Blog 8: Target Innovation Project Reflections

Creating and really emphasizing with a persona is a skill I have never encounter or experimented with throughout my business classes. This was probably my favorite core concept discussed in class. Personas are tools marketers use to better understand and create empathy for their segmented target market. Personas include both segmentation data (such as demographics, psychographics and behavioral traits) and very specific details, which may seem unimportant but really help to make the persona real. By understanding consumers through personas, businesses can design, create and market better products and services that truly fit their consumer’s needs and values. I enjoyed the experience of creating and empathizing with personas both in our empathy map blog and in the Target Innovation project. In the Target Innovation project we had to create a persona, which would be the center of our research and our insights. Our persona, Natasha, is a first generation Indian-American senior Pre-Med student. It was interesting and eye-opening to delve into her family, friends, hobbies, dreams and fears.

Another skill learned in class and implemented into our Target Innovation project is the use of generative research. Generative research is a tool used to uncover patterns in your consumers’ daily lives that will hopefully lead to key insights. These key insights will help you better understand the consumer, how they use your product or service and they unmet needs from your product or service. Generative research is not quantitative but instead used to create a dialogue in a natural context. In our Target Innovation project we used generative research to discover patterns of loyalty in our subjects as it relates to their everyday life, products and stores.

While the persona phase of the Target Innovation project was my favorite, I do not believe it merited the time that was dedicated to it. When it came down to the final insights and prototype, a miniature version of the target persona would have sufficed. A less extensive persona could have been due earlier in the project, giving more time for the later phases of research, analyzing insights and creating a prototype, all of which could have used more time.

I enjoyed being able to create a persona. Creating a whole being from scratch was a fun and very creative process. Furthermore it was interesting to see our persona come to life through the research subjects we interviewed. I really respect and enjoyed working with my teammates. We are all very different people, with different personalities and experiences, which enhanced the creative nature of the project. But to be honest this has not been one of my favorite group project experiences. This project required a very large amount of time commitment in class and out, on top of all the other weekly and semester long assignments. My team, fellow classmates and I all felt frustrated at one point or another with the large workload coupled with a lack of instructions. Even though specific instructions were asked for several times in class in the weeks leading up to the final presentation, none were given. Our team was upset (to say the least) when these instructions were finally emailed out at 7:00 p.m. the night before our final presentation and additional materials were due. It was a frustrating end to a frustrating project. While I did find a majority of the subjects discussed in class to be interesting and enjoyable, this project was not a highlight.