SensoGram 12: 'Consumer Driven': What Does it Really Mean? The term `consumer-driven' has become popular in recent times.  What exactly does it mean?  Does it mean asking consumers what they think they want and then giving it to them?  Not really; in fact this is a recipe for stagnation, illustrated above.   There are two main problems with simply asking consumers what they want:   Consumers, en masse, are not creative.  They cannot envisage possibilities, nor should we expect them to.  As an example, suppose we go back 20 years.  Can you imagine consumers volunteering, spontaneously, that what would be really handy in the kitchen would be a new type of electronic device for heating and cooking food?  Never!  And even if such a device had been described to them, their reaction would almost certainly have been negative.  Yet only 10 years later the microwave oven became a reality, and consumers embraced it.   Consumers may not know what they really want.  It's an old story by now, but one worth repeating.  Consumers may say they want food to be low salt/low fat/high fibre, but when the food appears, they don't want to eat it.                        So how do we become successfully `consumer-driven'?  We do it by locking in on the cycle below:                             The creativity will come via product development.  The idea may be an application of new technology, a response to a concern vocalised by consumers, or maybe it jumps `out of the air' - it matters not.  The idea will generate product concepts and prototypes which can then be evaluated by the consumer.   This taps into what consumers can do and do well - tell us whether they like a product or not.  If the product prototypes don't work, or need refinement, they are fed back for further development, and the cycle continues.   This is the essence of being consumer driven.  The real focus is the interaction of consumer and product, not either one alone.