 Hi, everyone. My name is Deepa and with me are my colleagues Neha and Kavita. Today we're going to talk about research methodologies. The entire conversation has been about how do you understand customers? The key thing towards innovation is really getting a good sense of who your customer is. But you will be surprised how many companies and people we come across that says, hey, you know what? It's about going for a walk with your customer. It's about just having a conversation with your customer. And what we hope to convince you of as you leave the room today at the end of 45 minutes is that there's actually a lot of method and rigor that goes into understanding people in the shortest time possible. Right? Sometimes we work with banks and research is believed to be this longitudinal study of almost 15 years. Gosh, you know, so much changes in these 15 years that we question a lot of the existing practices of research. Another big myth that we try to bust is that surveys are very effective tools for understanding people's behavior. Time and time again, there are examples where, guys, can you hear me? Okay. The mic's not on. Could we turn the mic on, please? You can hear me? So, time and time again, would you guys mind coming here so I don't have to, like, turn my neck? I'm extremely lazy. I understand that. Yeah. So we're just getting started. We'll introduce ourselves once again. Yeah. Thank you. You know, surveys are used as a technique to understand user mental models and behavior. And while there are lots of really good applications for surveys, understanding mindset and behavior is not the best through a survey. Right? How many of you in the audience are familiar with behavioral economics? No one? You should take a look and read something about Dan Ariely is someone that I follow a lot. Fabulous guy talks about how, you know, the power of defaults. Really understanding people's behavior. So I'll tell you a quick test that we did. We were in a building with lots of offices. And one thing that we asked is, when the electricity bill came in every month, we asked the watchman to give us all of the bills. We did one thing. We put a smiley face if the bill was less than the previous month. And we put a frowny face on it if the bill was more than the previous month. And this we did for all of the tenants in our building. Over a period of time, all the bills turn to smiley faces. Right? That is what we call behavioral economics. Understanding people's behavior and what are those little triggers that you can communicate to cause that change over a period of time. All we did was smileys. We didn't do any training. We didn't do any talking. They just got a bill with a smiley face and they understood that they were on the right track and it caused the right behavior to happen. So it's rare that you can get these types of things with surveys. So today what we're going to talk about is how can you use research techniques to really understand what the customer wants, to be able to know them, know the customers possibly better than they know themselves. I understand we have a mixed crowd today. We have a few folks that understand research and have done research before and then a few folks that want to understand what research techniques are all about. If I can see a show of hands, how many of you are familiar with the basics of research? Okay. So about half and half, as I thought. So what we'll do is we'll paste the conversation in such a way that we'll first give you an introduction and then we'll turn it up a notch and talk about more combination techniques. So today with me, my name is Deepa. I see a few more people have come in. So we'll do the formal introduction and get started. My name is Deepa. I'm someone who started off as an engineer. I actually wrote operating systems for a career. I moved to really understanding customers through my career and became a designer that learned on the job and then moved to be product management and strategy. So till more recently I worked in a company called Intuit where Intuit was synonymous sort of with understanding customers deeply and inherently and something that we prided was across the DNA of the organization. Two years ago, I founded my own company called Pensar. We're a design strategy and innovation consulting firm and basically what I did at Intuit by partnering with the founder to pioneer design thinking at Intuit, we brought that out and said what if we as a consulting firm can help people internally understand how they work, how they should work differently and to help them understand their customers so you can create product solutions and services that really delight them. So our tagline is actually awesome by design and very conveniently since I've been a product manager, a designer, a strategist as well as an engineer, very conveniently I'll keep changing to OAs engineers as designers. So bear with me while I do that. Neha is one of the best researchers I've met. She's got deep understanding of how to understand customers, how to get into their mindsets and really understand them better than they understand themselves. Kavi is actually an engineer by training. She did some really fun work with I keep forgetting that name but it's what and what is it called what brewing industry? Yeah and she actually has a really fun name for a really fun job. What is that science that you fermentation science and I'll let you guys decide what that is. And together we're going to talk about research methodologies that we use today and ones that we believe we've innovated to really truly understand customers. But before I go into research methodologies I want to give you a little bit of a sense of who we are. And we think it's really important to have a variety of cultural experiences. Why? Because on the team we want to think you know we want to have divergent thinking. We believe that divergent thinking is synonymous with innovation and really necessary. So you'll see Neha's profile here mine as well as one of our leaders Venkat and you'll see that we've actually lived in different countries. And what we bring with us is that richness of different experiences which we believe helps us connect the dots from customers in very very different ways. Another area where we have a lot of diversity is actually in terms of our functional experience. As I mentioned before I started off as an engineer. Kavi started off with fermentation science Neha actually started off in media. We have people from a product design background of marketing and business background and we think again that's another form of diversity that's really important. But we don't stop there as all the talks we've heard today you know the world around us is continuously changing and we think it's important to one learn from everyone because when we come out here and we teach what we know honestly we learn more than we give away. And so we constantly teaching we teach in all of these universities. I've had the great fortune of a Harvard Business Case Study being written about my work. And so I get to go to Harvard and Stanford and teach that case study as the protagonist. And I have to tell you that every time I do it I learn far more than I teach and that's what keeps me going. As a company we have a bunch of different services. So on one side you see products services processes that we innovate for our clients customers. And on the other end it's all internal focused. What does the company need to do from a business transformation standpoint a business model transformation standpoint. What do they need to do from a cultural transformation standpoint. And sort of the buzzword now is digital transformation. You'll be so surprised at the number of companies that come to us for digital transformation. But really what they do is they take the human process today and they try to digitize it. Versus understand what are the goals of the human beings that are doing the process today. And then look at the advantages of really digitizing that process. So you might say gosh these are all a bunch of very very different services. The key thing and the key talent that we all have at Pansar is really that of deeply understanding human behavior. We think that's our secret sauce. We think that that's what makes us different because we don't look at problems only from a business standpoint only from a cultural standpoint. We look at it from understanding human behavior. So even when we go into companies to help them be more innovative. The first thing we do is not teach. The first thing that we do is research. We talk to all of the stakeholders of the company to understand what are things that are working. What are things that are not working. What is the difference between the say do ratio. And we think that's really important to do why because that's when you truly understand the culture of the organization and you're able to articulate the gaps that they have. A lot of times we get asked gosh you know do you understand our domain really well. Recently we were talking to a large FMCG company and they say well show us some examples of work that you've done in the FMCG space. Design is agnostic. To verticals. In fact you'll see in the two years that we've been around we worked with these companies across all of these domains. And the beautiful thing about us is we co create with the client. So we actually plan our exit plans. Before we begin to work with them. Why is that important because it's important for us to build that internal capability. I've worked on the other side. This is the first thing that I've had as a consultant. How many consultants in the room. Just two of us. There's one more. It took me I want to say months to be able to say the word consultant and not cringe right because my entire career I've been on your side of the table working in product companies. And what happens when you work with consultants is one. You try to get you get a picture that sort of a pie in the sky. Maybe 10 percent of what you actually implement. So what we've done is we co create. I know many companies do this rather successfully and we're one of them where when we create something where we innovate for the organization we're building it with the organization. So there is that sense of pride accountability and ownership that comes along with it. But remember what I was talking about design being domain agnostic. This way we don't really need to learn the domain. Why. Because the people that we're co creating with already know the domain. And we get to look at things from a very fresh perspective. And as we talk to you about case studies we'll tell you about the fresh perspective we were able to bring because we didn't have that domain expertise. Right. So we think it's actually fun to be working with customers in that co creation space to be able to draw our strengths but catalyze it with that of the organization. Whether we're solving an internal problem or a problem that's more external focusing in terms of their clients customers. Does that make sense. Yeah. Every consultant has to have their own design thinking process. And this is ours. It's not that different if you look at it. How many of you in the room are familiar with design thinking a show of hands. Okay. Would one of you brave a guess and help define design thinking for me. If I try to go to simply then rather than creating a very long and journey towards building what you really want. Building something you know maybe quick and dirty to begin with and exposing that to the market. Learning from that iterating over building something bigger that ultimately you reach to what you really want to be. Awesome. Yeah. Being iterative. Yeah. Yeah. Iterative and learn from customers. Keep learning. You shorten the learning cycle rather than you know kind of having a very long one. Absolutely. Thank you. Any other thoughts on. Yeah. So what I could understand of design thinking is you put the customer in the center of things. You put yourself in his shoes. You think what he thinks. You do what he does. You feel what he feels. And then you look the word around yourself. Nice. And then you design and you build up a software around it. Absolutely. Fabulous. That's amazing. Any other thoughts on design thinking. So does one more. I think design thinking is a combination of few things. Collaboration and creative spaces and process and process what you have here. Because there are various versions of it. But yeah. Yeah. A combination of all these things I would say. This is fabulous. It's always great when the audience answers questions for you. You don't have to do it. Design thinking is a process. Absolutely. Right. But in our opinion it's a mindset. Right. It's the way you approach work to do it rather iteratively to think differently and hence innovative. It's about putting the customer in the middle of everything that you do and looking at it as a process. Bringing in that rigor. The biggest myth is that innovation comes to people. You know that aha moment that Eureka moment that suddenly things all suddenly make sense. Right. Now if you're Steve Jobs it probably happens a lot to you. But for the the rest of us that are mere models it becomes really important to be rigorous about our creative process. You can't be in India not have an analogy to cricket. Right. So it's not like Virat Kohli comes in and plays his game just because it's nature. It's a lot of rigor and practice at the net that gets him to play the game that he's playing. And so innovation is exactly like that. It is something that can be nurtured. It's not just nature. And it is something that's rigorous. But most importantly it's a mindset. So for us design thinking is not the end. It's the means to the end of that innovation. It's the means to the end of creating those awesome experiences that completely revolutionize the customer's life. That's what design thinking is. And the principles of design thinking are as follows which is you start with the discovery process. You start as Alan was talking about. You start with what you don't know you don't know and try to uncover that as you go along. But then it's about getting to insights. Insights that are about connecting the dots in interesting ways. And this is where that diversity the cultural diversity that functional diversity is what we believe really important because then you start to connect the data points that you've got from customers in interesting ways but with empathy putting the customer in the middle. These insights inspire innovation and it's all about falling in love with the problem and not the solution. The next step I mean as human beings we're all genetically engineered to solve problems and engineers more so right. You see a problem right away you're thinking about all of the solutions. And you fall in love with your solution not the problem. So we think it's really important to pause after you've identified the problem fall in love with it and be incessant about gosh you know how do I solve it how do I solve it better. And to really go broad explore multiple ideas before you narrow down and very quickly rapidly experiment with your customers. How many of you are familiar with lean experimentation. Yeah a few of you. So that's what rapid experimentation is all about. It's not to test your entire process or your solution or your service. It's to start with the key assumptions. Those key assumptions without which your entire idea falls flat on its face. Try that first. Assess that first and then work through the rest of your product. Right. Today we're going to focus on discover which is really about searching for what we don't know we don't know. And a lot of times we say hey you know what the research objectives are X Y and Z. But what we find is when we go in and start to do maybe about a week of research. We say we come back and we say now let's debrief. Let's debrief and now write down what we know and what we still don't know and what we hoped we knew. And we keep iterating on our research methodologies to really get to that bottom point. So broadly I would say you have multiple research types. So I'm sorry for those folks who are already aware of these research techniques but for those of you that don't thought this would be useful. So there are multiple research techniques. They're different methodologies and they're very different research types that you can do. The one that we focus on is primary research. Primary research is when you're sitting or connecting with the person that ultimately uses your product. Secondary research is one where you go and look at what other people have done. Let's say we're looking at attitudes towards finance which is one of the projects we're going to be talking about shortly. In that project we wanted to really do primary research and connect with them customers but we also wanted to know what do other people already know on this topic. And so we look at information that's extremely generously communicated already on the web and inform ourselves so we don't have to reinvent the wheel. The next stage is to really look at methodologies that go broad to explore multiple dimensions and then start to narrow down when you say you know what I know the problem is around this area now I want to deep dive and go in. So you have methodologies that are both convergent and divergent in nature. And finally the techniques. What are some of the techniques that you guys could use for research? Anyone brave a guess? Sorry. Interviews, yeah. Surveys, data collection, field study which is interview and brainstorming with the customer. Okay. Sorry. Gemba. I'm not familiar with that. Okay. All right. So a version of field study. Ah, okay. We call that wild safaris. Yeah. Correct. Great. So as far as techniques are concerned, there are visual techniques, there are observational techniques and there's interview techniques. A lot of us focus on interview techniques. Why is it important to see what people do and not just hear what they say they do? Why do you think that's important? Yeah, absolutely. People say different things, but actually do different things. And why might that be? Bises. Okay. What else? Got it. Okay. Visual communication could be far more effective. But my question is why do they say something and do something different? Why is there a gap between the say and the do? Are they terrible people? How we project ourselves is different. Yeah. And we think the reason for that is people, all of us, human beings, we speak in the form of intention versus real behavior. And when you're creating solutions, you want to create them for real behavior, obviously, unless of course you're in the exercise equipment, which you just want to sell for intention. So for example, if you came to me and said, Hey, Deepa, how do you start your day? And you were trying to create a efficiency software product. I would tell you, you know what, I go in, I look at my to-do list on Evernote and I look at my calendar and I prep for meetings. I make little notes on Evernote. I write my to-dos and all of the key objectives I have for the day. If you ask me to show you what I do, I'll show you my Evernote. I'll show you my calendar. I'll show you even the notes and you'll see it fairly updated. If not right away, maybe, you know, at least yesterday's notes. But if you see what I do, I'm probably running late. Neha is calling me saying, Hey, you know what? We have this emergency with this client. So what I communicate to you is very different from what I actually do because human beings, we speak in the form of intention versus real behavior. So it becomes really important for us to not just interview. It becomes important for us to observe, but not just interview and observe, but also use very different techniques like visual techniques to truly understand what customers are looking for. Yeah. Could you just give me an example of primary research? Yeah, I'm just doing it. I didn't pay her, I promise, but that's the next slide. Yeah. Yes. There this time for we will make sure we have questions. Time for questions in the end. Yeah. So these are some of the techniques that we use for primary research. You used an acronym I wasn't familiar with. That's what we call wild safari. Right. A lot of folks do mystery shopping type exercises where you go, you pretend you're the customer. We did some work for 3M in their auto aftermarket department. And what we did was we didn't tell those auto aftermarket departments that we were doing a survey we just went in. Kavya and I just went in with our cars and we said, hey, and we watched that experience firsthand, right? We were doing some point of sale research. What we did was we went into the store and we just sat there and observed. We asked them if we could we said we're from, you know, trying to do a PhD. So we're doing a survey. People understood it. We said if we could watch and they said, yeah, we interviewed them. We watched. We asked them questions again. These are all wild safari where you literally go out into the wild and explore when we get teams to do wild safari. There is so much reluctance. People go, oh my gosh, how can I just go ask people questions? We literally have to push them. But believe you me, once you do it, you're going to be hooked. You will be surprised how much information people are willing to give you. Just recently, last week, we were working with a company where we're teaching them the techniques of research. And we said, you know what? Go out and talk to small businesses in the area. We were on Residency Road and we said, just go out and talk to artisans that you can see. So much reluctance. But half an hour exercise went on to be an hour and we couldn't get people to come back because once they realized the value, there was no stopping them. So you don't need a lot of prep for this. You just need to be really curious. And somebody talked about biases. One of the things you can't be aware of is your biases that, you know, you just they're called biases because you're unaware. So how can you start going in and exploring, not be judgmental with the mindset to learn? Now, we also do user interviews that are far more structured. You have a questionnaire. You go in. You're thoughtful about what you want to ask. You set time ahead with the individual and you go in to understand them. We do the sandwich method, which is interview, observe, ask questions. So they tell you something. You see something else, and then you ask questions about that. Of course, you don't judge them, but you're curious and you want to understand that more. Expert interviews are really important thing to do. However, you've got to be thoughtful about what you do after listening to experts because educated in capacity, that is what experts have. They believe they know how to do something. And in a changing world, you can be in a lot of trouble if you only listen to experts. So listen to them. Note it down. But don't exactly do what they say unless you're convinced of it. Mind mapping techniques. This is something as engineers we do a lot. Mind mapping, flow diagrams. To be able to capture at runtime how the customer is thinking and how their mental makeup is all about. What are their attitudes? What are their motivations? What are their behaviors? To be able to quickly jot it down and just listen to them. One of the key techniques or rules, sorry, that we follow is the 90-10, which is when you're at a customer, you want to be speaking 10% of the time. Not 90% of the time. Next time you're in front of a customer, just time yourself. You will see that that ratio is completely flipped. Why? Because we're so eager to ask them, isn't this the other thing versus just asking them an open-ended question and letting their stories give you the information. So 90-10, I've been doing research literally my entire lifetime, but I'm not sure I've got that ratio right as well. But every time I'm looking to improve that. So these are some primary research techniques that we use. We've also got some secondary research techniques that we use. We look, we're very inspired by emerging technologies. We look at ways, you know, in India, gosh, I don't know how familiar you are, but, you know, the government now has written these payment stacks. UPI, BIM, I hope you guys are using it. I mean, what a technology revelation. Now a bank can do your EKYC, get your digital signature and move money to you in seconds. This is something that's not possible anywhere else in the world. So it's important to understand what enablement technology gives you. It's also important to look at the entire landscape. So when we're looking at, for example, health care, we're not just stopping at health care. When we're looking at automated vehicles, we're not stopping with just vehicles. We're looking at what is it doing to the real estate? If you could travel from anywhere to anywhere, where would you live? You may not live close to work. So these are those non-obvious connects and dependencies that we try to discover by scanning landscape. And finally, facts and figures, a lot of times you need this to convince your clients. Just recently we were talking to a small business client where they were saying, oh, we want to go into the manufacturing space. And we brought up that it's 5% of the small businesses. Is that where you want to focus? If that's where you want to focus, that's great. But bringing in the facts and figures just helps you move the customers in very, very interesting ways. So we've got observational techniques, interview techniques, as well as visual techniques. And we think all three are important. And in fact, you have to use combinations of these to truly be successful. When you're observing, how many of you are familiar with contextual increase? A few. So when you go in and let's say I want to understand a little bit about how you manage your life, it's important for me not to have your the conversation in a coffee shop, right? If I can have the conversation where you normally do your life, your work, your home, then I can see things that are around you that really help. And that helps me understand the environment in which you work a lot better. So that's a contextual inquiry. Show me how later, Kavi is going to be talking about some research that we did for a food manufacturing company around food preservatives. They were like, oh my God, I'm not going to use this product because it has preservatives. When we asked them to show the refrigerator, they in fact had tons of products with preservatives, right? So again, you deeply try to understand their attitudes when you start to do a, hey, can you show me how you do something? The interview techniques, it's not about just the conversation. It's about getting to that uncomfortable why. We were doing some bill management interviews and we kept asking the gentlemen, why is that important to do? Why is it important to pay your bill some time? And finally he yelled at us. He said, to stay out of jail, that's why, you know? Or have a good credit history, that's why. That's when you know you've gotten to the bottom of it and then you back out, right? You really want to be curious. You really want to ask those questions and asking open-ended questions. If I asked you, hey, do you like tea or coffee? What would your answer be? Coffee. But perhaps he actually likes soda. I never gave him that option. Why not just ask him, hey, what is your beverage of choice? What would you like to drink? That's a lot more open-ended and you know you're asking open-ended questions when your participant, your customer is stopping for a couple of seconds to think. Because then it's not a coffee, tea kind of response. It's a very thoughtful response that they give you. And in terms of visual techniques, there are some in the Indian cultural context that just don't work. Photo diaries is one of them. This is something that when I was in the US we used rather effectively. We would ask people to take pictures of things that they did in their work when we weren't around. And people would take such fabulous pictures. They'd make photo diaries about, we give them a magazine and ask them to cut up pictures. They're happily scrapbooking for us and telling us what money means and so on. In India, when we gave them disposable cameras and then when we called them to say, hey, we're coming, they randomly took selfies in groups, you know? So it was a total fail. Photo diaries don't work as well in India. But as you pointed out earlier, when we show them pictures of stuff and say, hey, what does this mean to you? That generates stories. So we really used visual techniques but moved away from some of the ones that work in developed markets in India. So we do research, but we spend almost as much, if not more time, synthesizing the research. The so what? When I was working for my technology company, we'd send all of our engineers out into the market to go talk to customers. They'd come back. They basically would be a glorified tech support. They would come back and say, well, nothing's changed for me in the way I do work. And I think that's a failure in terms of synthesizing and asking yourself. So I got all of these data points but so what? A question we often ask ourselves about research is did we need to do research to get these insights? Are they insightful enough? And so we're constantly checking ourselves. We don't wanna, again, repackage things that customers or I mean, clients already know about their customers or about their processes. We wanna come up with non-obvious insights. So it's important to synthesize. And these are various synthesis techniques that we use. I mean, of course there's personas with Alan Cooper. We all know Alan is synonymous with personas but the ability to represent the different types of customers that you've spoken to is important. Empathy map, it's one of our favorite tools. I think somebody was talking about this. When a customer said something, what were they doing? When they were doing that, what were they feeling? When they were feeling that, what do we think about their mindset, their values? It's important to do that whole circle and not just stop at, well, I asked this person and they said this doesn't work for them. Why? And a lot of times in these techniques, you see what the person's doing and you hear what the person says. So the say and the do, you actually have facts. But how they feel and what are their values and their belief system? That's only something that you can infer. Hence, it's really important to empathize with your customers. So these are a few of the techniques that we use. And if you come into our studios and see we've got war rooms where we have quote cards, things that the customer said that we went, gosh, this was a surprise. So we savor these surprises by putting those quotes on our board to keep us honest. These are all the basic tools and techniques that are used in research. But often they're not enough and we have to innovate even on these research methodologies. So I want to take that up a notch in terms of an advanced level and tell you what we've done and go through a few case studies. Would case studies be helpful? Yeah, okay. So we were working with a company that works with reward and recognition systems, right? All of our companies care about that. There are lots of awards. Lots of money spent against it. And yet when you look at employee engagement and ask them, do you feel rewarded? That's one of the lowest scoring questions in an organization, right? Money is spent. We have HR focused on it. We know how to do it. We're people. I know how I want to be recognized. You know how you want to be recognized. And yet this is really, really difficult. So what we tried to do was we went in with our interview techniques and our observation techniques. We went to our clients' customers and saw how they recognized people on service anniversaries, how they recognized people for jobs well done at the end of an agile sprint. We looked at all of those techniques. And we also talked to people and said, hey, you know, when did you last receive an award? How did that work? And after about a week, Kavi and I came back and said, gosh, you know what? We're not, we're just scratching the surface. Everything the people are telling us, we already knew. Why aren't we getting to the real meat? Why aren't we getting to the somewhat? What we realized through that initial set of research where we went really broad was that one, people talked about experiences. And I remember a quote where somebody said, you know what, there was a long line of us receiving employee of the quarter awards, right? A long line of us. And that told us the experience mattered. Somebody was just reading out names. And so we said, okay, the experience of receiving an award matters. The next thing was there were people that a smile, they would crack into a smile and remember when they felt special. It wasn't about being recognized, it was about feeling special. And we said, oh wow, there's something about experience and there's something about special and let's try to uncover it. So what we did was we looked at the deeper meaning of awards. So we took sort of a box of a letter written by the manager, a handwritten letter. We took an email of the same content, again written by the manager. We took little packaged boxes. We took gift cards, things that we know we all receive in our companies, right? And asked them to talk through that experience. When we use this technique of really being visual, that entire experience of opening a box was actually very special. But the gift cards, the most predominant way that people are recognized today was the lowest in terms of making people feel special. Why? Because I got a thousand rupee or even a 10,000 rupee certificate. But compared to my salary, it's a drop in the bucket. I've forgotten about it. I bought a kurtha or something and then I'm wearing it and then I've forgotten it. But the award that had your name on it that a lot of us put it at our desk, it was a really good recall value. People looked at that and smiled and said, you know what, I'm proud of what I did. And it might've been three years ago and it's still sitting on my desk. So we looked at all of these experiences and the emotions that were connected to this technique. And so this is a visual technique, but that wasn't enough. What we needed to do was then do a card sorting type technique where we said, you know, what are the times, like how do you create your goals? How do you measure how you're doing against it? When do you feel that you did something that went above and beyond? And as these people were talking about these visual objects that we were giving them, Kavi and I were writing quick post-its to say this is what they said. We gave them back the post-its and then said, now help us sort it in a way that it makes sense to you. Those groupings were invaluable because it helped us understand how they group things, not how we would have grouped it. We also used another very introspective technique. We gave people a scary blank template and we said, tell us about when you last felt special and what about that experience made you feel special? So this was actually one of introspection where the individual then wanted to think about what they felt like. And it had nothing to do with reward and recognition but it had everything to do with feeling special. How many of you have flown Kingfisher when it was there? They used to roll out a red carpet. If you were one of those premier customers, somebody would actually bring your bag right up and put it in that cabin luggage. Talk about feeling special. Why? Because as you're feeling special, everyone is looking at you, looking at something that they don't have, but you have, right? So it became about that experience that you create and hence we came up with insights that it's about creating that moment. It's not the long line of star of the quarter. It's about that one individual and making them feel special and then stretching that moment through a memorabilia that they can come back to and see. Facebook does that beautifully. They sort of remind you of your memories, right? Never, you know, people share it even. It's something that they've already shared and yet they share. Why? Because they're reminiscing on that memory and we think that that's what's important and so the product and the service that we've created now includes those elements of really helping create that moment for the individual and then stretching that moment over time so they can continue to feel special. It turned out that a monk that had a quote that was specific to an individual and why they got an award, a 150 rupee month was way looked at much higher in terms of feeling recognized than the 10,000 rupee gift certificate that was given to a long line of star of the quarter. Yeah? So this is, we had to use combination techniques to get to this. We couldn't just go interview a person and say, what do you like? What do you not like? Yeah? Mike. The next case study we wanna talk about is with the financial company. What were we really doing? We wanted to carve out financial solutions that are inclusive yet relevant to the newly banked and what we mean by inclusive or the company meant by inclusive was really trying to talk to people, a whole large population of rural India and one of the biggest challenges that we've in our head started to think about what did we want to find out? What did we want to learn? We actually wanted to learn about people's finance management. We wanted to know their mental models about what do they do when things fall apart? What do they run to when a financial crisis happens? What are those really resilient stories that they have and we wanted to actually learn about those things? One of the other things that we wanted to kind of understand was we all have a general inertia towards managing our finance. How many of us today, even in this room, are so proactive and go get her saying, I'm gonna take charge of really either saving or investing and really making my money work hard as we do, right? And that's what we wanted to really, really get down to. So what did we really do? We had two critical objectives in mind. We wanted to understand overall, if we go down to it, is the decision-making process. When do people decide to either borrow? When do people decide to ask for help? What really goes on in their mind to do a particular thing in terms of either going down to ask for money, either going down to ask for any other kind of help? What is their lifestyle behind that entire decision-making process about their management? Sorry. Yeah. And finally, it was about really digging those really deep stories about them and especially the fact that it was a topic called finance. Finance is really, really private. Finance is really, really personal. And even today, how many of us are comfortably talking to even one person about what we do, where we faltered, what we don't have, right? And we were talking to a rural audience where even language was a barrier. So what did we do? What did we have to do? We knew that one-on-one interviews, watching them, all of those techniques which Deepa earlier illustrated, we would do them, but those were not going to be enough. A one-on-one interview was never gonna get us deep stories. We wanted stories. So what did we do? We figured out, we combined a new technique, which is a mix of a game as well as storytelling. So what we called as the monopoly. What it allowed us to do was actually have discussions with groups of people in a gamified manner that actually very organically allowed them to share their stories with us. So it went like this. For example, on the board game over there, there were a stack of cards. And just the fact that they were rolling a die and then moving things on the board, picking up a card, that itself was an icebreaker for them. When they read a card, the card had a scenario. For example, he's actually a guy who works in a small garment textile factory. So for example, and his father was a farmer. So a painted scenario was a farmer, Ram is a farmer, his tractor has just stopped working and due to the rains, he's not got a good crop, but he needs money. He doesn't have enough to go on. What can he do? What happened was while this was not his real scenario, it helped him go back. It helped him connect to things, to scenarios that he'd either been through. He'd heard people been through and it just allowed him to share stories about himself about things that he did, about things that his friends had done. So what really happened was we did this game fight way of really eliciting stories across multiple locations across India. And I'll tell you, one of the big things that came out was like one of the things we learned was there were so many micro ecosystems that they were engaged with in terms of borrowing money, getting help that we weren't even aware of that actually were very comforting to them as opposed to a banking system. We would have never known on a one-on-one interview. Then we'll move to the next case study. This is the case study that Deepa earlier referred to, the one about the ready-to-eat foods company that we worked with. So earlier we spoke, I think you must have heard about confirmation bias. So what the company really came to us and asked us to do, they believed that sales had dropped mainly because people had this perception of preservatives being in the food while they were actually not using preservatives. And they also wanted to come up with a new marketing proposition. So what we did during research was we went out to understand people's perception about preservatives itself. And the other thing was actually to understand attitudes towards these categories of food. So the categories of food we were researching was stuff that are staples at home, the South Indian home, dosa and idli batter. For an North Indian home, it would be rotis and parathas. And this was food we were researching about. So like we spoke earlier, we use a combination of techniques. So we went out and conducted contextual inquiries. What we did was we interviewed people, but we also asked them to show us how, what they were doing. So like Deepa mentioned earlier, we actually went, people kept talking about how natural food was important. Farm to fresh, I mean, farm to table and homemade, locally made batter. In the locality, somebody was making batter and that's what they wanted to buy versus what was packaged because it had preservatives in it. So we went ahead and asked them to show us their refrigerators. And lo and behold, you're seeing jam, you're seeing pickles, you're seeing cheese. So we asked them, what is it? That's preventing you or such a barrier for you to look at batters and rotis that are available. And somehow that made it trade off for the convenience of it. So you had things like jams and cheese that you typically can't make at home, but something that they can control, they want to control as much as possible. So during a debrief when we came back, we said, this does not make sense. Let's see what people are saying things. Let's go test it out in the market, which is why we came down to packaging prototypes. People are talking about being able to see the food, see how fresh the food was. So we use clear packaging. People started to talk about earthy and how important it was. And typically food that's made naturally comes in very earthy brown paper packaging. So we put that product out. We even use a copper vessel to provide that entire field. Funnily enough, you would think a store wouldn't let you do that. They actually let us display these products out there. That whole thing around kind of getting over your inhibition to even go out and conduct quick dirty prototypes. People will actually let you do that. And this was actually Namdari's. It's not like a corner store, right? So you'd be surprised. We were surprised too. We said, what's the worst they can say? No, right? And we went in and we gave it a try. And it's also like you mentioned earlier, iterating quickly and changing that. The other thing we did was attitude mapping because we constantly heard these words. We went back and asked them what those words meant to them. And it was very quick. It allowed them to give us answers as a very honest. So we asked them what they associated with the words natural, homemade and packaged. And this is what we saw. And going forward, these were things that we could then map against what the product was not offering or not communicating really. It's not that the product was not offering it, but versus focusing, instead of focusing on the fact that preservatives, the perception of preservatives was being the barrier, we then changed it around to connect that product back to how it was being made at home. Because all of these products are something they associated with their mothers, their grandmothers, to keep it for them. And that's the messaging, the new marketing position that we went back to them with. And they actually went ahead and created a marketing campaign that went viral, completely viral. And based on the insight that it's about the meal, it's not about the dosa batter, it's about the meal. And it was a Kanakai campaign that was on Mother's Day that completely went viral. So again, it's these insights that help you build awesome products. It helps you really think about the experience, whether it's a marketing campaign, a solution, a process, or a service. When you truly start by understanding the customer deeply, better than the customer knows themselves, then you're setting yourself up for success. You're upping your chance of success, I would say, not setting yourself up for success, because you will fail less, but you'll probably fail more frequently, but when you start with that deep understanding, you've already upped your chances of really innovating and creating those awesome experiences for customers. This is a quick picture of our group. We're about 15, 20 people, all diverse backgrounds, and ready to take on any challenge, but it all starts with deeply understanding the customer. So thank you very much. You've been a very patient and interactive audience. As always, you run out of time for questions. So what we'll do is, it's between you and lunch right now, I believe, terrible spot to be in, but we're here, we'll eat lunch later. So if you have questions, please come by and talk to us. Thank you so much.