Prioritizing the customer's voice

You have completed the multitude of interviews, market research, focus groups, and surveys, and now you find yourself drowning in quotes and observations, but without some structure, all you will have is a mountain of information.

What is required is a way to gather these large amounts of data (ideas, criticisms, opinions, and issues) and organize them into an actionable plan. This is where an affinity diagram can offer the practicing marketer a base-level way to organize these large groups of data into groupings based on their natural relationships. This tool is very popular for brainstorming, but can also provide value by providing the first step in making sense of the volumes of information you may have collected.

In the late 1970s, the US government commissioned an exercise to study effective group decision-making. In this exercise, they asked 30 military experts to study enemy intelligence data and to try to determine the enemy troop's movements.

Each...