Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

You have to understand the job the customer is trying to do in a specific circumstance. If the company simply tried to average all the responses of the dads and the commuters, it would come up with a one-size-fits-none product that doesn’t do either of the jobs well. And therein lies the “aha.” People hired milk shakes for two very different jobs during the day, in two very different circumstances. Each job has a very different set of competitors—in the morning it was bagels and protein bars and bottles of fresh juice, for example; in the afternoon, milk shakes are competing with a stop at the toy store or rushing home early to shoot a few hoops—and therefore was being evaluated as the best solution according to very different criteria. This implies there is likely not just one solution for the fast-food chain seeking to sell more milk shakes. There are two. A one-size-fits-all solution would work for neither.

Crux of milk shake story