Firm brings sophisticated 'psychophysics' tool to Thailand
Everyone will tell you to ask consumers what they want. However, consumers don't always know what they really want. In some cases, they even lie.
Kasikornbank's executive vice president for retail business, Wirawat Panthawangkun, recently told a seminar that if consumers never lied, all deposit money would have fled to the smaller banks from the larger banks that usually offer depositors lower interest rates.
"When asked in any survey, customers will always say [it is] interest rates [that determine their decisions]. But the truth is, customers are lying. Otherwise, all money would have gone to smaller banks. However, big banks command more than a 70-per-cent share of deposit money, totalling Bt900 billion," said the KBank executive.
Idea 360 chief executive Tapat Yuvaboon said the problem with traditional consumer research methods was that they failed to dig into the hidden needs and insights of consumers, and this had haunted marketers and researchers for a long time. Recognising this dilemma, Idea 360 joined forces with US firm Moskowitz Jacobs more than a year ago to bring a sophisticated "psychophysics" tool called IdeaMap to the Thai market, he said.
IdeaMap, developed by Howard Moskowitz, has been used by many leading US corporations for 29 years, and it won the Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Research Award, regarded as the "Nobel Prize" of the market research industry, in 2005. In the Thai market, IdeaMap has been applied by many leading brands and corporations including ICC, Arrow, Essence, HSBC, S&P, Magnolia Quality Development, Taokaenoi, Lactacyd and Auntie Anne's, and at an ultra-luxury residential project in Koh Samui, Tapat said.
IdeaMap was behind the successful development of Diet Pepsi, Tropicana's orange juice and many other new products "which consumers did not know they wanted before the products existed", said Tapat. The concept was vividly illustrated in the book "Selling Blue Elephants: How to Make Great Products that People Want before They Even Know They Want Them", authored by Moskowitz and Alex Gofman.
In addition to new-product development, the psychophysics tool has been applied in various fields, including marketing communication and sales enhancement, and in a courtroom, as showcased by American lawyer R Rex Parris in his historic US$370 million (Bt11.5 billion) case against a co-founder of apparel firm Guess in 2008.
Idea 360 co-founder Julamas Jitpatima said that in a conventional market survey, each consumer would be asked to choose from a number of product ideas, say three samples, which one he or she liked the most. But through IdeaMap, marketers are able to come up with "the fourth idea", which nobody saw or knew about before, because the tool analyses by "mixing and matching" data from consumers' answers.
After spending 21 years in the United States, Tapat moved back to Thailand and set up Idea 360 together with Julamas, a former consultant with Accenture, in 2008. In addition to market research, Idea 360 offers real-estate and investment consultancy services. It was an adviser of CIMB-GK Securities (Thailand) in the most expensive land-sales deal in Bangkok, valued at Bt1.2 million per square wah (Bt300,000 per square metre), in 2008.
Tapat is a nephew of the former permanent secretary of the Interior Ministry, Chanasak Yuvaboon.