When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become great at making products people will buy

by Alan Klement

Marketing communications should focus on what a product does for (and to) the customer, not on what it is.

The pitfalls and limitations of defining markets and competition in terms of product categories, versus, seeing markets from the customer’s perspective.

A Job is the progress that an individual is trying to make in a particular circumstance. And for innovators, understanding the Job is to understand what customers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress … i.e., the causal mechanism of customer behavior.

We respectfully disagree with the assertion that answering that question is the key to innovation success (of course that depends on your definition of innovation). How can you expect to invent new value propositions that will create tomorrow’s markets … with an understanding of customer progress that only explains why customers buy products today?

Crikey

Alan’s work recognizes that humans have a compelling imperative to improve themselves.

Even more true of businesses. They must grow or die

Step-change business growth demands that new product concepts reflect the improvement imperative that keeps customers looking to the market for ideas, devices, and knowledge that break from the past.

I struggled with innovation for many years. I finally made progress when I focused on two things: The desire every customer has to improve themselves and their life-situations. How customers imagine their lives being better when they have the right solution.

Very often, innovators think they are studying customers’ needs – when in fact they are studying what customers don’t like about the products they use today, or what customers currently expect from a product.

We can’t build the products of tomorrow when we limit ourselves to the needs and expectations associated with the products of today. Instead, we should focus on what never changes for customers: their desire for progress.

Alignment and distributed decision-making. Insights around a customer’s Jobs to be Done serves as a "true north". Everyone in the business will use the same customer insights to market, design, build, and manage solutions that customers will buy and use to make progress in their lives. This empowers employees throughout the organization to make good decisions that align with the job, be autonomous and innovative.

Nice. Liked "Baked In", and Cagan's 'empowered teams'

At the time, I didn’t understand why it was successful. But now I do. It was because I offered a collection of products that worked together—as a system—to help customers make progress.

Upgrade your user, not your product. Don’t build better cameras—build better photographers. —Kathy Sierra

Besides, isn’t every social action really a personal, emotional desire to gain recognition?

Fuck off

A Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to transform her existing life-situation into a preferred one, but cannot because there are constraints that stop her.

Jamie further explained that Basecamp was made specifically to help companies his size. As Jamie spoke, Andreas’s mind began racing: Basecamp could help my company stay organized as it adds more customers and employees. Up until this point, he had just assumed that his company had hit its growth limit.

Sort of like Challenger Sale. The vision may be latent, and the buyer may not be aware of how to solve it

Besides demonstrating a JTBD well, Andreas’s story also demonstrates that creating a new me (i.e., having a JTBD) is a process. It’s not something that consumers have; it’s something consumers participate in.

The biggest mistake I see is thinking of a Job to be Done as an activity or task. Examples include store and retrieve music, listen to music, cut a straight line, or make a quarter-inch hole. These are not Jobs; rather, they are tasks and activities – which means they describe how you use a product or what you do with it.

Keep in mind that a Job to be Done describes the “better me.” It answers the question, “How are you better since you started using [product]?”and “Now that you have this product, what can you do now that you couldn’t do before?”

Renowned psychologist Albert Bandura described humans as “proactive, aspiring organisms”. Customer Jobs carries this idea into markets, making the claim that we buy and use things to improve ourselves, to make progress. If you’re not describing a Customer Job in terms of progress, you’re probably describing something else.

Customers don’t want your product or what it does; they want help making themselves better (i.e., they want to transform a life-situation, make progress).

Focusing on the product itself, what it does, or how customers use it closes your mind to innovation opportunities.

Similar to the essay on marketing myopia

People have Jobs; things don’t. It doesn’t make sense to ask, “What Job is your product doing?” or say, “The Job of the phone is…” or “The Job of the watch is…” Phones, watches, and dry-cleaning services don’t have Jobs. They are examples of solutions for Job.

Competition is defined in the minds of customers, and they use progress as their criterion.

When customers start using a solution for a JTBD, they stop using something else.

So its always a switch sale, just maybe not from another product

These entrepreneurs were jumping from one solution to another. This makes competition for a JTBD a zero-sum game. For somebody to win, somebody else has got to lose.

They don’t wait until after they’ve finished using a product to determine whether they like it. They measure progress along the way. Do people wait until they lose ten pounds before judging whether a gym membership is successful?

So you must give them a sense of progress early

Customers need to feel successful at every touch point between themselves and your business, not just at the very end when the outcome of an action is realized. Design your product to deliver customers an ongoing feeling of progress.

Over time, you will notice that you need to change the outcomes and goals you deliver to customers. Why? A successful product and business will continually improve customers’ lives. As customers use your product to make their lives better, ...

I think the biggest thing that Jobs [JTBD] encourages people to do, which I’m a big fan of, is to stop spying on customers and start talking with customers. I feel that way especially with software because we have the analytics and the geeks who are building the software; they’re all about tracking and logging and all these data…I always give the analogy of being a retail shop owner and hiding in the back room and trying to learn from your customers by watching the closed-circuit television. You could watch [customers] come in, walk around your store, pick up things, put them down, try things on…or you could just walk out and ask them, “Hey, what brought you in here today? What are you looking for? What other places did you try in the past?” Talking to customers about their motivations is where you’re going to learn the most.

Hell yeah

Ask customers about what they’ve done, not just what they want. Confirm it if you can.

I’ve noted that when it comes to solutions for a JTBD, customers can use only one at a time. When they start using one solution, they have to stop using something else. This helps you understand what the competition is. It also helps you gauge how to price your product properly and figure your revenue potential.

Should you charge less or more? You have two big factors to consider: the amount customers are already accustomed to spending on a solution for a JTBD, and the intensity of their desire to change. The more they hope to change, the more they are willing to pay.

Your guiding star in understanding your customers’ JTBD is their motivation to better their lives. Focus on that. Focusing on functionality will distract you.

Anthony wouldn’t have got the same depth of insight had he interviewed parents only about what they did and didn’t like about the play. Had he done that, he would have ended up getting a lot of feedback about how to make the play better—but only in comparison with other plays.

Good

With these new insights, Anthony and his clients were able to create a new type of theater experience: a theater subscription product. When people buy these subscriptions, each person is put into a specific cohort of customers. Shows are picked out for these customers. Over several months, this same group of people sees the same shows and engages in social events around the show.

Wow!

What anxieties do first-time customers experience? What might prevent customers from using your product?

In analytics - that their staff will use it as frontline roles aren't very technical. Its a high risk purchase. We need to reduce that anxiety

Morgan said, “It turns out that customers had this obstacle in their buying path. They decided what groceries to buy only after they’d figure out when they’d get the delivery. We had it reversed: you would pick your groceries first and then decide when to have them delivered.”

Oooh that's clever

YourGrocer wins because it does what every great innovation does—that is, it helps customers break a constraint.

The last few case studies made frequent references to pushes, pulls, inertia, and anxieties. These four forces work together to generate and shape customer demand.

The first group is push and pull, or the forces that work together to generate demand. The other group is inertia and anxiety, or the forces that work together to reduce demand.

Most innovators focus on the top two forces. They want to know “what customers want” and how demand is generated. They overlook the bottom two forces—that is, the forces that reduce and block that demand.

The innovators featured in this book are successful because they think about all four of these forces.

Push. People won’t change when they are happy with the way things are. Why would they? People change only when circumstances push them to be unhappy with the way things are. These pushes can be external or internal.

What are these for analytics?

Having a second child who makes grocery shopping unbearable is an example of a push. These parents have realized that their lives have changed, and the old way of solving their problems needs to change along with that.

Pull. If a push is the engine that powers customer motivation, the pull is the steering wheel that directs motivation. Customers experience two kinds of pulls: (1) an idea of a better life and (2) a preference for a particular product.

The pull for a better life. People don’t buy products just to have or use them; they buy products to help make their lives better (i.e., make progress).

We are probably putting too much focus on Pull in analytics - their desires for improvement. VOC research can unearth the pushes too. What pain are they experiencing?

It’s important to be able to answer the question “How will customers evolve when they have the right solution?” One way of thinking about this type of pull is to see what happens when customers don’t recognize how life can be better (or refuse to act to improve it).

Psychologist Gary Klein posits that customers must engage in various mental simulations before they take any kind of action. They need to make sense of their desire to evolve, and they need to create expectations of how life will be better when their struggle is resolved. A customer who fails to do either of those mental simulations will not be motivated to make a change.

This is what the Challenger Sale is about

Another entrepreneur might recognize that the struggle is due to his inability to create a proper business model and assume that creating a business model is inherently hard.

There is no demand—and therefore no JTBD—unless push and pull work together. A powerful step in understanding customer motivation is to study and appreciate the interdependencies between push and pull. They need each other. I might be attracted to the idea of owning an electric car from Tesla, but I won’t buy one unless I need a car. I have no push.

Do this thought exercise for analytics