The first concept that comes to mind that was enriched by the
project is the concept of a customer persona. In class, we talked about how to
segment customers and gather a better understanding of whom we are selling our
product to. In this discussion, we talked about going beyond basic demographics
to understand the customer. Professor Walls discussed how a persona should
cover the seemingly trivial aspects of a person’s life. The purpose of creating
an in-depth persona is to be able to create a tailored product for this
persona. In our project, we did this very exercise to understand the persona of
a post-grad female. We had to break down our persona’s daily schedule. We had
to understand where she worked and where she played. Beyond her actions, our
group had to understand what drove her to these actions. We had to use the
empathy map for a person we did not even know. Spending hours trying to create
a person helped us understand the “why” behind many human actions that we could
never of thought of without this exercise. Understanding the persona created a
firm foundation for our group to explore the actual needs of our target market.
I never realized that starting specific as opposed to broad would prove to be
more beneficial in understanding a consumer market. There are so many facets to
a person’s decision-making process that one cannot account for based off simple
demographics. I can rationally assume that a post-grad in Austin is more likely
to look at Twitter, but without a persona, I am not able to know why he/she is
using Twitter.
Another concept from lecture that the project furthered my
understanding of is data visualization. Data visualization is the process of
placing data into easily viewable charts or graphs so the audience can gain a
better grasp of the results of research. Professor Walls walked us through
various ways to display data on PowerPoint. He was able to give us examples of
creative ways to show data to an audience. Words on a slide and simple charts
were made out to be unacceptable. This project gave me an opportunity to
experiment with data visualization. As a Finance major, I have not been asked
to be creative when it comes to displaying research results. During this
project, my group was kind enough to critique my trial attempts at creating
visually appealing slides. This project produced many different types of data
that were difficult to display. This project forced me to find new ways of
exhibiting data in a way that added to the audience’s understanding of the
data. Here is an example of one of the slides I applied the visualization concept to:
The concept from lecture that served to be least helpful in the
project has to be the lecture on ethics. The lecture on Ethics and Privacy
helped us understand the various ethical dilemmas that marketers are faced with
daily. The articles about Facebook and Google opened my eyes to the harsh
reality of customer’s lack of privacy. Private information about customers is
so readily available that companies can know pretty much everything about
someone from their social media page. This information is also very valuable to
marketers when they want to segment customers into very specific categories. This
lecture created a beneficial dialogue among the students about where the line
should be drawn for companies. Unfortunately, the project did not allow for our
group to apply these concepts. There was not a requirement for our group to
discuss our prototype from a moral perspective. I feel like we could have
explored this side of the prototype more especially as we plan to link our
prototype to Facebook and other social medias.
Personally, my interaction with other group members throughout
the semester was one of the most rewarding aspects of this entire project. We
all come from very different backgrounds. We clearly have different interests
and different approaches to work. These different backgrounds and different
styles helped my group avoid homogenous ideas. It helped us conjure up a wide
variety of suggestions for our persona and our research methodology. My group
helped me better understand concepts from class. For example, Savita grasped
the research methodology lecture significantly better than me and was able to
explain research approaches to me in a practical manner. The consistent
feedback from both Professor Walls and Jessica also helped the overall
experience of the class. We were able to stay on track and it was easy to ask
questions to both instructors. Jessica was patient with my incessant questions
about the project and my need to know the reason “why” for every step of this
project. Without in-depth feedback, I believe our project would have suffered
and ultimately been a failure. My group definitely helped me grasp difficult
concepts throughout the semester and I am grateful for their ability to put up
with me for a few months.
