Who are your customers? Can you identify and describe all of the people who will come in contact with your product or service offering? In addition to the people who directly use your product or service, you should also consider the needs of all of the people who influence the decision to purchase the product, those who install, support and maintain the product, as well those who indirectly benefit from the use of the product though they may never use the product themselves. 

Voice of the Customer
"Voice of the Customer" or VOC involves the collection and analysis of quotes and comments from all of the people involved with the product to uncover basic needs and wants within a market segment.  There are many potential sources of customer verbatims including site visits, focus groups, customer satisfaction survey comments, customer meetings, discussions with sales representatives, and customer requests for new product features or problem fixes, to name a few.   By studying these comments within the context in which they were said, one can identify basic needs and wants, perceived benefits, and how the customer would assess whether the need has been satisfied by the proposed product or service.  If organized properly, this information can provide a clear and rich description and map of what needs to be comprehended in the new product or service.

Observational Studies
Sometimes customers can not articulate what they need.  In these cases, other qualitative research methods are deployed to observe and study the customer in their own environment.  By watching customers do what they do and seeing first hand what they actually do versus what they say they do, how they do it, and why they do it that way, we can often uncover latent needs that even the customer did not know that they had.  

Customer Profiles
Once this descriptive customer information has been collected and organized, patterns often emerge that help describe or characterize the customer or consumer segments.   Particularly in business-to-business markets, there are often multiple people involved in the decision to acquire products or services. Being able to identify and profile all of the decision influencers, their role in the decision making process, their level of influence, and their interests or priorities is important in designing products and services that meet their collective needs.

Perception & Awareness
Perception does not always match reality.  Customers are not always rational and may perceive a product to be advantaged or disadvantaged over another when in actuality both products perform identically or the converse is true.  You need to know how aware customers are of your brand, products and services, and how they perceive them rightly or wrongly against your competitors.

Awareness measures what percentage of your target customer recognize your organization or its brand. It also measures what these people think about your organization’s products and services. So, not only should you measure that they know about you, you should also measure what it is about you that they know.