Leapfrog the competition by simply having better conversations. When you broaden the conversation with your clients, you better understand their context and can discover new consumer-facing opportunities—ideally before your 
rivals do.

That’s the approach one consumer packaged goods company took when it set out to grow in an untested direction. Though it had been a leading provider of baking ingredients to households for decades, its B2B offerings—to restaurants, cafes, and the like—had grown out of its consumer offering and centered around essentially the same set of products.

To arrive at a new B2B strategy, Daylight and the client began with roughly 100 qualitative interviews and observations. We spoke with chefs who served diners at places ranging from large chains and hotels to Michelin-star restaurants and observed distinguished Relais pastry chefs and artisans in local bakeries to surface their needs, pains, and questions. We talked with their customers to learn what end consumers were expecting from their dessert experience. And we did so in the US and a number of European countries to gain an expansive cultural perspective.

The client emerged with an in-depth understanding of the entire ecosystem from which tailored solutions could be developed. One such solution came from this insight: Many professional savory chefs see dessert as a thorn. It’s an essential part of the menu, very profitable, and underpins many of their customers’ final moments with them. But it’s risky. A small error is ruinous in the way a minor mess-up isn’t in savory cooking, and in terms of focus, desserts are a disruption to chefs’ normal workflow. Understanding their limitations along with what both they and their diners desired led to a partially ready-made concept that would provide restaurants with reliably delicious but easily customizable desserts that chefs could put their signature on.

New offerings are one outcome of going broader and deeper with the conversation with your customers' customer. Added value is another. Understanding your customer’s customers can make you a proactive partner as well as a supplier and help protect the long-term health of your customer relationship. Offering unexpected value helps maintain loyalty and gives you a competitive advantage, a reality that one Daylight client, an automotive parts maker, leveraged.

The client provides lighting and other component parts to major carmakers including GM, Volkswagen, BMW, and Hyundai-Kia Motors. Suppliers typically respond to a specification RFP, meaning the relationship generally consists of pricing solutions according to a detailed specification provided by the customer. Firms who respond to such RFPs can find themselves in danger of being caught in a race to the lowest price. Insights about user preferences often trickle down in the form of OEM specs that come without context or explanation. The client sought to reframe the exchange with one global luxury carmaker by sharing its own research into the Chinese luxury vehicle market and how interior and exterior lighting could impact the driver and passenger mobility experience. It was data the automaker wasn’t collecting.

Through field research conducted by Daylight and the client, assumptions about what the Chinese market wanted from this luxury OEM were disproven, among them the presumption that overt references to Chinese symbolism should factor into the design. A more nuanced meaning of what luxury means to affluent Chinese customers in the context of European products emerged. The insights inspired on-brand lighting concepts that were tailored specifically to the OEM brand's perception and position in the Chinese market, pushing the client ahead of the curve.

If you can’t or don't want to change your commoditized product, it’s not game over. Instead, consider how you can innovate around it: in the way you offer the product to improve workflows (even the logistics of how your product is delivered tends to provide ample opportunity), by supplementing your offer with digital services, or by exploring new business models. New solutions on these fronts can often be inspired by the specific context of a market or a client relationship that companies find themselves in.

Within the mining industry, Michelin effectively acts as its’ opposite of a commodity player, given that the very large tires are highly sought after by mining operators and there are only two major suppliers of them worldwide. It would be easy to assume Michelin could simply sit back and let the laws of supply and demand play out in its favor, but Michelin actually provides a rich example of the benefits of exploring innovation opportunities around one’s products.

In Michelin’s case, the reason for that lies in the fact that the market for mining tires is highly cyclical and often supply-constrained. Only four factories produce these types of tires for mining trucks, and no new factories are planned due to the boom-and-bust nature of the industry. When mining operations worldwide are at their apex, tire shortfalls can be severe. Therefore, whichever manufacturer can make their tires last longest will be the industry favorite, prompting Michelin to look at how to innovate around its tires.

The tires bear a lot: They support mining trucks that load hundreds of tons at a time and last just six to 12 months due to the weight of the load and what tend to be poor road conditions within the mines. Michelin sought to more deeply understand the main factors that cause wear, from overheating to hazardous objects in the road that can be challenging to spot, and determine how mine operators can better monitor those factors and act on them.

The potential business implications for Michelin’s clients was significant: A single set of tires is priced around €250,000, and a typical mine can run roughly 100 trucks. Costs for tires that might last on average nine months therefore add up to tens of millions per year; stretching their lifespan by even a couple of months would mean millions in savings.

The idea of shielding yourself from outside disruption, or even disrupting the market yourself, is a universally appealing one. It’s a difficult thing to achieve. But companies are best positioned to do so when they consciously marry tech-driven innovation (“what can we do?”) with need-driven innovation (“what should we do?”) when looking for innovation opportunities.

Sometimes innovators are best served by moving in incremental steps. Sometimes they should leap ahead instead. When the time comes to leap, being able to back up their concepts with a clear, user-needs-based story lets them build a convincing case for radical measures that wouldn’t be justifiable by looking at the world “from the inside out.”

Radical innovation had been absent in the cell culture media industry for some time. The sole non-formula change that had occurred in the previous two decades was the switch from glass bottles to plastic. Flat sales prompted Invitrogen, which owns the popular Gibco brand of cell culture products, to explore potential innovations based on its users’ workflow.

One might assume the lack of innovations over the preceding years indicated the bottle functioned exceedingly well. In reality, the users just hadn’t been asked about their experience and never thought to ask for anything other than what they knew. The company partnered with designers, Daylight’s Tom Hynek among them, to carry out international field research to identify and address lab technician problems. The Gibco bottle that resulted from those conversations and observations revolutionized the entire bottle concept.

The innovations were manifold, from a label that was more conducive to annotations to an angled opening that reduced the shoulder strain brought on by pipetting. A wider mouth lowered the possibility the pipette would touch the sides and contaminate the contents, while flat sides allowed for stacking in space-starved lab refrigerators. The results made clear how much the industry had been looking for change: The label rolled out quickly while the other changes awaited regulatory approval, and the company saw a double-digit sales increase in the first year due to the new label alone.

While these companies escaped the commodity trap via different paths, the value that UCD brought to each of them is a testament to the fact that even in the B2B space, the focus should be on the people, not just the business.

B2B customer experiences are as emotional as B2C experiences, if not more so when you consider what can be on the line: People’s jobs, careers, and livelihoods are in play if business relationships are soured, contracts are broken, or product and services experiences don’t meet expectations or even cause damage.

For companies caught in the commodity trap, the first and most crucial step is turning what are all-too-often default assumptions and high-level mental models about the customer reality into real, human insights rich in surprise, opportunity, and inspiration. So much value can be born from that: in the form of improved products, innovative services, or disruptive experiments that accelerate toward the future.

How have you used customer insights to differentiate your B2B offerings in a crowded market? Or how could you do so? Which approach speaks most to you?