Experts Don’t KNOW Jack!

This summer I worked for a start-up that was developing a product to be launched into the outdoor technical apparel market. My job was to help them identify the biggest target market and the most probable buyer of this new heated jacket.

Having worked in the venture capital industry before returning to school, I was no stranger to identifying market potential and analyzing new products. Much of the work that I had performed as an analyst revolved around talking to industry experts and interviewing likely customers in order to validate a business concept that was under evaluation.

So using the cultivate skills I had developed, I set out to find those experts and customers that would help me predict the potential demand and the likely market response for this new product. I contacted gear editors at some of the most prominent sporting goods magazines, technical apparel buyers, and nearly 100 of the top expedition leaders/mountaineering guides in the country.

Much like the response Herman Miller got about the Aeron chair earlier on, these experts were less then excited about this product. They mentioned numerous reasons for their apprehension from reliability to functionality to novelty to market need.

When asked who they thought would be the most likely buyers of this product, most referenced novice outdoorsman or “technical weenies” to be more specific. In comparison to the mountaineering guides or the technical sport writers, who have spent the majority of their lives in the outdoors using outdoor equipment and perfecting their skills, their clients or readers haven’t. They participate in an outdoor sport sporadically. These are the “weekend warriors”, who want to fit in with the sport enthusiasts – aka the Experts, but have neither the time nor the talent. These “technical weenies” need a different kind of product to be capable, competent and competitive and they look to innovative, high-concept gear to provide that edge.

Unfortunately, I took the feedback from these experts as gospel, assuming that if heavy users of technical apparel didn’t find this product compelling that it probably wasn’t. I used these findings to further justify my recommendation that the company reallocate it resources to the luggage market, where the market size and need was much greater and the resources required to educate the market were less; listing among the most significant reasons for this switch, the relatively lukewarm response from customer surveys.

However, upon recent reflection, I have come to question whether these supposed experts were capable of seeing this product for its ultimate potential. Are experts typically the trend setters or the early adopters of innovation?

Maybe they are, but more than likely their not. When I contemplated why experts may not necessarily see the next trend or acknowledge a novel idea, I realized that much of what an expert knows has taken years to develop. By asking an expert about a disruptive technology or an innovative product, you are asking him to abandon years of experience, which centered on the old approach. Just by introducing this new concept, you force the expert to defend the old methodology or risk saying that that this is no longer valid – that his expertise is no longer valid. Pride and ego are equally important reasons that an expert might not want to acknowledge the next emerging idea, especially if he didn’t come up with it. If you were deemed an expert and knew the ins and outs of a subject matter, and didn’t identify potential needs, it could be argued that you really didn’t know that space as well as you claimed. Perhaps for some, they have too much vested in the old way or the old product to be objective. In the case of the mountain climbers, they knew what gear/apparel worked and what didn’t. This knowledge came after years of trial and error. Trying something new meant taking a significant risk, which most weren’t interested in doing while hanging from the side of a glacier in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. They had learned to adopt the current product offerings to fit their needs and therefore, didn’t see this new product as a solution to any of their problems.

If experts might not be able to identify the next big thing, then what role should they play in innovation?

The best possible utilization of an expert’s domain expertise is in incremental product innovation. This is not to say that experts can not be instigators of emerging product innovation. On the contrary, they have such a depth of knowledge regarding what has historically and what currently exists that they may be able to see through the clutter and create something new. However, their greatest strength lies in their ability to recognize the subtle nuisances of a product and to articulate those differences between offerings in the marketplace – in critiquing and improving not creating.

So leave the coolhunting to the “weenies”, who aren’t afraid to try something new!