Juha-Pekka Ahvenainen, Markus Alavaikko

We participated design breakfast arranged by Kuudes. According to their web pages Kuudes is Nordic insight, strategy and design agency. They have been doing motive based profiling of the customers for over ten years and they have published their latest studies last year. Kuudes has found eight different Finnish customer profiles based on different motivations. You can see those from the picture below.

Source: http://theinformedconsumer.fi/finnish-study/

Different kind of profiles appreciate different kind of things. This comes close to different kinds of values of life. Profiles also get irritated about different things. They are categorized to x and y axis according to conservation vs. openess to change and according to being selfish or selfless. From the web-pages of the study you can find more detailed information about different profiles. There are insight about profile´s behaviour and demographic details. Moodboards and checklist are also used to visualize the profile.

Picture: moodboard of the dreamer

You can also find videos from the web-pages that show you how different profiles choose their daily foods. There can be found many kinds of opinions which foods are healthy and which are not. Different profiles adopt services in different stages as you can see from the picture below.

We found these studies very interesting, but what we can do with all the information and data about these eight profiles? We think service designers can really use this data to design personalised services and products for different profiles. Or at least we can use these ground surveys as a stepping stones to our own service design projects. Kuudes has done very nice work and their work encourages us as service design students to dig deeply those human insights, motivation and values in our own projects.

Last but not least here are some guidelines how to do your own motive based profiles, shared by Kuudes.

• Profiling must be done and seen as big picture because different profiles are related to eachother.
• Profiles have to be based on deep customer insight: motives and values.
• Clarify organisation´s inner needs
• Clarify who are going to use profiles
• Final results should be easily available to all members of the organisation
• Profiles should be visual and inspiring
• Co-creation in organisation supports implementing
• You have to also understand the future, on which direction things are going in crucial fields