An essential part of any endeavor to create new things that people will want is to understand what they could want! Understanding the future customer involves answering the following questions:

1. Who are the future customers?
2. Why do they choose the things they do?
3. What are the essential differences between the different types of customers?

The answers to these questions are not easy because the information and knowledge that is most important is inside the heads of people who you do not yet know. Moreover, the most important information inside people's heads is sub-conscious. This knowledge is not easily gotten because it is tacit, hidden and not readily articulated. It is the process of obtaining this knowledge and synthesizing it in ways that provide the deep insight into the minds of future customers that is the focus of customer understanding.

In particular, customer understanding involves the following actions.

• Find unmet needs & desires

• Capture the essence of the future customers

• Distinguish between the essential types of customers

• Understand adoption dynamics

• Create compelling new concepts

• Test ideas before developing

• Make the qualitative insight explicit

These actions all come together in creating Persona Models that are at the core of customer understanding. Once you have captured the essential aspects of your future customers in a set of persona models, you can use them over and over again to examine the specific nature of how and why your future customers will behave in certain ways. This persona-based customer understanding is a powerful means to get inside the mind of your customer.