Business Strategies, marketing planning and consulting

So you think you have the perfect product. Maybe it’s an all-in-one toaster, rice cooker, and coffee maker. Or a telephone that auto-dials contacts at pre-programmed times, making that Sunday afternoon phone call to mom easier to remember. What about a toilet paper dispenser that automatically re-orders toilet paper from the local supermarket when the roll gets low? Regardless of your product is, one thing is certain: you will need to identify the consumer or consumers most likely to purchase it. When brainstorming to come up with your target consumer, designing a flowchart linking potential consumers to the product will, no doubt, be useful. Mind Maps are an effective and creative way to design product-to-consumer flowcharts, and they can help facilitate the brainstorming process surrounding identifying your target buyer.

Using Mind Mapping to Put Together a Product-to-Consumer Flow Chart

Mind Mapping is a means of depicting information, or “mapping out” ideas using words, images, colors, and other visual representations. Information constructed in this manner is thought to stimulate the brain’s natural learning functionality, because it makes use of several learning pathways, not just one. With Mind Maps, the brain can process not only words, but colors and images as well. This engages multiple areas of the brain, allowing thoughts to flow more easily and intuitively.¹ Mind Maps are, therefore, a natural choice for brainstorming to create marketing flowcharts that help identify buyers.

The first step in creating a product-to-consumer flow chart is to represent the product as the central topic of the Mind Map. This topic should be located in the center of the map. Next, the main uses or functions of the product should be attached to the central image, and listed on “branches” flowing from the image. Any product sub-uses that you feel are important to note should be listed next, and attached to the “branches” on “child-branches”. Lastly, decide which groups are most likely to benefit from the uses or functions that your product offers, and attach them to the uses/functions using more “child branches”. The attached Mind Map depicts a flow-chart connecting the a product called the “Video Game Cell Phone” to its potential consumer(s) in the manner described above.

Identifying Consumer Target Groups From the Mind Mapped Flow-Chart

As the Mind Map shows, consumers 18-24 are most likely to benefit from all four of the listed uses/functions. Therefore, you might decide that 18-24 year olds are the most likely target base for your product. However, 25-34 year olds appear to likely benefit from three of the four uses your product offers, making those in this age group good targets of your product as well. A marketing campaign focused on consumers age 18-34 thus emerges as the strategy most profitable to pursue. Though simplistic in nature, the attached Mind Map shows how instrumental it can be in the initial brainstorming process for identifying the target consumer. By organizing initial brainstorming ideas in the manner described, marketers can save money and time when deciding where to put the emphasis for a marketing campaign.

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When undertaking any marketing research project, the first step the market researcher needs to take is to determine exactly how the project will be carried out. Questions such as: “Will this be a computer survey or a phone survey?”, “How many respondents will be surveyed?”, and “How long will the survey be in field?” are crucial to answer before starting the research project. It is often at this point that researchers can get a bit overwhelmed; successfully organizing a research project requires the fitting together of many components. Mind Maps can provide an easy and workable way to organize a research project. By clearly “mapping out” the research project, from beginning to end, using visuals, key words and pictures, the intuitive process of finding out what the consumer thinks can naturally emerge.

An Example of Mind Mapping a Research Project

Consider, as an example, a market researcher who has been hired by her client to find out how well his fast food product rates among fast food consumers. The researcher wants to organize how the study will proceed using a Mind Map. He/She begins by listing the main research objective of the study in the center of the Mind Map, which, in this case, is to find out how fast food consumers rate Product X. Next, he or she lists the main points he or she will undertake in the study, such as “recruit panel”, and “field survey”. These steps are attached to the central objective via “branches” that flow from the objective. Here, the researcher may want to insert any pictures, colors or visuals she chooses to make the Mind Map more intuitive. For example, she may insert a graphic depicting people next to the step “recruit panel”, to represent the people in the panel.

After listing the main steps of the project, the researcher outlines the components of each step, and attaches these components to the steps via “child branches”. Thus, she attaches, “contact panel recruitment firm”, to the step regarding recruiting the panel. Again, he/she may use a visual, such as the logo of the recruitment firm he/she ordinarily uses, to enhance the listed components. He/She then continues attaching components to each main step he/she has listed, as well as lists, via more “child branches”, any sub-components of the components. When she has finished, the researcher has a Mind Map outlining the complete research project, from beginning to end, along with each step that will be taken, and the aspects that comprise these steps. Moreover, since he/she has used colors, visuals and other images to construct the Mind Map, he/she now has all of the information he/she needs to begin the project distilled down into an easily comprehensible layout. The attached Mind Map diagram represents the example research project layout described above.

Beginning the Research Project

With the all-important, and arguably most challenging, step of organizing the research project out of the way, the researcher is now free to begin the work of conducting the study. As shown in the attached Mind Map diagram, all of the steps she needs to conduct the study are clearly laid out. Compare this method of organizing a research project with the method of simply taking notes on a piece of paper. Absent the visual imagery and spatial layout of the Mind Map, the second method would likely be more tedious to comprehend, and thus, work with. The researcher now has the advantage of conducting the study using information that is easily organized and intuitively processed. The research project is ready to commence.

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