The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Creating and Sustainability Successful Growth)

by Clayton

A new set of researchers then came in to understand what customers were trying to get done for themselves when they “hired” a milkshake, and this approach helped the chain’s managers see things that traditional market research had missed. To learn what customers sought when they hired a milkshake, the researchers spent an eighteen-hour day in a restaurant carefully chronicling who bought milkshakes. They recorded the time of each milkshake purchase, what other products the customer purchased, whether the customer was alone or with a group, whether he or she consumed it on the premises or drove off with it, and so on. The most surprising insight from this work was that nearly half of all milkshakes were bought in the early morning. Most often, the milkshake was the only item these customers purchased, and it was rarely consumed in the restaurant. The researchers returned to interview customers who purchased a morning milkshake to understand what they were trying to get done when they bought it, and they asked what other products they hired instead of a milkshake on other days when they had to get the same job done. Most of these morning milkshake customers had hired it to achieve a similar set of outcomes. They faced a long, boring commute and needed something to make the commute more interesting! They were “multitasking”—they weren’t yet hungry, but knew that if they did not eat something now, they would be hungry by 10:00. They also faced constraints. They were in a hurry...