on Dragons Den) we have been working everyday on different applications in order to further understand who we are targeting, what problems we will be fixing and much more. When our group first scanned the business model environment that we would be working on, we had so many ideas flying through our heads that were all GREAT! The problem with this was attempting to keep these ideas on track and related to each new piece of the project that needed to be completed. As a result, our biggest surprise was during our attempt to complete our empathy map for our main marketing segments (family’s with children and restaurant owners.) When initially looking into these groups for this portion of the project, we took on the mindset of how our product will benefit them. Since this has been the idea of most of our previous assignments, we were able to fly through the empathy map. Right when we were about to finish up the last quadrant, our professor informed us we were looking at this particular assignment in the completely wrong way.

When thinking of restaurants and the business, I’m sure we all have the idea that “the customer is always right” in mind, meaning we focus on the needs and wants of consumers. However, for this particular map, rather than focusing on this idea we were meant to focus on these consumers in their everyday life, rather than at a restaurant or using our product.  Although we have done these types of assignments in past marketing projects, we have never taken it to the extent of “what our customer hears, says, does, and thinks? Etc.” As a result, after considering all the differences between our customers the one aspect of the empathy map that I found to be the most interesting was under “what does your customer say and do?” Although we can easily describe some feelings of our consumers from experience, I found it the most difficult to actually know what our customers say and do. As a university student, the time we spend with families with young children or business owners is very minimal (if any) therefore making it difficult to think of the actions our customers may take.  With this being said, this external factor is one that had the most impact on me and helped me brainstorm more ways in which we can help our consumers through use of our product.