Learning with Natasha Rajan

The most valuable skill I have learned in this class is developing personas.  A persona is a fictitious character that marketers develop to represent a certain type of consumer.  In our group project we created Natasha Rajan, a first generation american millennial who is conflicted by the clash of her traditional upbringing and parents’ expectations with her aspiration to live her own life and make decisions based on her own rationale.  In order to truly understand Natasha, we created different types of social media accounts, including Twitter, Instagram, a blog, and Facebook, to truly understand the content she consumes and produces.  As a future marketer, I understand that empathizing with your consumer is one of the most important traits.  Personas are a tool that I will use to more strongly empathize with consumers and understand how to connect with them on a deeper level.  Currently, I am competing in the L’oreal Brandstorm case competition and have been developing a persona to understand our consumer more deeply.  Role playing as our persona Drake and analyzing the market and the Kiehl’s brand from his perspective has unleashed a number of very important insights.  The persona has become so deeply ingrained into our analysis, that we have decided to lead our presentation by introducing Drake and to tell the story through his eyes.  

The next most valuable skill I have learned in this class is gaining insights through generative circles.  Generative circles are a research method used to understand consumer values and motivations.  In our group project we used generative circles to generate insights on our target market’s loyalty in everyday life, towards specific types of products, and towards specific brands of products.  This process gained insights that helped us understand what loyalty meant to our target market and how what aspects we should emphasize in developing a new marketing plan for that consumer.  Through this method, we learned that our target market was deeply influenced by friends and family and had a passion for learning, both formally and informally.  These insights were significantly leveraged when designing our new offering, an addition to the mobile application which increased consumers’ ability to gain real-time information on products in target stores and allowed consumers to shop virtually with friends and family.  I think generative circles are useful because they uncovers consumers motivational foundations.  Rather than asking consumers specific questions that will be answered with their conscious thoughts, generative circles let you unveil more unconscious thoughts that can be tied into almost every decision they make.  

Although I believe the idea of soliciting feedback from the target consumers we interviewed could be very useful, I wish there was much more emphasis on this stage of the project.  In a real product development cycle, multiple iterations of prototyping and beta-testing with target markets would occur before releasing the product.  To more closely resemble this reality, I believe an entire new phase of the project should be added .  In this last phase, teams will be tasked with working with the individuals they interviewed to review their initial prototype and and solicit honest opinions about what works or not works.  Then, teams will use this feedback to alter components of their prototype before presenting it to class.  This phase will help teams incorporate more consumer insights, gain additional experience with proto-typing, and overall increase the value of the final offering.  Under the current standard, it’s easy for teams to overlook this portion of the project and miss out on feedback that is more constructive and relevant than any classmate or professor might be able to give you.  

At first, it seemed like there might be a lot of heated discussion amongst members of the group.  Although after a couple successful team meetings, it was obvious that the heated discussions were, in fact, extremely beneficial for the team and forced me and other team members to think about important areas from different perspectives.  At the end of the project, I was happy we had spent so much time in meta-level discussion regarding our persona and our idea, because it really helped us rationalize and justify the decisions we ended up making.  Working with a group also helped show me how other people would apply techniques learned in class different, such as the use of generative circles.  I would definitely say working with the group contributed to my learning and enjoyment for the project.  I was also very happy to have grown close to individuals that I hadn’t known before-- this is something I have not experienced as often in other classes.  The days that we got to work with our team in class and ask questions to our TAs and professor were also extremely beneficial.  It truly helped to hear their thoughts and explore areas that we hadn’t considered before.  My only feedback for the working with the professors/TAs process, would be that I thought more feedback should have been provided at the end of phases. There were a couple phases where my team didn’t really understand why we got the grade we got (even when it was a 10/10) and we wished that feedback resembled our in-class discussions more.  Overall the project was an extremely beneficial experience and one of the most educational in-class assignments I’ve had at UT.