automobile prospecting support application

Identifying the market opportunity / Low-fidelity Prototype due / testing your value

proposition with customers 05/11/2012

Overview of the project:Initial idea: the initial idea was to create

simple application based on a multi-criteria algorithm to help users choose their cars. This idea was rapidly tested by the team ,and it became obvious it will be a poor tools ,hard to use and will not offers the services wanted by the team. And our value proposition is constantly reworked to reach our objective.

The initial idea stated on : 17/10/2012 as a need definition “customer need a tool to make a better choice when buying a car”.

The team:The team is formed of 3 members :

Mahdi : with background on decision analysis , and project management.

Roberto: manager automobile retail sector.Christopher : film making and internet retail

used automobile retailer.

Value proposition:Buying a new car can be sometimes a hard task for many of us. Often we need to choose between many cars , that has some

good points and bad ones , and the diversity of the offers can make this decision fussy.

This difficulty Is growing with the speed evolution of the cars features ,that make it harder to keep with the technological evolution of cars systems and electronics at least if you are a car enthusiast .

That’s why we want to help peoples in theirs prospection and decision making.

Choosing between cars is not an easy decision , as it’s include many parameters like taste ,family decision, and personal consideration.

We understand that each user needs is unique .

And we intend to help him in a way that has never been done before.

By combining our understanding of the customer’s needs, the use of existing multicriteria decision algorithms and good practices methodologies .

We can help him to deal with this complexity and in the final make a clear choice he will be satisfied with.

How do we intend to do that?1) Understand our customer and helping him

formulate the problem ,defining the critical parameters in his decision.

2) Not limiting or influencing his choices, he can compare as many cars as needed and concentrate on the element he is more concerned about.

3) Helping him following a methodology and using best practices to limit the complexity of the decision.

4) Offering him the right tools and helping him using them.

Complex for us easy for the userSo the final aim ,is to construct an application that

will be for the user the most easy and intuitive to use.

And that in the end will help him making his decision, and respond to the questions:

“Why I choosed this particular car?”“what where my consideration when buying the

car?”

To the end have a satisfied users ,that will not regret their choices or be influenced and buy a car they will regret soon after.

1.

Identifying the market opportunityOur team has decided to first target the NEW CARS

Market ,that we believe will be less complex decision to start with.

For the market size , we can’t actually have a precise quantification of the market. Our market is not the market of new cars.. it without doubt smaller than that.

But Since we are dealing with the consumer behavior. The Risk is not on the market size (it can vary rapidly).

The risk is on that if we have a good understanding of the consumers behavior . And can deliver the service we promise “ a simple and intuitive application that will help the user “. And that the user in the first place need such us service?

Another limitation will be the channel , user’s need to use internet in different stages of their decision process that we can have access to him.

Our team first focus was on studying first the behavior of the consumer. By using existing made survey’s and academic papers.

Résumé of the “identification of the market opportunity”.the behavior of consumer’s has changed

toward a more rapid decision.

The consumer are more concerned by technologies and devices in the car particularly for luxury car :

User’s has more and more less sensitivity to the brand

In the final the study showed that there many segment of consumers. And we need to replay to each segments.Seg1: the people that have a precise idea what they

want to buy and don’t have a problem taking this decision.

Seg2:the people that follow their taste. They don’t build they're choices on rational parameter.

seg3: people that combine rationality and taste to make their choices.

Seg4: people that are strongly rational they compare the cars features and choose the best.

Seg5 : the people that are strongly influenced on their decision by ‘expert’ or ‘relatives’ that can be friends, parents, wife or husband…

Seg6 : the people that loyal to a certain car type or brand.

In all this segment we will be likely not in measure to help the 2 first segment. But can offer adequate tools to the others segments and their sub-segments if we can identify than.

So globally we have identified our market opportunity in many segments , the opportunity is to quickly catch the needs of each segment, and respond to each segment adequately. In all the stage of the car buying decision.

The model we will use for that is blackwell and al model.

Testing value proposition with customer.The objective of the first contact with the

users was:Test that the need we describe is real.Find out if the segment we defined as base of

our application really exist.Have an average description of each segment

that will help us to point out the important parameters in fitting each user to a segment and building next surveys.

The customer information.The customer information include:

AgeSexStatusEducation levelIncomeCountryNumber of new car bought

The sample : about 20 people interviewed

The result from the customer talk:The first data are very interesting:

Nearly 85% define the decision of buying a new car hard or moderately hard. Only about 15% find it an easy decision.

Considering the rationality of the decision

More than the half think their decision is a mix of rationality and taste , and only 8%Consider their decision as totally pure taste.

a last open question : “for you what's the most difficult part when choosing a new car between many alternatives? “Show us many constraint, even if we cannot quantify them since

our simple is small. But the response showed the real existence of segment we defined

on our value proposition.Practically the segment : 2,3,4,5,6 was on our sample.We detected 2 other segments we didn’t considere in the first

assumption. Seg7 : people that don’t have any experience with cars. They have

never bought a car before ,or their knowledge is very limited.so they have problem defining their criteria..

Seg8 : people that are sensitive to price ,define the car they will buy that fit a defined budget.so they try to choose the best they can have for a strict price.

conclusionThe first contact with the clients ,show us

that there is an important need for such as tools. We succeeded to test our basic hypothesis regarding the existence of the market.

Next we will expand our survey’s to know more each segment needs .

And that we can quickly classifies a new user under a category.