Customer Interviews No. 3

     From week to week my opportunity and interview strategy has remained, for the most part, unchanged. If you’re unfamiliar with my opportunity, check out the following posts http://cxgoss.blogspot.com/2016/02/interviewing-customers-no-2.html or http://cxgoss.blogspot.com/2016/01/customer-interviews-no-1.html. 

     I once again targeted groups of people that were eating and asked them to read the following business concept and answer a couple of questions: Mugged offers a unique twist on a traditional café where everything will be served in mugs. Since everything will be served in mugs, the food will remain cold or hot longer for a greater period of time; which will allow people to have longer conversations before their food becomes unappealing to eat. The long-term goal of Mugged is to become a unique café that provides a small town feel, even in a larger city like Gainesville. Ideally Mugged will become a place where people can go to have lunch or a cup of coffee and just forget about everything else going on, if only for a couple of minutes.

     After reading the business concept I asked each person to react to what they read. I then asked how likely they were to visit a place like this, followed by what they think the target audience of this café is. Here’s an audio recording of their responses:

     Overall people reacted positively to my business concept, all five people said that they would be willing to visit a place like this at least once. I was kind of surprised that no one had anything bad to say about the idea, which I think it because most people assumed that it was my idea and didn’t want to hurt my feeling. The only thing I think I’m going to change is my target group of people. In the second round of interview I increased my focus from 13-30 to 13-50 because of some of the comments that I received but I think that after this round of interviews that Mugged should target 13-30 year olds.

Week 6 Reading Reflection

     In “Michael Porter: The Five Forces that Shape Competitive Strategy”, I was surprised to learn that “the five forces reveal why industry profitability is what it is” and what the five forces where. After I read the reading I realized that this makes a lot of sense, I remembering learning about some of the forces when I took basic economic classes a couple of years ago but I never applied them in the way that Porter does in the reading.

     I didn’t find any particular part to be confusing. This reading used basic economic concepts that I have already learned and just built onto them while also using examples to illustrate the concept with real life, relatable examples, like the music industry.

     I would be interested in knowing which barrier to entry is most powerful at keeping people out of the market. I noticed that Porter mentioned the importance of several of the barriers but I don’t recall him stated which is most important. I would think it would be restrictive government policy but I would be interested in knowing what Porter thinks. Something else I would be interest in knowing is what is the best way to gain market share. I think that this is something really important for both established companies and ones just starting out. It would be interesting to know what he suggests for companies just starting out in particular.

     In this reading I didn’t disagree with anything that Porter said, which I think is mostly due to the fact the reading drew upon a lot of basic economic concepts that I have continuously heard for years.