Being customer-led can lead you astray
How do you create demand when customers rarely know what they need until they see it?
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Customers don’t know what they want.
The French wine, Château Pétrus, is legendary. It will cost you £750 a bottle. How do such winemakers know their customers want such a wine?
They don’t. They don’t listen to the customer.
Winemakers are probably the most customer-sceptic innovators in the world. So they believe there’s no point in asking them what they think.
So the owner of Château Pétrus makes wines that please him.
And there we were, all the time thinking that winning customers requires surveys and analytics to discover what they want.
How do they create demand when ignoring what customers want?
They create something novel - something their consumers’ haven’t imagined. Then, they shape the tastes of the market - the distributors, retailers, the drinkers. They create an ambience around the product, using tasting rooms, enchanting spaces, opulent events and the winemaker as a visionary.
They create something distinctive, something with allure.
There’s nothing wrong with mass-market brands.
Nothing - Except they can be easily copied.
The mass-market wines you can find in most supermarkets follow the traditional business model - making wines that appeal to the most palates.
There’s nothing wrong with listening to customers.
Nothing - Except, customers rarely know what they need until they see it.
When did you know you needed an iPad?
An iPod?
A platform offering us private houses where we could rent out a bedroom?
The Answer?
You Didn’t. Until You Saw It.
Marketing to the Uninformed
In a famous study, burgeoning wine experts were given two glasses of wine, one red and one white. The tasters described the two wines in completely different languages. They didn’t know both glasses contained the same wine - the drink in one glass had simply been dyed red with a tasteless food colouring.
Brands need a unique, compelling story that sets them apart from all the others competing for the same cultural mindset.
Starbucks, Patagonia, Dove and others followed this strategy. Nothing about them is about new technologies, and everything about them is about distinctiveness and a story.
Starbucks founder Howard Schulz set out to refine his customers’ tastes and ended up dramatically shifting the way Americans drink coffee. Starbucks succeeded by creating ‘the third place’ because Schulz had a radical, uncompromising vision for what drinking coffee should be like.
My takeaway: Like wines, most great products and brands are considered great not simply because they ‘taste’ extraordinary, but because of what we believe about them. And they tend to have a point of view - what makes for a good coffee experience (Starbucks, for example).
Customers often don’t truly know what they need and listening to them can lead to the derailing of your business or worse, destruction (which I’ll evidence below)
By completely focusing on the customer, brands risk becoming homogenised and losing their unique identity, threatening their competitiveness
Brands cannot create something innovative and distinct if they only focus on serving existing customer needs. The most successful products and services create something different.
Customers don’t know what they want
I read that Optimizely (one of the biggest CRO testing platforms) tell the story that the most requested tool feature in their early days was the ability to run multivariate tests (MVT). It was not an easy thing to get right, and they invested a lot of time and energy in building it. After releasing it, how many customers used it?
Just 1 per cent.
The software company 37signals also warns against trying to satisfy all customers and losing sight of your core audience and core product. In their book, ReWork, they put it simply “Don’t be a whore to your customers”.
Shoes of Prey in Australia understands the perils of this only too well. CEO Michael Fox admitted that a core reason the business failed after 10 years was that they took what their customers told them at face value.
"While our mass-market customers told us they wanted to customise …what they were consciously telling us and what they subconsciously wanted … were effectively opposites".
Michael Moore, CEO of Shoes of Prey
The key here is not, of course, to stop listening to your customers, but to carefully consider what they are saying, what their true motivations and biases are, and if their needs align with your brand. If they don’t, ignore them.
Peep Laja from ConversionXL says:
"Be brand-first. Have a strong point of view and stay true to your brand principles. Filter all research through your brand lens".
Being customer-led can lead to brand homogeneity
I’m a vocal proponent of CX.
But too many of us get focused on fixing small CX problems, ironing out an existing journey, and as someone said, “fixing potholes in the road with post-it notes”.
With our attention spent addressing micro pain points, we lose focus on creating delightful and memorable experiences. This risks a loss of what makes us as a brand unique, interesting, and even arresting.
By only listening to our customers, we start to become vanilla, with little differentiation.
An example can be seen when looking at the top websites today.
Whatever the category or sector, they all tend to look and act largely the same. Big glossy images, rich media, packed with social proof, fast delivery, free delivery, free returns, and payment choices. The list goes on.
This stuff is important, but when a trigger event sparks a need in a user, what is it about your brand that will force recall? Why would someone seek out your brand over another? Other than habit, a hefty price discount, or a more prominent shelf placement, what trigger event makes you buy toothpaste A over toothpaste B?
If you don’t know the answer to this for your brand, you need to spend more time creating your distinctiveness and less optimising your (and your customers) efficiency.
New Thinking doesn’t address existing needs - it creates them
What was it Henry Ford once famously said his customers wanted - faster horses?
(Except he didn’t say it. There is no source for this quote. Someone made it up, and others - including myself - rinse and repeat it without knowing any better. There’s a lesson here).
That doesn’t mean the idea isn’t correct though. Consumers couldn’t imagine a car.
Steve Jobs knew this and is quoted as saying: “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new”
(He did say this. I checked).
No one said they needed an iPad. Yet, with some brilliant marketing, people began to want one, and a new product category was created.
Nobody needed a fizzy brown sugar drink. But when Coca-Cola started marketing one, suddenly everyone wanted it, leading to one of the most profitable products in the world.
So, if you’re only listening to existing customer wants or pain points, and not spending time and effort innovating in areas they’ve not even yet considered, you’ll never produce anything distinctive, whether physically or emotionally for the consumer.
Not all brands are in the position to be able to create new product categories.
And that’s OK. That’s many of us.
The point is, to think about what is distinctive or new that you could create instead of just focusing on chasing present wants. Does Starbucks sell coffee? No, they sell an idea. Does Dove sell soap? No, they sell confidence over anxiety. Special K doesn’t just sell breakfast cereal, they sell a dietary plan to women under the banner of the Special K Challenge!
Summary
A brand that only listens to customers and always tries to give them what they want leaves itself open to being misled, a loss of identity, and stunted thinking.
How do you get your team to create new ideas and a better user experiences?
Where do you start when customers are often unable to know or express what they want?
Whilst customers know what rubs them up the wrong way or what brings them delight, they’re mostly clueless about how to come up with solutions to fix their issues.
How do you resolve this challenge?
By stopping asking customers what they want and instead asking what they want your products to do for them.
Try to distinguish between outcomes and solutions.
Why?
As consumers we would like to think we can imagine solutions to our problems, but we only know what we’ve experienced. We’ve no training in turning problem identification into problem solution.
Another issue is functional fixedness - our human tendency to fixate on the way services and products are normally used.
Kawasaki asked customers to suggest improvements to its Jet Ski stand-up recreational water-craft. Customers asked for side padding for more comfortable standing. But competitors developed seated models, trumping Kawasaki.
Usually, customers are only able to say what they want if they are given options to pick from within familiar product categories.
Limitations of Listening
Focusing on outcome-based dialogues during user interviews and usability studies takes skill. People tend to talk features, not results, so you must distinguish between outcomes and solutions.
David Ogilvy, often called the "Father of Advertising," had this observation about customers and their desires. "Consumers don't think how they feel. They don't say what they think and they don't do what they say" (A-Z Quotes)
He highlighted the complexity of understanding customer behaviours and preferences, emphasising that customers are often unable to articulate their needs and wants clearly.
Both Steve Jobs and David Ogilvy recognized the challenge of aligning product development and marketing with true customer needs and desires. Jobs highlighted the difficulty of directly asking customers what they want because their preferences can change rapidly, while Ogilvy stressed the importance of understanding the deeper, often unspoken, aspects of consumer behaviour.
Incorporating these insights into customer experience (CX) strategy involves anticipating customer needs and desires through a deep understanding of their behaviour, rather than solely relying on feedback. This approach can lead to more innovative and effective product development and marketing strategies..”
The lessons here?
Beating the competition by being better and harder isn’t a strategy. You need to move away from your competition.
There are purpose brands - and then there are brands that understand their customer’s purpose and needs and seek to help them accomplish that.
Brands that succeed in influencing consumer tastes create a vision of their distinctiveness and create champions.
You don’t need high-tech innovation to be different and to create distinctiveness.
See you next week.
hey Mark, I find they can offer good insight for existing use and incremental improvements but they cant see 'new' products or services. Interestingly, very very few of the great innovations in product and services have come via consumer demand. Such brands have in common an 'idea' that is new and compelling. I've seen too many customer led brands responding to 'cheaper', 'quicker', in the race to stay 'better' or 'different' - a race that never ends and has no final winner. Michael
Solid post this week, Michael. I've found listening to customers to be a double-edged sword. While they often struggle to articulate their desires for new products, their feedback can offer invaluable insights. Engaging in customer conversations has often revealed underlying needs and innovative ideas, ultimately enhancing experiences for others.