Soliciting users to boost the development of an innovative knee pad
"What we appreciated was the fact that there was a scientific basis behind the study as well as the fact that we were able to analyze emotions relative to the speech of potential customers. We saw this as a really huge opportunity and these are interesting methods rarely seen in marketing."
Cédric KAMDEM, R&D Director EXONEO
RyM support in 3 words: Precise • Beneficial • Relational
Precision for the data part, analysis and quality results. Beneficial because it was useful for the project's continuation from a design and communication point of view. And finally relational because from the beginning to the end we were well followed.
Origins of the project: To recontextualize, Exoneo is a startup created in 2017 with the desire to develop medical and prosthetic devices for middle and low income countries. Exoneo then set itself the challenge of revolutionizing the response to handicaps, particulary for people with amputations: this became a reality with the arrival of our first product, which is an articulated foot prosthesis launched in March 2020. As specialists in biomechanics, we decided to go further by offering orthotics, more commonly known as knee and ankle protectors. The first part of the body that interested us was the knee. We made some observations about the knee pad on the market as well as their mechanisms and then we worked on the development of our own model, innovative because it implied a new way of thinking about movement and a differen mechanics on the product which allows to relieve the knee whatever the activity: walking, running ... We were at a stage of development in which we had a finished product, but where we had to find our market.
Problématique : For our second product, the innovative knee pad, the market was much larger. We all have people around us, or perhaps ouselves, who have knee pain... To simplify, this is a market with 14 billion potential knees to help ! So we needed to position ourselves and find a promising segment. 'How do you find this segment?' We aksed ourselves this question for a long time, because since we are involved in a "general public" product, we couldn't just launch it and hope that it would work, we had to prepare it. Nous avions besoin d’éléments pour savoir comment adresser le marché. It's always important to know how to address the end customers and that was a skills we were really looking for. We found these skills in the Reach your Market study, so we decided to do the marketing study with RyM, also it's an innovation that really out from what exists.
Bénéfices retirés : Avec la solution Reach your Market, ce qui est bien, c’est que les données sont quantifiées et qu’il y a une base scientifique derrière. De plus, sur le fait de pouvoir analyser les émotions par rapport au discours des potentiels clients, nous y avons vu une opportunité vraiment énorme et ce sont des méthodes qui sont rarement vues dans le domaine du marketing. Cela nous a fortement intéressés, car comme nous travaillons dans le secteur du handicap, nous avons une forte emprise sur les émotions des personnes ainsi que sur l’aspect psychologique. Donc pouvoir bénéficier d’éléments de réponse sur les émotions des potentiels acheteurs, c’était très pertinent, it allowed us to focus our communication and our marketing. De plus, l’étude a permis de sonder les potentiels clients afin qu’ils puissent voir à ce stade le prototype et qu’ils puissent s’exprimer sur leur intérêt, et sur leur compréhension de l’utilité du produit et de son caractère innovant en termes de facilitation de la vie quotidienne.
Because we had already launched a product, we believed we could apply the same methods and processes except that this product is completely different from the first. The Reach your Market study was a necessary step to gain perspective on what our product was and how people perceived it. Toute innovation a une phase d’adoption et ça, nous l’avions un peu négligé, donc les résultats de l’étude Reach your Market ont permis de revoir certains des éléments de langage et d’appréhender les freins que nos cibles pouvaient avoir juste en voyant notre produit, sans pour autant l’avoir testé ou utilisé. Et finalement, l’étude RyM nous a aussi donné des clés pour travailler sur plusieurs aspects à la fois sur le produit en lui-même ainsi que sur notre communication.
Les suites de l’étude RyM : Aujourd’hui, nous sommes en train de retravailler sur le produit en lui-même, car les résultats de l’étude ont montré qu’il y avait des marges de progression au niveau du design, pour vraiment faire accepter le produit par les utilisateurs. En parallèle, nous sommes en train d’établir une stratégie de communication adaptée et nous menons également une réflexion sur notre ciblage : est-ce que nous allons adresser le marché BtoB, BtoC ou les deux, car ce sont des éléments qui sont ressortis dans les résultats. À l’origine, nous avions la volonté d’adresser plutôt le marché BtoC et the study has perhaps opened up a new BtoB segment for us.
Advice for other innovative project owners: The only advice I could give is that, no matter what the innovation is, il faut trouver son marché suffisamment tôt, because it is useless to develop a product, to innovate and to go too far in the development to realize that the market is not adapted or not ready. This is also one of the reasons why we have conducted a study.
