This analysis is based on 30,670 customer reviews of 108 tablets published online by December 24th 2011.

To insure statistical representation and accuracy of results, we have focused on 18 tablets that were reviewed at least 100 times this year. That may mean that some tablets that were introduced toward the end of the year did not qualify for this report.

We have studied before the correlation between number of reviews published online and a number of units shipped, and therefore found it important to use it for comparison.

The most customer-reviewed tablet of 2011 are Amazon Kindle Fire (3,572), Apple iPad 1 and 2 (2,302 combined) and HP TouchPad (970).

Amazon Kindle Fire announcement dominated media and not surprisingly received a disproportional number of customer feedback after it was released.  It’s value proposition and content availability are highly anticipated to make long expected dent in iPad market supremacy. The number of reviews seem to predict that this is the case.

Even though Kindle Fire OS is build on the Android platform, it has sufficient proprietary layer to view it separately from a more common versions.

From the date of TouchPad introduction the WebOS customers were the most satisfied lot (1.39) and the uncertainty about its future does not seem to extinguish their enthusiasm. Apple iPad customers are very close behind at (1.35). It is interesting to note that iPad 2 version of iOS have substantially improved its overall average satisfaction score.

The Kindle Fire OS experience score falls 0.03 points behind the Android, which is well within the margin of error, while both somewhat exceeded their customers’ expectations.

Our Market Intelligence Analysis of the tablet segment indicates that the following attributes of customer experience are most important to them:

1. Usability – 11.45% of all opinions expressed
2. Reliability – 9.45% of all opinions expressed
3. Price – 3.21% of all opinions expressed
4. Screen – 2.89% of all opinions expressed
5. Sound Quality – 2.52% of all opinions expressed
6. Compact Size – 2.10% of all opinions expressed
7. Screen Size – 1.70% of all opinions expressed
8. Battery Life – 1.63% of all opinions expressed
9. Customer Support – 1.40% of all opinions expressed
10. Operating System – 0.95% of all opinions expressed

You can get more detailed explanation of Attributes and Importance by watching this short video.

In terms of overall satisfaction, Samsung Galaxy tablet (7″) has earned the top customer satisfaction rating (1.53) and Huawei Ideo 7 tablet (1.50) came within a statistical tie, while Archos 7 Home tablet (0.82) and Velocity Micro Cruz tablet (0.95) are on the very bottom of the list.

To get more specific insights into the dynamics of the tablet customer perceptions, we sampled a market segment by analyzing the most experienced (i.e., most reviewed) models representing different operating systems.

1. Amazon Kindle Fire – 3,572 customers
2. Apple iPad 2 – 999 customers
3. RIM Blackberry Playbook – 281 customers
4. HP TouchPad – 970 customers
5. Motorola Xoom – 588 customers
6. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 inch – 615 customers

More details and customer feedback verbatim are available via access to the dynamic dashboard for this segment on request. Watch this video for navigation tips.

I keep struggling with the definition of what is an innovative blockbuster product (or service), and this is yet another attempt: A truly innovative product is the one that delights its customers by anticipating their needs before they knew they have them. In other words, if you want to develop a blockbuster product, you should stop trying to better serve the existing needs of your customers and instead try to discover needs that customers may not realize they have and address them.

Traditionally, companies use customer feedback to assess satisfaction with existing products and to validate product developer’s ideas for the improvements. One of the most popular methods used for collecting customer feedback are survey and panels, where the questions asked or topics moderated tend to reflect interests of product development team and focus on how customers experience their product.

I would like to pose that truly innovative product developers use a different perspective to discover the needs customers cannot articulate in controlled or moderated environment – the perspective of holistic experience of a job the customer “hired” the product in question to do.

The journey starts with the understanding of what the “job” they want to do is and what a desirable outcome is. The next step is to imagine how this whole experience can be simplified in its entirety, which may or may not involve your product. I use the word “simplified” because it is an ultimate description of improvement in a context of “desirable outcome.” Terms we usually use to describe improvements – Better, Faster, Cheaper – are traps anchoring us to the incremental changes of status quo.

The complete customer experience starts with a notion that the desired outcome can be achieved, and goes through discovery of components required, acquisition of the components and/or materials and skills all the way through a process of applying them. Your product may be just one of many in that process, but if you can make it easier to find at the conception stage, simpler to understand that it is the best alternative to get the job done at the acquisition stage, and require less skill and/or effort to operate, that will make your product a lot more successful. However, truly innovative products do often have an element of disruption that does not easily fit into organizational structures. If you are a drill product manager, and survey satisfaction of a drill purchasers, the ideas of alternative wall anchoring to hung pictures will not likely come up. However, even if it does, how does it help you or your department?  I wonder if a celebrated genius of Steve Jobs could only manifest itself because he operated from above of organizational hierarchy.

The question is, “Can Customer Feedback help to create innovative products?” If you define Customer Feedback as the results of survey or other structured information-gathering method, the answer is NO. The best outcome of these exercises is reduced uncertainty about your assumptions (i.e., confirmation of what you already know). The probability of discovering an idea that could lead to the conceptualization of an innovative product is extremely low, but could be improved somewhat by allowing open-ended questions and a lot of unstructured comments.

I define Customer Feedback as any and all customer-generated content available about a product/service in any form customers chose to communicate it. That includes company and public forums, customer support notes and call transcripts, company sales notes, customer’s Facebook comments, and customer videos and reviews published online. The wider Customer Feedback “fishing” net is cast, the higher probability of innovative ideas discovery. Combine it with the right analysis methodology that does not tie you up with pre-conceived keywords and ontology, and your chances are looking even better.

Tablet’ Market Segment update

The last month was full of action if you follow the tablets market segment. HP first started the price discounting to “gain market share” and then dropped the “bomb” of discontinuing the TouchPad they introduced only 42 days before. The judgment is still out whether we witnessed results of really agile decision making or an example of exceptionally bad corporate self-distraction. The initial stock market reaction seems to support the latter hypothesis, and current history of HP boardroom soap opera episodes provides enough clues. The new CEO apparently wants the company out of consumer products businesses.

There is an update – It appears the decision produced a shark bait effect and caused a number of class action suites on behalf of shareholders.

In this installment of online market research update, I would like to explain the process we follow to generate these reports.

We start at the Product Reputation screen and enter name/model of a tablet and click the “Submit” button. When the metrics for the entered tablet show up on the right side of the screen, we click on the “Compare with other products” button to expose all tablets in our database.

At this date, we monitor customer generated content for 32 tablets and the Market Intelligence report will show their reputation which is calculated by processing the text of customer reviews with our opinion mining software. Keep in mind that no questions were asked about their experiences and no customer was ever contacted by us to solicit their opinions. Surveys are not our business!

We use the “Customize your report” button to select only the tablets that were updated (new customer reviews were published online) within the last 30 days and have greater than 25 customer reviews published. The total number of reviews analyzed is 9,003. The result of the customization is displayed below. Please note that the metrics are calculated on all aggregated reviews published by the customers from the time a tablet became available for purchase.

We export the CSV file and generate WoM (Word of Mouth) Share chart and Trend based on the exported data. Not surprisingly, Apple iPad earns the largest share of customer feedback at 17%, although the number is much smaller than its market share and substantially dropped from 35% only two months ago.

To discover what attributes of their customers’ experience are important, to measure how important these attributes are to the customers, and what the difference between their expectations and their experiences with each attribute is, we focus on five of the most reviewed tablets for a more detailed Customer Intelligence Analysis.

We use a two-point scale to visualize that difference.

0=unacceptable / 1=experience meets expectations / 2=delighted

Customers “say” that Usability (11.64%), Reliability (11.32%), Quality of Construction (9.5%) and Display (5.4%) are the most important attributes of their experience with the tablets. While all participants are providing Usability experience well above their customer’s expectations, HP TouchPad and Apple iPad 2 are the leaders in this category. Motorola and Toshiba are considered the most “reliable” tablets by their customers, while Samsung Tab continues to struggle.

Here is the access to the tablets’ online marketing research dashboard that allows to see actual customer’s feedback if you click on a specific bar.

The last chart I would like to offer depicts customer affinity for tablet’s operating system and despite all brouhaha about the TouchPad, WebOS still earns the highest score from its customers.

   For those of us who are deeply involved with online marketing research, it may appear that the proliferation of Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs is exploding these days. However, recent Forrester’s research found that 56% of the executives they surveyed were not aware of any formal VoC program in their companies. One of potential explanations to this discrepancy may be the fact that many companies conduct localized, departmental initiatives that are not visible to the rest of the organization.

Indeed, an amount of online surveys I am bombarded every day is staggering. It seems that people who designed every website I stop by want to know my opinion… even before I had any time to form one. Availability of inexpensive and easy-to-use technology for conducting online surveys is not a good excuse for harassing your site’s visitors to collect “short” and “easy” response to the closed-ended questions structured on a scale of 1 to 5.

There are 3 reasons why an inadequately administered survey is harmful to your business:

• Popup surveys reduce visitor engagement with a site, and therefore promote high bounce rate.

Many people commenting about their site user experience are complaining about the timing of these interruptions and their inability to respond to posed questions at a time they are being posed. Timing the request to allow a customer to experience your product or service would provide more meaningful reaction and responses.

•  Questions that do not align with customer’s experience and perspective do alienate the customers.

The closed-ended questions you pose to your customers may be very important to you and your company. However, if answering them does not provide any value to the responder, why would they want to waste their time? It is much better to provide generous space for comments and reflections of their experience from their perspective, and let them tell you what elements of this experience are important to them. Make it easy for them to say what they want to, not what you want to hear. They are not in the business of validating your assumptions.

• Customer Feedback that does not result in action is a waste of time – yours and your customer’s.

A disconnect between cause and effect explains low participation of voters in a political process. Customers want to help you improve your product or service and will provide you with clues to how to do it, if you “listen”. There are tools available for automated processing of unstructured customer comments and reviews that are called Opinion Mining platforms. Use them to help you discover the insights into their experience. You can get results within 24 hours. Let the customers know that their efforts are not wasted. Communicate back what you have learned from them and what actions you plan to take in an effort to improve their experience.

Social media monitoring quickly becomes a “commodity” with hundreds of companies’ rummaging through fire hose streams of communications published, re-published and re-tweeted every second of a day. Brands want to know what people think about them and are prepared to pay for this knowledge. But why is this so? What is the value of knowing that people communicate a positive sentiment about your brand today?

I would speculate that most companies make this investment without specific strategy or process on hand, and some companies do it to manage the reputation of their brands or in other words, to do PR damage control and risk mitigation. A very few do so to systematically improve their customers’ experience.

Most of Social Media chatter has relatively low value for opinion mining efforts, which need to be given attention if you want to extract actionable knowledge for systematic change.

Furthermore, it is important to understand the differences between the types of communications that use Social Media channels:

• People often refer to Word of Mouth (WOM) in Social Media as a buzz and focus too much on technology at the expense of the appropriate targets, actions and measurements.
• The Voice of the Customer (VOC) is a subset of WOM that can be directly attributed to the customers of your product. It is very similar and as valuable as, if not more valuable than, customer feedback collected by many companies through their “walled garden” channels at a great expense.

The opinion mining operation that is focused on the Voice of the Customer “ore” delivers significantly higher yield compared to the overall Social Media buzz in terms of actionable knowledge. It is possible because it provides a very close correlation to specific products and often describes holistic customer experience with these products. I refer to “holistic customer experience” in the context of the customer’s effort required to achieve a desired outcome. An example of a desirable outcome is a new roof for the house or a quality audio experience while exercising in a gym.

We consider all steps – from the initial purchase research to the selection, purchase, delivery and setup, and to a completed realization of the desired outcome – measure it as a difference between the customer’s expectations and their perception of reality (their actual experience). Examples of VOC “ore” include—in ascending order—customer forums, blogs and customer reviews published online.

Recent Forrester’s research found that 14% of executives surveyed said that their companies don’t solicit customer feedback at all, while 56% of the respondents said—or were not sure if—their companies do not have a formal VOC program. However, the most shocking finding is that nearly one out of every four executives said that they seldom or never use customer feedback to change a business process (source: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=142811).

The Temkin Group research identified it as the one of Top 10 Customer Experience Incompetencies, as shown in the table on the left.

There is a good reason why so many companies find it difficult to mine Social Media for improving customer experience:  most content generated by customers is unusable by corporate information systems that are built to process structured data.

The following steps have to be taken to address the big challenge of translating seemingly anecdotal evidence into a scalable, corporate process:

1. Aggregation, capture, cleansing and authentication of Voice of Customer data
2. Conversion of this data into structured information
3. Alignment of this information with corporate targets, i.e. conversion of this information into corporate knowledge
4. Integration of that knowledge into existing, repeatable business process.

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The discussions on importance of innovation are all over Social Media. The calls for innovating ourselves out from the current economic malaise are coming from the President of Consumer Electronics Association to the President of the United States. In the words of Louis XIV (or was it Mel Brooks?) – “It’s good to be the King!” – for the rest of us it would be helpful to put some definitions around these terms. I do not pretend to be an expert on the subject of innovation, but I like to be specific and want to offer some ideas for discussion.

So what differentiate commercially successful product or service from the innovation?

I would like to propose that successful products gain market traction, meet their sales forecasts and generate anticipated profit margins.  Innovative products re-shape the market place, create new categories, and generate blockbusting profits. Innovative products successfully defeat the competitors’ assaults for long periods of time.

Development and introduction of successful products or services is a very challenging and risky endeavor, as we are well aware.

The Recent Portfolio Management Benchmark Survey sponsored by Planview, reported that only 52.3% of products meet with commercial success, while 21.2% were “killed prior to launch”.  They did not specify the type of products or industries covered by this survey, but my personal experience pegs the success ratio well under 40% mark.

The risk level for innovation is even higher. It is estimated that only 1 out 3,000 new innovative ideas becomes a commercial success. We also know that most innovative products rarely have anything to do with technological inventions, but have everything to do with the scale of market adoption. Peter Dreker, the father of modern Management Science, wrote in his book “Innovation and Entrepreneurship”, that a 15 year “gestation” period is the average time observed between the time of an original invention and the time of its commercial realization.

We all know examples of such innovations as Ford T, Microsoft Word, iPod and iPad to name a few that dominated and still dominate their product categories. These are very different products, however the thought process, methods and techniques of the people who are behind the creation of these products, are a mystery we want to discover.

I would like to propose that the key difference between really good Product Managers and the Innovators is in a way they perceive and understand the markets they target.

While a Product Manager segments the markets in terms of demographics or personae for which they develop a product, an Innovator is focused on the Customer Experience of people, who struggle to use existing products to do their chores, and interprets these struggles into the definition of innovative vision for new generation products.

In other words they concentrate on improvement of EXPERIENCE as oppose to improvement of a PRODUCT.

I am honored to present this webinar sponsored by Grandview Product Management community on June 22nd, 2011.

There is a heated debate in a Product Management community about the Role of Market Research in creation of innovative products and I have mused on this subject earlier on this blog.

Product managers, who subscribe to a “thought leadership” (as oppose to “customer participation”) model, love to quote Henry Ford who supposedly said – “If I asked my customers what they want, they simply would have said a faster horse.”  The “customer driven innovation” camp proponents are swearing by Customer Feedback and Voice of Customer based methodologies. However there is no clear evidence that either site consistently out-innovate their opponents.

During this webinar we will explore and analyze traditional methods of product definition process, their limitations and their applications that often lead to incremental improvements as oppose to true innovation. We will talk about

• What separate a successful product from INNOVATIVE product
• What are differences between a Product Manager and a Star Product Manager , and
• How the knowledge of the market helps to close the gaps between the two.

Please click on this link to register

The Playbook introduction caused a lot of controversy well before it was actually released with speculations about its battery life problems wildly spread all over internet. The decision to go with its proprietary operating system was also met with a lot of criticism in social media. However since the Playbook started shipping and customers had a chance to form their own opinion, the results of their opinions analysis did not produce a crystal clear picture yet.  One thing seems to emerge though – it is a lot better product than most people have expected.  This writing is based on the analysis of 886 customer reviews of their experience with these tablets.

Below is a screenshot of the dashboard with a subset of attributes that are most important to customers (statistically determined). The bars represent measurements of the difference between customer expectations and there experience with each attribute.

It appears that Battery life issue was either blown out of proportions by pre-release speculations, or miraculously corrected by RIM engineers before the product started shipping, as the Playbook customers report that it exceeded their expectations by 21%.

QNX operating system appears to be a big hit with the customers as it exceeded their expectations by 35% and scored at much higher customer perception levels than iOS and Android.

What is surprising that overall general satisfaction score from the Playbook customers is quite low in spite the fact the most of the important attribute’s scores are positive.  When I clicked on the general satisfaction bar of the Playbook, the negative opinion snippets (customer insight) was focused around the lack of content and applications for the device.

In the last few weeks I have encountered this meme on Tweeter, LinkedIn group discussions and numerous product management camp presentations. In my opinion at the core of this debate are a fuzzy definition of the term “innovation” (that is often confused with “invention”) and poor understanding of market research methodologies that are often limited to survey and forum applications.

Since I don’t know a source of really authoritative, undisputable and complete definition of the term “innovation” I would like to propose that most innovations usually are new applications of previously invented technologies and/or processes. Truly innovative products usually find new ways to use existing inventions to improve experience of people. The confusion arises when practitioners focus on improving products rather than experience with the product, because that is where a difference between “innovation” and incremental “improvement” lives.

Product managers, who subscribe to a “thought leadership” (as oppose to “customer participation”) model, love to quote Henry Ford who supposedly said – “If I asked my customers what they want, they simply would have said a faster horse.” There is no debate that a motorized carriage was an amazing invention, which by the way was not created by Ford – he innovated scalable assembly line manufacturing, among other processes. However his quote only implies that survey and/or forum market research methodologies are not suitable for validation of truly innovative products in conceptual stage of development. He couldn’t help but notice all the horse manure on the streets and inefficiencies of small cargo shipping associated with horse carriages. The art of “noticing” how customers experience products, currently available to them, is called ethnographic research and there is no innovation possible without some degree of it.

During the last SVPCamp 2011, I was really tickled to see a presentation by Tony Ulwyck of Strategyn, called “Silence the Voice of the Customer (VOC) and Create Breakthrough Products”. My first reaction to the subject line of the presentation was extremely negative as I, like possibly many others, did not pay close enough attention to terminology he used. In fact VoC is defined by most practitioners as company stimulated customer feedback about your existing products, which is one of the best sources of inspiration for incremental product improvements. Considering this, Tony’s subject line is very valid and surely catches people’s attention. Since VoC collection mechanisms are designed around company’s desire to collect and process the content in the most efficient way, they often do not encourage free and easy sharing of customer experiences, and the ways and reasons customers use the products. That is the primary reason why VoC does not offer much opportunity for discovery of “Aha” insights that lead to innovation. However the quest of an enterprise for efficiency often leads to missed opportunities to innovate as freely flowing stories about how the customers use the products and what jobs they “hired” these products to do, contain insights that can be discovered only by much more expensive ethnographic research. Online Word of Mouth (WoM) opinion mining technologies hold a promise of help this discovery to become timely, scalable and economical process.

It is very hard to sell to people we don’t understand. We turn to market research for help to understand who our best potential customers are.  This quest usually starts with assumptions about common characteristics these people have to be predisposed to our products or services. It is common to assume that certain age and gender groups, or their residence, would make them more interested and capable to spend their money on our offering. Normally we come to these assumptions based on our personal experiences and intuition that we call “common sense”.

I wonder if that “common sense” is the same one that came with very accurate definition of what happen to us when we ASSUME?

I am sure that most people would prefer to KNOW instead of assuming and estimating, but there is no good way to know what does not exist yet. However there is a way of making better assumptions and estimates.

Steve Jobs is often and rightly credited as the genius behind Apple’s great success in assuming what consumers really want, but I wonder if there is a method behind his magic. Just how much sorcery is needed to figure out the requirements for iPod if you take a really close look on what customers, who purchased MP3 players, have experienced? Imagine watching these people figuring out tiny menus trying to find and play a music track they want to hear. Surely the age and gender may influence just how much of inconvenience one can tolerate, but the very fact that these people have made a decision to spend their money for something that is so imperfect, uniquely qualify them as a special market segment that supersede the traditional market segmentation criteria based on demographics.

The special applications tablets and digital e-readers were around for a few years and relatively large number of people and companies spent considerable time and money using these devices. Wouldn’t it make sense to learn from them what could make their investment even more compelling, and as the result attractive to even larger audience?

Consistency of the Apple success in introducing the products customers want suggests scalable methodology and transferable skill. I think the vision of current, successful products of your potential competitors as an early prototype of your future blockbuster is at the foundation of this methodology.  The skill of creative analysis of customer experience with these products provides a detail road map to the future success.