Understanding What Makes a House a Home

Client: Colony Homes - a Home Builder and Community Developer

Situation: A developer of single-family homes had a strong reputation as a builder of high-quality homes ranging from entry level to deluxe. However, the company operated in a highly competitive market and wanted to stay ahead of its competition. They wanted to identify innovative features and benefits for new home models, enhance the customer’s experience throughout their home building and ownership process, and ensure the customer lasting value.

Strategy: Conduct an ethnographic study to understand the customer's experiences and latent needs throughout the home buying process. Explore the livability of the home designs and communities, and understand the changing needs of the customer throughout the lifecycle of home ownership.

Tactics: Innovare conducted a Vocal Insights exploratory, visiting homeowners and their families at homes in 12 communities. We conducted in-depth interviews and listened to family members and neighbors tell stories about their experiences. We walked through homes and communities while the subjects talked about what they loved and what issues they were having. We sat in on homeowner’s meetings and listened to concerns about the homes and communities.

We captured hundreds of insights and created a clear framework of the customer’s experience. We immersed the client team into the customer’s full range of experiences, then worked with them to infer customer needs and generate customer requirements.

Results: The knowledge obtained through the research was used to create more than 50 new design features and to identify service improvements and community development opportunities that would create lasting customer value.

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