• What does it look like?
• Who surrounds her?
• Who are her friends?
• What types of offers is she exposed to daily (as opposed to all market offers)
• What problems does she encounter?

• What is really important to her (which she might not say publicly)
• Imagine her emotions, what moves her?
• What might keep her up at night?
• Try describing her dreams and aspirations

• What is her attitude?
• What could she be telling others?
• Pay particular attention to potential conflicts between what a customer might say and what she may truly think or feel

• What are her biggest frustrations?
• What obstacles stand between her and what she wants or needs to achieve?
• Which risk might she fear taking?

• What does she truly want or need to achieve?
• How does she measure success?
• Think of some strategies she might use to achieve her goals

Gaining an empathic understanding of people's thoughts, feelings and needs by listening, observing, interacting and analyzing

Notice places, notice other people, notice inconsistencies between what people say and what they do.

E.g.:A study of the automobile market in India unexpectedly revealed that, unlike Americans, only 10 percent of Indians eat or drink in the car. On the other hand, 80 percent display religious symbols near the dashboard, and in India, cars are a common wedding present. All of these observations were at the periphery of the central study—how do Indians buy cars?—but were invaluable in designing better cars for the market

If we make a deep, direct emotional connection with end users’ needs, we will be in a far better position to develop new ideas in tune with the customer.

A Jump Associates innovation team gave executives at Mercedes-Benz an assignment: Sit down and have a conversation with a group of young, upwardly mobile drivers for whom they were trying to innovate, and then go out and buy a gift for them. What would be a gift they would value? The best innovations should feel like a gift from a knowing friend, according to Jump.

Use the ethnographer’s approach to live with and learn about the behaviors, practices, and motivations that form the context in which people will use the tools, artifacts, messages, and services that you intend to create

Only by immersing into the daily lives of their new customers can they hope to understand the vastly different behaviors and values. Margaret Mead, an American cultural anthropologist, pioneered the idea of immersive ethnographic research. In a study she conducted among a small group of Samoans, she got to know, live with, observe, and interview 68 young women between the ages of 9 and 20 to frame-up classic revealing insights about behaviors during the passage from childhood to adulthood.

We should let them guide the discussion toward what’s important to them; we have to be students, not teachers.

Fiat Brazil developed the design of their car, Fiat Mio FCC III, by adopting an open source approach through a dedicated website, listening to about 10,000 ideas and suggestions coming from about 17,000 members of the community viewed by 2 million people from 160 countries. This approach, based on large-scale “listening,” was a challenge for the company, but they successfully established both physical and virtual collaborative environments among the online community and the company’s various departments.

• What’s not working well in the current situation and why?
• How are people facing challenges in their daily lives?
• How are they working around the problems?
• Are they just giving up since there is nothing that can support their needs?