Blog 6 Reflection

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.