My HP colleague Chris Hawkes has some interesting insights on how hp works with customers to keep updated on their current and future product requirements - Vince

How does HP know what their customers want and why? Sometimes it’s a simple “launch and learn” where we try something and see how it goes over with our customers. However, mistakes in our business where our printers are designed 12-18 months before they are introduced to the market and the pipeline has thousands or tens of thousand of those printers boxed up and ready for customers can be very, very costly. They can also cost us a great deal of customer loyalty.

Fortunately HP has an enormous number of engineers, product manager and other groups who help to put the whole product together, diligently working to make sure that we’re designing our products to be as feature-rich and simply to use as possible. Our employees also know a great deal about our customers and are constantly looking for ways to improve the ‘product experience’.

There are a number of mechanisms that HP uses to stay connected to our customers:

• We have periodic studies that ask how happy our customers are with their products and whether they intend to purchase HP again.
• We get feedback from the technical support calls – to understand what functions or capabilities are less intuitive than they could be.
• We also conduct a good deal of market research to talk to customers, in different environments (home, small business and the enormous enterprise customers
• We also do this across the globe to understand how people on different continents and in different countries want their printers to work, what functions are critical and which ones could be taken out, so we can meet their expected price-point on certain types of printers.

Some of the issues that we have conducted market research on include:

• Understanding how price sensitive customers are.
• We can always add impressive capabilities to our products, but if they’re not expected or desired by our target customers, those functions should be taken out so we can give customers a better price on their next printer purchase
• We have also researched want advanced features such as ‘fax to e-mail’ (or Digital Send in HP terms) our customers want
• Are smaller companies interested in having these higher end capabilities which have yielded great efficiency improvement for the larger businesses? If so, are they willing to pay more money to see those capabilities built into their products?

HP conducts dozens of market research projects every year; it is our marketing priority to understand what you as a customer, would ideally want from the perfect printer or MFP. We consistently seek out and value customer’s opinions and do everything that we can to see that they are included in the next generation of our products. Of course conducting market research doesn’t mean that we also always hit the perfect mix of capabilities and price for all of our customers. That’s not an easy thing to do, but it is considered everyone’s job at HP to do as much as we can to match our product offerings to the customers’ demands and do that better than the competition. The team works very hard at that. We’re trying to make your life easier and it’s important that we can talk to you, our customers, to understand how best we can serve you – now and in the future.

Best Regards,

Chris Hawkes, Market Research Consultant

For more information on the types of market research that are available and how they work, you can go to www.MarketResearch101.com for more details on the processes.