Pay Attention To Your “Extreme Consumers” [Archive.org URL]

What do Porsche fanatics, a video game hater, and a person who cooked two weeks’ worth of meals in a rice cooker have in common? They are all “extreme consumers”—those whose tastes are so out there that mainstream market researchers tend to dismiss them as “noise” when trying to figure out how typical consumers think.

That’s fine if you only want to keep making incremental improvements to your products.

“Traditional market research is all about studying the average consumer, which gets rid of the noise in an effort to study the majority of customers, but also gets rid of people who are potentially leading the category,” says Jill Avery. By understanding those consumers who lie “in the tails” of the bell curve product designers can discover truly innovative breakthroughs.

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