Are some customers better than others at developing new concepts? Professor Donna L. Hoffman at the University of California Riverside thinks so. Emergent customers have a unique ability to “wrap their head” around a new concept and improve it. She created a scale to identify them so companies hear the voice of the “right” customer during new product development. Emergent customers are better at imagining how concepts address latent unmet needs. Dr. Hoffman describes it as a “unique constellation of personality traits and processing abilities that enables such consumers to engage in a synergistic process of visualization and rationalization to improve product concepts.”