12A- Figuring Out Buyer Behavior

Segment: The portion of the population that takes an elevator at least once a day in a multi-level building (residential, business, recreational).

When does the need take place? All the population within my segment experiences this need when taking the elevator during a busy time of day. According to my interviews, mornings, lunches, rush hours, dinnertime. These all add up to about six total hours everyday of incremental amount of time being wasted waiting for the inefficient elevators. This need takes place about 10 minutes per day per person, which really adds up when you consider the amount of people on earth that use elevators in multi-level buildings.

When do they become aware of the need? Elevator Patrons become aware of this need when the time waiting passes a threshold. Based on my three interviews, this threshold is 30 seconds. The people that I interviewed are elevator patrons and programming students. They not only have a grasp of the required effort to produce the solution to the opportunity that I am following, but they also understand the issue in depth. Living on the ninth floor of an apartment complex makes the problem easy to understand. The 30 second threshold is quantified by taking the median of the reported thresholds from my interviews.

What do they do to solve the need on their own? There is not a lot that one can do when an elevator is going slowly, or an elevator ride is being stolen from them other than take the stairs. However, if a patron lives or works on a high floor, going down the stairs seems almost as daunting and time consuming as having to walk up them, should they be stuck on the ground floor.

Summary: Based on my interviews and the information revealed by all of them, I found that much more testing is required for the need to prove to myself and those that I would sell the product to that there is a true need for it in the elevator/real estate industry. The 30-second threshold helps the start of that research and can be included in a final presentation of this opportunity.

Conclusion on segment in terms of need awareness and information search: Unfortunately, patrons only become aware of their need once their threshold has been passed for waiting for the elevator. This makes the need not only preferential, but also hard to target. Luckily, however, there is almost nothing people hate more than walking up more than 2 flights of stairs to get to work or getting home after a long day. This is the equivalent of information search for this situation, just because there is nothing a regular person can do about a slow or mismanaged elevator.