Some people crave all the bells and whistles. Others just want to make a call. And thenext generation is going to need to do what we don’t even know about today. In the mobilephone business, aligning emerging products with consumer needs is a challenge that evolvesalmost as quickly as the technology itself.
Dr. Morgan Gerard
VP Chief Resident Anthropologist
Proximity Map in Labs explore the frequency and functionality of products and people.
Opportunity Mapping with the global LG team.
Locating applicable signals from the Global Scan.
What do you want from your phone?
Some people crave all the bells and whistles. Others just want to make a call. And the next generation is going to need to do what we don’t even know about today. In the mobile phone business, aligning emerging products with consumer needs is a challenge that evolves almost as quickly as the technology itself.
"Everyone wants to be
an expert.
In 2009, LG asked Idea Couture to create and articulate a series of consumer themes to fuel the development of new product concepts and internally position them in the marketplace over the next three years. With six discrete American consumer segments identified by the Korean electronics giant, our task was to establish the critical baseline for what teens to boomers and early adopters to newbies considered their key mobile needs, usage scenarios and future feature expectations.
Connecting the present to the possible across wide demographic and psychographic user gaps, we discovered that the desire for access to greater mobile ‘ability’ was more similar than segmentation typically accounts for. Here, vaguely articulated expressions of more reassuring, liberating, social, tactical and empowering experiences led us to a series of insights, one of which clearly reveals that everyone from the 60-year old grandmother to the 25-year old techie wants and needs to be an expert.
Insights drawn from our sessions guided a series of collaborative workshops with LG stakeholders from Seoul and San Diego where fully articulated themes on tele-intimacy, style vs. simplexity, safety and security, gendered performance, memory caching and the artistic impulse were used to inspire a range of mobile product and feature concepts for future LG handsets.
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