#2 Customer survey - festival visitors

Hey peeps,

we hope that you are having a great weekend! As we promised, in this post we will write about our first customer survey on preliminary assumptions.

Our business model solves a logically assumed problem (pain) of festival-goers having to deal with the hassle of carrying around a small bag/other small items in addition to a jacket. In establishing our business model, we incorporated several leaps of faith that needed to be verified before being further developed. Thus, this week we went out of the classroom, talked to people in order to test these.

The following are the key initial 'leaps of faith' that we thought were crucial to test:

1. Most festival goers would consider it a hassle to bring festival necessities such as smart phones, wallets or water bottles.

2. Most festival goers would find rain annoying.

We naturally assumed that if such hassle and annoyance indeed exist, festival goers would favour our product because it solves the problem of having to carry around key items in bags or even in one’s hands/pockets and also helps repel rain.

So we came to our third leap of faith:

3. People would be willing to pay a premium price for a raincoat/rain jacket which can be transformed into a bag.

To test such underlying assumptions planted in the business model, we developed a short interview that would essentially help verify the three leaps of faith.

The interview consisted of questions such as “Which items do you carry with you to the festival? Why?”, “Does it bother you to carry them around? For which reason?”, and "Do you have or are you willing to buy a waterproof jacket? And if so, how much did you pay for it/what would be a reasonable price?" so that we could get not only the answers to our assumptions (leaps of faith), but also the basic idea of how people ‘get their job done’ when they have several things to carry around in festivals (especially in bad weather). The latter was especially important to us after reading the 'Know your customers' Harvard Business Review article (2016) and understanding how 'circumstances' are key to finding customer needs. 

Because we all prefer colourful infographics to lengthy texts, we made some nice info graphs for you, in which we summarise our findings:

Ok, it's not an info graph. :)

The main reason we decided to make interviews with people in person instead of conducting an internet survey was that we hoped to get some qualitative insights besides the quantitative data. And of course, because it's much more fun. :) 

So, this is what we found:

1. General insight: 

Those who had bags (mostly girls) were annoyed by the bouncing of their bags.

Specifically,

• Those who said that pockets are enough to store belongings felt the least frustration but many were interested in pursuing a more optimal solution.
• Those who said that they had to hold items in their hands felt the most frustration because it limited their freedom to move and dance.
• Those who had bags(mostly girls) were annoyed by the bouncing of their bags.

Interestingly, only 25% said that they were trying to get the 'task' of relieving one's burden done through utilizing the lockers. This shows that people either do not have strong enough urge to solve their problem or that they want to solve the problem but haven't yet heard about Backjag found a suitable (more optimal) solution. Thus, it may be our task to help more people realize the existence of such problem and provide a solution through our product.

2. Other findings

The ease of being pick-pocketed:

Pick-pocketing was a concern for all those carrying a bag with them. As pointed out by respondents during the survey, putting zips on all (of most of) pockets could be incorporated in our product design.

The thing that people hated the most of the rain were mostly due to:

• The cold that arises by the fact that they were wearing cold clothes
• The dirt/mud that the wet terrain creates
• The fact that wet clothes make you feel uncomfortable 
• Not annoyed by the rain per se, but rather by the fact that the rain is destroying the happy atmosphere that can be usually seen during a festival

The neglected waterproof jacket:

Most of the people were surveyed to already have a raincoat or a waterproof jacket at home. Yet most of them did not use it during festivals because they did not find rain protection important enough and were scared it could get spoiled by the dirt and dust. 

This gives us hints on how to configure our product: one of our tasks is to make the fabric completely and easily washable in a common washing machine in addition to making it dust as well as dirt resistant. 

Hikers segment will not be targeted by our value proposition:

We collected responses from 40 hikers about their priorities and needs when hiking, in order to understand if they could be a prospective customer segment for Backjag. We discovered that basically everyone brings a backpack with them during excursions which contains an rain jacket in case of rain, and they see it as a necessity more than a hassle. Additionally, in the backpack they carry many more objects than festival goers. As a consequence, we concluded that Backjag is not likely to add value to their experience and therefore the hikers segment will be excluded from our BMC.

Our concerns after the first customer survey:

Weak demand in good weather conditions

Our sales will be highly contingent on the weather of the day of the festival. While in rainy or

windy days our product will gain traction, on sunny days or even remotely cloudy days people may not find our product interesting. 

A possible solution to the rain issue

Low willingness to pay for merchandise in festivals

A large percentage of our respondents were not fond of consuming goods at festivals since the perception of festival specific goods are more of a thing that you wear 'only at' festivals and not much outside of festivals. Thus our initial thought of selling our product at festivals is at risk. This basically means that we need to re-select or reinforce our "Channels" strategies in order to have a secured channel.

Fashion-savvy respondents

The respondents turned out to be fashion-conscious people who are not too fond of the conventional 'rain jacket' silhouette. considering the fact that our product does not have a sophisticated design at the moment, we need to address this matter by adjusting the design to be more slim and sleek. 

Free handouts of rain jackets

In various festivals, free temporary rain ponchos are handed out in bad weather conditions, which makes our potential customer not interested in buying our product at all. 

Keeping in mind these concerns, we conducted other interviews targeted at a different customer segment - travellers for city trips - in order to test the viability of our idea and different assumptions. The results are soon to come so please stay tuned! :)