What strikes me about defining is that it is a movement; it continuously grows.
Before I learned about the process of defining, defining was very singular in my mind. As in, I have defined the word, now it’s time to move on. But the defining process is anything but singular, which strikes me as particularly counterintuitive to what I’ve been taught before.
So what was new to me in the defining process? The first was that defining was a process. One thing that really helped in my group was that before coming together, we each made our own profile of what our general customer looked like. I had learned in a previous class that by doing so, this encourages divergent thinking, whereas if we had started out as a group we may not have been able to generate as many unique ideas. From there, we came together to discuss what our profiles looked like. But it didn’t stop there. After that, we paired off and combined four of our ideas into two, and then two ideas into one. It was new to me to be constantly redefining and gathering information; in essence, to really think before diving in. In effect, I think it made me think about the future much more so than I would. Normally, when thinking about a project I focus on the present with the mindset that I can develop as I go, but the problem with mindset is that it sets me off on a certain track without ensuring that this is the best track. This process made me think carefully about which track we were going to take, and in doing so, we had to think about the future of each track. I think this was useful in that it forced the group to think about the next steps in the process, by analyzing what each customer profile may need, and thinking back to the larger connection of the company – will this take the company in a direction where it can grow?
The most challenging part of this process was that since we had spent time each developing our own, it was difficult to morph those ideas into one. In particular, I think it was challenging to let go of the idea that the idea I personally developed was the most accurate profile. It’s simple psychology, but as soon as I created that profile, I inadvertently became attached to that idea. It comes along with the concept of ownership, but because this was an idea I created, there were certain aspects that I didn’t want to let go of, such as the idea of a single rather than married consumer. Another challenge segueing off of that is combining our ideas into a best representation of what the ideal consumer looks like. How do you define what that is? How do you ensure that that truly is the most accurate representation of your consumer? In truth, there is no way of knowing. We didn’t find any information on consumer demographics on Olay, so we were going off our best interpretation of what the ideal consumer is, and in my case, without being an actual consumer of a project. I think if there’s anything I could have done, I would have taken the time to talk to actual consumers to get the best representative look at who these people are, what their values are, and what their needs are.