What is NIHITO? What does it stand for? How does it require you to change your working practices? What is the benefit?
NIHITO is one of the best acronyms for anyone involved in product design, creating services for customers, understanding what customers need, determining strategy for their company, writing customer-facing communications, determining pricing…
It stands for Nothing Important Happens In The Office. Which, in itself is a challenging concept to assimilate. What it actually means, however, is simple: you can’t make decisions about the products you offer customers while you’re stuck in your own office. You have to go out and talk to them.
So, instead of discussing and formulating ideas about your products and services internally, using “gut-feel” and “experience” and using terms like “I think…” and “trust me, I know what’s right”, you go and talk to real customers about the real problems they face every day.
It’s only by engaging with customers (either current, former or potential) that you can confidently claim to have full and proper insight into what their problems are – and, ultimately, how you can fix them. By adopting NIHITO and getting to talk to your customers you can determine:
- What your customers think of your products
- What your customers think of your competitors
- What problems your customers have – that you can fix
- What changes does your business need to make – right now – in order to continue winning new business
- Which products changes should you start to make now – and what the priority order should be
Armed with this fact-based knowledge, gleaned from real customers, you can make decisions on how your business should adapts its offering in the short- medium- and long-term.
The phrase – and, indeed the entire concept – of NIHITO comes from Pragmatic Marketing – a company which trains people on building market-driven products.
Over the next few weeks, we are going to look at how to apply NIHITO as a concept, show some real-life examples and provide some guidance as to how to go about setting up customer meetings to enable you to gather market intelligence to make your products and services excel.
NIHITO is a Trade Mark of Pragmatic Marketing Inc., of Scottsdale Arizona.
Do you need to gather more market information? Do you have full knowledge of what your customers think of your products? And do you know what your customers’ top problems are – and how you can create products that will fix them? Contact us today – we can help you gather the right information from your customers, so you can create the best possible products for tomorrow. Email us now – info@thedigitalzebra.com.
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