Expert Panels for Product Development and Improvement

 Marketers and engineers usually have the necessity for comments from customers that goes deeper and into greater detail than the conventional satisfaction survey or new service concept tests among a random number of product users. What's needed is the kind of expert feedback, from an "early adopter" number of product category users, that could help the marketer and engineer to see beyond just the next incremental change and to a whole new version of something that provides it a distinct competitive advantage. In addition, such an early adopter expert panel group may also help to generate entire new service categories.

Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, is just a classic book on marketing high technology products. Inside he defines "early adopters," or "visionaries," as "that rare breed of those who have the insight to complement an emerging technology to a strategic opportunity, the temperament to translate that insight into a high-visibility, high-risk project, and the charisma to have the others of the organization to purchase into that project." Oftentimes these people are the mavens, or salespeople, or combination thereof, described in The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. Most of us know these people. The are the people who, back school, or at our work, seem to also have the most recent cool gadget and who're on the surface of the latest technology, and who, importantly, know very well what its potential is. acheter des abonnés They understand the bigger picture of what technology can perform to produce our lives easier and/or more fun. They're intellectually curious, love using new technology, and specifically, like to work things out and making something are better and be more useful. Inside our work we see these people in pretty much every high-tech focus group we conduct, and they're wonderful. They care greatly about technology, they're passionate about it, and they provide lots of thought about how technology could be improved to produce it more helpful for people.

These early adopters, or visionaries, then, are exactly the kinds of individuals who provides marketers and product developers a wealth of outstanding information with which to greatly help them develop products. Expert panels are a great tool for keeping your products current and ahead of the competition. Expert panels are a group of those who have decided to be "on call" for the client company to offer expert feedback and opinions on current products, new service prototypes, strategic product direction (i.e., new markets for current products) and big picture "pie in the sky" brainstorming on new service concepts. Using these outside experts, a business will help assure so it keeps pushing its technology forward and stays ahead of the competition.

It used to be that these expert panels could be brought together in-person, in an emphasis group type setting. This is often and often remains done, but with the web and social media tools, expert panels may now be recruited and brought together much easier and frequently, online. The idea of "purposed online communities" (POC's), a new trend in the mixing of social media and marketing research, is a wonderful tool for developing and using expert panels. POC's are online panels recruited by the business, with the objective of periodically initiating a conversation about specific topics the business needs to have feedback on.

While POC's can't be employed for various types of research because of the nature of the participants (typically they are only made up of current customers) and the fact that you can't implement a targeted traditional survey, it can work nicely being an expert panel tool, as you can draw in a sizable quantity of experts quickly and cheaply, and generate a lot of interaction and brainstorming-type discussions about specific topics. Essentially, these act as loose focus groups, being fully a bit less guided than a focus group session, but nevertheless with some general guidance from the web moderator. Thus, as in an emphasis group, the info gathered is directional (vs. definitive, as in a survey), yet can yield a wealth of informational gems. The exact same could be the case if you should be conducting a professional panel in person.

Given the newest ability via the web of companies to quickly and inexpensively develop expert panels, which can help them gain and keep a competitive edge, it has become clear that this can be a research tool that all companies, large and small, cannot afford never to be employing.