Don't Just Talk To Your Customer - Do This Instead.
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." - Henry Ford.
A new product or feature means nothing unless you can demonstrate its value to your target audience.
But it has often been said that customers don't know what they want unless you show it to them.
"If I had asked people what they want, they would have said faster horses." - Henry Ford.
So we find ourselves with a kind of chicken-egg problem. Customers don't know what they want, yet they chose some products over others. But builders and designers like Henry Ford seem to know what customers want beforehand.
Is there a formula for innovation?
Is there a way to know in advance, how to create or design an experience that will bring the customer to you, especially when they wouldn't possibly know what they wanted if you asked them?
Competing Against Luck
Suppose you were the owner of a fast-food restaurant that sold milkshakes, but your milkshakes weren’t selling well. What would you do to improve the sales of your milkshakes?
Would you buy higher-quality ingredients?
Would you survey customers to see what flavors they would like to see on the menu?
Or would you focus on one popular flavor, say chocolate? And make the chocolate shake richer and more decadent?
Any one of these solutions might increase sales. But you can’t be sure. The success of each proposed solution relies heavily on luck.
It’s like throwing a bunch of seeds onto the earth, and hoping that one of them takes root and grows into something that people would like to buy.
Most companies waste resources by taking this hopeful approach to innovation too far because they don’t know how to innovate.
Jobs to be Done
Instead of asking, ‘How can I get people to buy my product?’, we need to ask, “What job are my customers hiring this product to do?”
In his book Competing Against Luck, Clayton Christensen says, when we buy a product, we essentially hire something to get a job done.
Some jobs are little, such as how to pass the time while waiting in line. Others are big, like how to find a more fulfilling career. Some happen unpredictably, like how to get to an out-of-town business meeting in a foreign country.
At the moment, you might be hiring my newsletter to take a productive break from work. Or to satisfy your curiosity about identifying opportunities to innovate or design effectively.
Back to the milkshake problem.
What makes people buy milkshakes?
In the mid-1990s, two fast-food consultants from Detroit answered this question for us. They stood inside McDonald's for 18 hours, taking careful notes as they observed people buying milkshakes.
It turned out that 50% of the customers bought the milkshake before 8.30 in the morning. It was the only thing they bought. They were always alone. And they always got in the car and drove off with it.
When asked what job they were trying to hire the milkshake for, they revealed an answer deeper than just ‘satisfy my hunger.’
One set of customers was hiring a milkshake in the morning, just before their long and boring commute to work. They would also have one hand on the wheel leaving the other was unoccupied during their commute. And though they weren’t hungry yet, they knew they would be hungry later, by say, 10 am. So they wanted something that would settle in the belly.
The milkshakes could last a long time because they were thick. It took the customer an entire 23 mins to suck the milkshake up the thin straw, and it stayed in their stomach all morning. It also fits right into their cupholder, where they could conveniently grasp it with their free hand.
This way, it was more convenient for them to hire a milkshake than to hire a chocolate bar or a bagel or even a banana. The chocolate bar made them feel guilty, the donuts were too messy, and the banana was gone in less than a minute.
However, another set of customers hired milkshakes for an entirely different reason. They hired milkshakes in the afternoon to help them spend some time with their children. A milkshake allowed a dad or mum to have a sweet uncluttered time to talk about what was on their child’s mind. It was always better than going to a movie.
Competing Against Luck
Notice how asking the customer what job they were hiring the milkshake for helps us uncover specific cues for innovation.
Innovation now becomes a matter of improving a specific experience. For the commuters, this can mean making the milkshakes even thicker. You could also make the drinking experience more stimulating by adding chunks of fruit to the milkshake.
Or you could move the milkshake stand closer to the checkout counter, with pre-mixed milkshakes since commuters are probably in a rush.
For the parents in the afternoon, you could improve the experience by introducing smaller cup sizes. So the parents wouldn’t feel as guilty for buying their kid a milkshake. Or you could pair the milkshake with a small toy. Both of these innovations would make the customer more likely to hire your milkshake when they have the job of: “I need to give my kid a treat, but I don’t have much time and I don’t want to spend a bunch of money.”
Focus on the job, not the customer.
Smart innovation isn’t about making a higher quality milkshake for everyone but rather based on improving an experience for a person in a specific circumstance.
With a solid understanding of the customer's context, you will know how to integrate your product such that they could pull it into their lives, and it would provide the experience needed to get the job done.
Additionally, this helps you recognize what kind of brand you'd need to apply to your product. Such that when customers find themselves needing to get the job done, your brand pops into their heads.
Even when designing digital products, the customer is always the wrong unit of analysis. Customers find themselves pulling a product into their lives for different jobs at different times of the day or circumstances, so understanding the job is always critical in developing successful products.
Was Henry Ford right? Yes. The customer hires horses to get from point A to B. But they would only hire faster horses because they had not experienced the novelty and convenience of hiring the Model T.