You wrote: 

"But how can you harness something so fuzzy as intuition?  Is there
a tool available for this?  Sorry, but the only good tool is an active
imagination."

In the context of understanding customers, there is another method:
Ethnography - using trained social scientists and cultural anthropologists. In a seminar that you had last year in Chicago on Strategic Partnering, one of your guest speakers reviewed this in some detail.  Companies such as GVO and E-Labs use this as a significant differentiation point.  Now that I have experienced this in several projects I can offer a limited description.

First, when you have enough qualitative data collected according to accepted standards, it approaches quantitative.  Second, the interpretive models that ethnographers use take "intuition" and "organize" it into models that while interpretive, still provide for substantial objectivity.  Fortunately, for my company, our competitors do not understand this kind of approach and over the next year especially will be dumbfounded at how we uncovered "the obvious." 

A great resource on this topic is in the 12/98 Harvard Business Review,
"Empathic Research."  Also, Sue Squires at GVO is usually willing to explain the methods to people.  Finally, the New York Times had an excellent feature article on the topic about a month ago (Sue can probably fax you a copy).

Hope you find this as useful for "grist for the mill." 

George Walls
Director Product Innovation
Laerdal Medical Corporation

TCP: George, thanks for reminding me about the work of our friends over at GVO on the use of "ethnography" to uncover unspoken customer needs.  I attended a different session with GVO principals Michael Barry and Gary Waymire back in April at our PPLC event, where they shared a video showing a customer interacting with a new toilet bowl cleaning device, and we learned a lot about the different ways one could interpret the benefit called "freshness" and how engineers had a rather poor understanding of "ease of use" in the product design (the customer fumbling with the installation was quite telling). 

I encountered ethnography techniques under another name once, "cohort marketing."  I find it fascinating when people apply socio-cultural analysis to consumer behavior and product attributes.  One place this is apparent is the way automotive companies name their cars, choosing monikers because they denote such things as masculine power (Mustang, Sunbird, etc) or rugged adventurism (Explorer, Pathfinder).  However, I'll never understand why Ford chose a name like "Aspire".

Sounds as if Laerdal is trying to gain a competitive edge with this technique.  I hope your competitors don't read this and catch on.
-- Gregg

Speaking of GVO, someone's ears must have been burning...

Dear Critical Path:

We really enjoy your newsletter. You're tackling some tough subjects like
the role of intuition and how we "educate" our intuition (sometimes by
unlearning a bunch of things).

Getting distracted by a "loud" customer is an age-old problem with focus groups, too. However, the New Coke fiasco was due to a number of factors. We believe one of the major reasons was the forgetting of the meaning of the Coke brand. Coke was getting sensitive to the charges of being sellers of "brown, sugared water." They began to think like their idiot critics who believed the cola market is about the taste of the product.

Coke did extensive blind tasting tests of the New Coke and it won every time. The operative word is "blind." It meant that the consumers being tested had no idea of the brand they were choosing (to be seen ordering and drinking). The Coke brand is about nostalgia and history and consistency (kind of like baseball in America) not mere taste. To use the word "New" with "Coca Cola" was the non-starter. True, this means that "Classic Coke" is a redundancy, but hey, they had to distinguish it from the "New" stuff.

Robert Hall
Principal
GVO, Inc.

TCP: Bob - I appreciate your supplying more details on my off-the-cuff new coke remark and the ethnographic angle.  Only a mega corporation like Coca-Cola could weather such a product strategy blunder.  I recall much talk in the wake of "new coke" by spin doctors who heralded the whole mistake as a brilliant PR event (as if they did it on purpose to make us appreciate the original).  More to the point, I think many of us wish the products we worked on could reach the level of cultural icon status that makes such anthropological observations much clearer.  Coke is indisputably America's soft drink.  Is Otis Elevator "America's hydraulic lift system"?  Maybe it could be their stretch goal.  Although I'm just kidding here, I know that even products most think to be obscure could benefit from the type of analysis that uncovers the truth behind how customers choose and their latent needs.  "Pink handles for girls, blue handles for boys" may sound simple, but is often overlooked.  -- Gregg

Dear Critical Path:

Just been reading your feedback notes.
Another thought occurs to me. As others point out, we like to be someone's internal customer because we feel we can then demand service. Of course, we resent another group demanding "service" from us, when we want to be "partners" or "in community" with them. So its natural to start trying to develop the relationship downstream, and its naturally going to be hard.  How about identifying some people or groups UPstream, whose customers we have previously felt we were, and surprising them by offering partnership? Maybe it would catch on?

Guy English
Unit Director
Kodak