User personas

For this week, I made a sheet to recap what kind of person go in department stores. For this assessment, I use the user personas tool to find the different categories of people.
To make things easier, each user represents a age category. So, I made 3 categories : the 18 - 24 years old, the 25 - 35 years old and the 36 - 50 years old.
I created 5 users and tried to speak about them saying what is their situation and why they go in department stores.

Age	User
18 – 24 years old	N°1	Student at the university, his financial resources are quite low. He goes very often in department store to find all kind of products he need. He compares all the products to find the best price. Linked to the new technologies, he spends a lot of time surfing on his smartphone to compare the prices and after go to the department store.
	N°2	At the beginning of her professional career, her financial resources are quite low too. However, she can spend a little bit more for some extras. Very often in department stores, she compares the products and is looking for the best price for a good quality. Also linked to the new technologies, she spends a lot of time surfing on her smartphone to have the best price.
25 – 35 years old	N°3	At the age of 30, he gives priority to efficacy and utility more than be an impulsive person.
	N°4	In the working life, she searches for well-known brands, quality and a big choice of products. Without child, she is spendthrift and likes spending times in department stores to find the last product or the good deals.
35 – 50 years old	N°5	User n°5: In charge of two children, she takes new budgetary decisions. With a budget to manage, she compares the prices between the different department stores. She buys only what she need for her family to avoid the useless expenses.

Week's assignement: retail industry and department stores in Turku

This week we were given the assignement to find as much information about subjects that we'll be working with quite closely during this course: retail industry and departmen stores especially in Turku. I found couple of very interesting studies that handle these subjects and are pretty wide so they can be used as background material before we start the actual innovating and get our hands dirty.

https://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/87787/Tukkk_KR2-2012%20Marjanen%20Malmari%20DIGIversio_170013.pdf?sequence=1

The first one is a large report made in Turku School of Economics in 2012. It's in Finnish and has a lot of really useful information about what affects consumer behavior in area of Turku and what has changed. The current situation here is really competetive since we have three large shopping centres within quite a little distance that are all competing of the same customers. When we add the department stores and smaller stores in the very centre it gets clear that the competition here is indeed really hard and everyone of them has to have something special to offer for customers to keep them loyal.

http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/lup/publication/3233399
(click the link on that page to open the report in pfd)

The second one is also a large report made in University of Lund. It's focused on one of these three large shopping centres, on the newest one, Skanssi. Skanssi markets itself as "the greenest shopping centre in Europe" and that's one of the main themes the report is focusing on. The other big theme with this report aswell is consumer behaviour. This one is in English and I think we'll get a lot of very useful and current info out of it. It's been published in 2012.

TOPIC: Whether it is benefical to find the familiar food in the foreign storew when you travel around the world.

Question: What are the benefits if you could have a home food at the foreign countries when you go travelling?

FLORIAN:

-          When you want to cook something, you can easily find the components.

-           You can make the food and share with your friends, it is the cultural exchange.

JAN:

-          Get familiar faster with the culture.

-          Feel like you are at home

KIM:

-          Bring the culture of your hometown to another countries.

-          Eliminate home-missing

SAMANTHA and LAURA:

-          It could be easier to cook stuff you know.

EMILINE:

-          Do not need to waste time when you have to go various shops to find enough ingredients for 1 meal.

-          Find the appropriate food with your health when you are travelling.

-          If you don’t like the local food, you can eat your food.

The First pitch

We were thinking in our team if it´s a need to find your own countries food when travelling abroad? Is it a need to have a big international food market where they sell food from all over the world in every country so you easily find your own food?

I pitched our idea to one of my friends who is travelling a lot if she thinks it´s a need to get familiar food when travelling abroad. She said that it seemed like a good idea but she doesn´t need familiar food when she´s abroad. She wants to try and eat the food that the local people eats. She also said that if you live or stay longer in a foreign country you might want to have some familiar food but it´s not necessary.

The second week of Inno: Pitching the idea

This week we were given the assignement to come up with a fresh and good customer need based idea and to then pitch it to potential customers and/or people who'd might be involved with the product or service or any type of final result of the idea to find out if fulfilling that need would actually benefit the person somehow. We used the SRI  International’s  Elevator  Pitch  Worksheet and it's NABC-method, especially the letter N (representing the Need) and the letter B (representing the Benefit).

First we had to figure out a target group whose needs we'd be observing more closely. We ended up with the group Travelling people (especially those who travel abroad) because that's a group everyone of us has easy access to when it comes to pitching and everyone has more or less experience of it. The idea for the need was Familiar food in a foreign country

So this is what we started to work with. The idea about pitching was to do it a couple of times - the goal was to reach 9 pitches to assure if the idea was good and modify it on the path to make it more suitable. The next posts will be about the actual pitches!