Consumer insight drives our user-centric innovation

Many of us imagined our ideal car when we were youngsters and for a lot of us, the exterior design was the sole engine of our excitement. It was only later, as I became a driver, and a frequent car-sharing user, that I realised how much certain interior features can delight or frustrate when you use them day in day out. And not every new car generation seemed to improve this. Now Faurecia and the automotive industry are finding ways to bring consumers more into the design and development process of car interiors and features.

I’ve spent the last thirteen years being curious about what excites consumers, gathering insights to uncover new opportunities, inform creative concepts and product development across industries and across continents. I'm an advocate that listening, observing, researching and analyzing what consumers think, feel and why helps us bust myths, challenge beliefs and uncover ‘truths’ to guide projects towards what consumers really want and need.

I joined Faurecia in early 2020, attracted by its transformation towards a user-centric mindset and way of working. Over recent years Faurecia has built a valuable in-house team combining consumer intelligence, cognitive science, user experience design and evaluation. And for good reason: mobility has a huge societal and environmental impact and people have a real emotional relationship with cars. It’s exciting to be shaping how people experience the Cockpit of the Future and engage differently with mobility.

At Faurecia we use consumer intelligence to help reveal opportunities, optimize ideas and test concepts quickly and cost-effectively upstream in our innovation process. For example, qualitative research on visibility in the cabin in difficult weather or lighting conditions, quantitative surveys to ‘size’ how difficult something as trivial as adjusting one's seat can be. For the more complex briefs, we use external agencies and expertise to go deeper, through ethnographies, online communities and focus groups that enable Faurecia to get even closer to consumers. For example, when wanting to understand what people expect in terms of more intuitive ways to interact in their cars.

Faurecia’s vision for the Cockpit of the Future is underpinned by much global investigation and testing. Using a fact-based approach shows its real value when you succeed in developing and delivering something that is wanted, desired and accepted by consumers. Every question in every survey is the opportunity to learn something new, and often reveals something that we didn’t realize we didn’t know!

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