Ousmane FALL

In Marketing, it is essential to understand the consumer. We can use a tool called the empathy map.  An empathy map is a visual tool for understanding and empathizing with consumers. It captures their ideas, feelings, behaviours and requirements. It allows teams to gain deeper insights into customer experiences and perspectives, which can then be used to guide product development, marketing tactics, and customer support activities. As its name suggests, the objective of the empathy map is to put oneself in the place of the Consumer or customer to be studied to better understand the latter. The empathy map is a canvas on which we will represent on a single page what the consumer hears, what he sees, what he says, what he feels and what he does. By looking at things from a consumer's perspective we bring together the information and knowledge available about them to fill out the empathy map. To establish an empathy map, you need to bring together people who are likely to know the Consumer you are targeting well. The empathy map can also be done by a single person, but it is richer if done by a whole team.

An empathy map is Consumer-centered and generally consists of below parts.
 
- General information: A description of the target we want to understand, its socio-demographic profile and an overview of its situation. Here you need to draw up a portrait of the person or group of people in the segment you are targeting.
 
- Reflection: in this section, you document what the client thinks or says internally. This may include their goals, motivations, anxieties, desires, and concerns regarding the product or service. What does the customer want to achieve? What does success look like for this customer? and what must the customer do to achieve this?
 
- Perception: What the person hears from others, from colleagues and friends and those around them, but also what the person sees on the market and in their environment.
 
- Says: This quadrant captures what the customer says, such as verbalized statements, quotes, or comments about the product or service. What the person says, how have you heard your consumer or Consumer express themselves? or what can you imagine the customer saying?
 
- Fact: This quadrant focuses on the customer's actions and behaviours. What activities do they carry out regarding the product or service? How do they interact with this? What are their weaknesses or sources of frustration? What the person does and the behaviours you observed in particular.
 
- Feelings: In this quadrant, you will investigate the client's emotions and feelings. What are their emotional reactions or comments about the product or service? Understanding their emotional state can provide valuable information about their desires and priorities. What the person feels and thinks, we can also put here their aspirations and the problems they encounter. This section often contains a subsection called “pains and problems” which represents their frustrations and blockages. Another subsection called “benefits and gains” is where we will put the aspirations and dreams of the Consumer we are targeting.

There is a pitfall to avoid when drawing up an empathy map. You must avoid attributing your own feelings to the targeted Consumer when drawing up an empathy map.

It is important to put a date and version number on the empathy map because the empathy map will be frequently updated based on additional knowledge that we have about the Consumer of our product and/or services.

The advantage of the empathy map is that it is created quickly and provides a very good overview of the profile of our client and/or Consumer.

To use an empathy map to determine client requirements during new product development, you should perform the following:
1- Define your targeted consumer segment. 

2. Collect customer insights. It is about understanding more about your targeted clients through surveys, interviews, focus groups... Collect as much data as possible for your empathy map.

3- Complete the empathy map using the information you gathered. Use Post-it notes to capture key observations, remarks, behaviours, and emotions from your target clients.

4- Examine the completed empathy map for patterns, themes, and similarities in the customers' thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and wants. Identify challenges that can be addressed through new product development.

5- Use the Empathy Map insights to generate ideas and solutions for innovation or product improvements that better address customers' wishes, preferences, and challenges. Use the Empathy Map as a reference to ensure that your solutions meet the demands of your target audience. This Empathy Map would probably serve the blue ocean strategy.

6- Using the ideas generated, construct prototypes or Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and obtain consumer feedback via testing and validation. Use this feedback to iterate and improve your product thoughts.

Using an empathy map during the new product development process helps organizations obtain a better understanding of their customer's demands, resulting in more customer-centric and successful solutions.

The monitoring frequency is the time interval between two monitorings. The frequency of monitoring is essential for guaranteeing results. Let's try to see this from a more down-to-earth angle through the example of hospitalized patients. In each hospital, there is a patient monitoring protocol. Indeed, depending on the severity of the illness and the urgency of care, the frequency of monitoring will be more or less frequent. imagine that for patients admitted to intensive care, the monitoring frequency is further away and that for patients awaiting discharge, the monitoring frequency is closer. what is likely to happen? The operations will not be adapted to the needs and the risk of loss of human life will be quite high.
Given the previous example, we can say that the business process is comparable to hospital protocol. Therefore, deciding how often to monitor a process with control charts is crucial to the survival of a business. This will help detect and respond effectively to process variations. When determining the frequency of monitoring a process, it is important to consider factors such as the stability of the process, the type and quantity of product data, the costs and resources allocated to monitoring, the sensitivity of the process and the contribution of the process to the overall results of the company.
The stability of the process is almost the most determining factor in deciding the monitoring frequency. In fact, the more stable the process is, the less the process will be monitored. and of course, inversely proportionally. If the process is unstable, it will be necessary to systematically monitor it at regular intervals. This will allow variations in performance to be detected early and to more or less have time to correct through controlled actions. On the other hand, if the process is stable, the monitoring frequency will be much less.
The pace of data production can also be restrictive for process monitoring. Indeed, for certain cases where data is produced at a slow rate, it is often difficult to closely monitor the processes. If the process generates a large volume of data quickly, more frequent monitoring may be feasible and beneficial. Large-scale manufacturing, with the volume of data generated, must be monitored very closely. If necessary, in the event of a variation in quality, non-conformities will be considerable.
The decision to monitor more processes to the detriment of others may lie in the criticality of the latter. If a process has a major contribution to the quality of the product or service, it may justify more frequent monitoring to guarantee performance with very little variation from targets.
However, the cost of monitoring may be considerable and requires more resources in terms of time and investment in equipment, software and data storage devices. making it a factor to consider when determining monitoring frequency.
Because of the above, it is important to talk about the possible consequences of incorrectly sizing the process monitoring frequency.
If the monitoring frequency is too high, it can consume excessive resources. Indeed this will generate waste (MUDA) such as overproduction, overprocessing and an irrational use of resources thus leading to an increase in costs.
This frequency, more than necessary, makes it difficult to distinguish between normal variation which does not impact the final quality from those which negatively impact the latter. This leads to excessive adjustments to correct minor variations with unnecessary interventions that can disturb the stability of the process.
On the other hand, if the monitoring frequency is too low it can result in delayed detection of variations and deviations in processes, allowing problems to escalate before they are detected and addressed. Therefore, process owners could lose control and this will not militate in favour of the quality of the product or service and will certainly degrade CSAT and NPS. When it comes to continuous improvement, optimization opportunities will be missed. Indeed, certain root causes of problems can remain unsuspected for a fairly long period.
In conclusion, to guarantee the stability and control of a process, the frequency of monitoring is important. moreover, since factors such as stability, control, and resources consumed by a process are not static, it is essential to review the monitoring frequencies regularly to maintain a certain alignment between the performance of a process and the monitoring frequency of the latter. Therefore, the frequency of process monitoring can be revised upwards or downwards depending on the results obtained. This will continually improve the said process and overall business results.

In an organization context, the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework is a goal-setting technique that helps set and trail objectives and their related expected outcomes.
Here we are talking about primary objectives that the company wants to achieve. These said goals are SMART. By SMART we mean:
S: Specific
M: Measurable
A: Achievable
R: Realistic
T: Time-bound
These objectives are in line with the company's vision and overall strategy. They provide information on expected achievements.
These major expected results indicate progress toward achieving the objectives. They are quantifiable and tell us how far or close we are to the goals. These results confirm or refute the effectiveness of the actions taken to achieve the objectives.
One of the condition for the OKR framework to work is the establishment of periodic reviews not exceeding every six months. in fact, in general, the objectives are annual and by carrying out quarterly or half-yearly reviews, the company will have more or less time to correct or even change its operational strategies and tactics. In addition to scheduled reviews, there may be occasional reviews at the request of top management. To enable these spot reviews, dashboards with real-time analytics are needed.
The Objectives and Key Results framework is a good example of the implementation of the PDCA (Plan Do Check Act) quality wheel.
When it comes to goal setting, the OKR framework and Hoshin Kanri satisfy the same needs but with different approaches. Below you will find a comparison table contrasting the two approaches.
 
 
OKR Framework
Hoshin Kanri
Generality
Focus on results as indicators on the achievements
Strategic focus on policies and strategies deployment
Timeline
Year
Multi-year horizon
Force
Flexibility
Long-term planning
Approach
Bottom-up
Top-down
 
The flexibility of the OKR framework pushes many small and medium-sized businesses to adopt it. This type of company needs to control the results about the objectives previously set.
On the other hand, for hyper-structured companies that already have a certain control over their results, the Hoshin Kanri approach would be more appropriate. The Hoshin Kanri Matrix or X matrix clearly shows the the links and correlation between  Strategic goals, Annual objectives, Top-level and improvement priorities and Key performance indicators. At the same time, the X matrics makes sure that someone is taking an action.
However, nothing would prevent both approaches from being carried out at the same time if adapted to the need.