Case: Mehiläinen — Finding the Customer’s Voice in Health & Social Living for the Elderly

Here is a case description for Mehiläinen. You can read about the other cases under “cases”. The course lectures start 10th of September — but the groups are already working!

For this project to be successful, the group needs to create good insight about the target group’s needs and desires.

The Finnish social and healthcare system is in a major transformation. Key players in that transformation are private services for the elderly, especially when it comes to housing and living. Much of the public debate around these issues has focused on politics and the system itself. In the current debates, the voices of the elderly and their close relatives is easily forgotten.

The objective of this project is to understand the emotions, rationale, prejudice, and needs of the elderly population whose way of living and services are being designed. How do they describe their thoughts and feelings, and how are these people different? Are there groups and sub-groups who are significantly different based on attitudes, social networks, and feelings? How do the close relatives of the elderly discuss their thoughts and feelings?

The objective of this project is to understand the emotions, rationale, prejudice, and needs of the elderly population whose way of living and services are being designed.

Mehiläinen, one of the big private healthcare providers in Finland, wants to understand better the elderly and their relatives, and how heterogeneous is this broad group of people. Mehiläinen is especially interested in how to design housing and living services for this target group so that the service, communication, and value propositions match the customers’ language. For this project to be successful, the group needs to create good insight about the target group’s needs and desires, and show by designing a service concept how the insight can be turned into an actual living and housing service.

This case is for you if:

• You are ready to dive into the customer’s mindset and thinking — and how to communicate value propositions in an understandable manner to different customer groups.
• You are interested in how different customer groups and types (buyer, user, decider…) should be taken into consideration in digital services.
• You are interested in the health care ecosystem and the customer journey of the elderly in supported living.

Potential target group: Senior citizens and their close family