Harvard Marketing guru, Clayton Christensen gives a lecture on how to better understand your customer. I transcribe it at length here:
One of the big fast food restaurant companies was trying to goose up the sales of their milkshake product line. They segmented their markets first by product category: you had the main meals over here, and they had the deserts over here that were categorized by product; they could tell you exactly how many milkshakes were sold by Mac Donald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and so on. And they also segmented their markets by demographic. So they could give you a demographic profile of the people who were most likely to buy it. They even had psycho-graphic profiles of these people. So they would invite people who fit those profiles into conference rooms and say “Could you tell us what we could do to our milkshake that would cause you to buy more of them? Do you want it chocolatier, creamier, chunkier, chewier, cheaper…?” And they would get very good feedback. They would then improve the product, and it never have any impact on their sales or profitability whatsoever.
So one of our colleagues went in and just stood in one of their restaurants for 18 hours, with the question on his mind, “Gosh, I wonder what job people hire a milkshake to do for them?” So he took very careful data on: When did they buy it? What were they wearing? Were they alone or with a group of people? Did they buy a meal with the milkshake or just the milkshake? Did they eat it in the restaurant? Did they leave? It turned out that nearly half the milkshakes were sold in the very early morning. It was the only thing they bought, they were always alone and they always got in the car and drove off with it.
So the next morning he comes back and he confronts these people as they are leaving the restaurant with the milkshake in hand and he asks them “Excuse me please, but can you tell me what job you were trying to get done for yourself when you came here to hire this milkshake”? As they would struggle to answer, he would say “Well think about when you were in the same situation, needing to get the same thing done, but you didn’t come here to hire a milkshake, what did you hire?” And it turned out that they all had a similar job. That was, they had a very long and very boring commute to work. They just needed something to do while they were driving. One hand had to be on the wheel, but God had given them this extra cup holder, and they just needed to keep busy. They weren’t hungry yet, but they knew they’d be hungry by ten o’clock, so they wanted something that would thunk down in their stomach and stay for a while.
“So what do I hire when I got this job to do? Well, come to think of it I hired a banana last Friday. But it didn’t do the job well at all. It was gone in two minutes, I was hungry by 7:30; and yeah I guess I hire donuts on occasion, but they get my fingers sticky, it gets the steering wheel gooey; and I hire bagels, but they are dry, tasteless, crumb all over my clothes; if I put cream cheese or jam on them I gotta steer with my knees, and then if the phone rings that’s a problem. And I remember once I hired a snickers bar but it made me feel so guilty that I never hired one again. But let me tell you, when I hire one of these milkshakes, it’s so viscous, that it easily takes me 20 minutes to suck it up that think little straw. I have no idea what the ingredients are, but I do know I’m still full at ten o’clock, and it fits right in that cup holder.”
And it turns out that the milkshake does the job better than any of the competitors. The competitors are not Burger King milkshakes, but bananas, donuts, bagels, snickers, and very importantly the milkshake is competing against boredom. Because it’s so inconvenient to find your way to that restaurant, and then you gotta to wait in the drive though lane or the line inside to get it, so a lot of times they just drive to work bored out of their tree.
Instead of considering only the attributes of the milkshake, this approach considers the whole context in which the customer is using the product. What do customers really seek to solve in their situation whey they bring their custom to this product?
For a number of years I’ve been using this method to better understand what employee-customers get from work. And I’d like to do the same with you right now. Ask yourself this question: what job do you hire your job to do for you? Take a few minutes. Think about it before continuing below. See if you can write down at least three or four. If one of the first ones you think of is “to give me money” take it a step further and ask what you want the money for.
I’ve asked this question of many people. And the responses have included the following. I hire my job:
- to give me puzzles to solve
- as a place to hang out with friends
- to make things
- to be a part of a team
- to learn
- to make me look good at parties
- to make me unique
- to help others
- to protect or nurture my family
- to help me buy other experiences
- to get me access to circles from which I would otherwise be excluded
- to be my stage and my audience
- to play dress up
- to escape my family
- to provide structure to my life
- to leave a legacy
- to be independent from my husband
- to give me messes to tidy up
- for the thrills
- to reward the trust of the people who helped me to get here
- to give me a field on which to compete
- to be my creative medium
Why is it important to frame the question as “the job you hired ____ to do?” It’s a question that reaches beyond the surface attributes of a particular product, to the why of the product. If I asked you which of three variable speed drills you like, you might make some distinctions around size or grip or drill speed. But If I ask you what job you hired the drill to do for you, you would say “to make holes”. And then we could develop a much deeper understanding about what good hole making is like, how well the drill satisfies that objective, and what other products besides drills might be competitors.
So when we ask the question about job, we are reaching around the limitations imposed on our thinking by the standard model, according to which the only answer to question of what we hire our job to do for us, should be “to give us money.” Of course money is important, and is behind three or four of the common answers (Buy Experiences, Take Care of my Family, Take Care of Myself, and to some extent Look Good at Parties). But the value being received by workers goes well beyond a paycheck. The standard model implies that work is something we don’t want to do (that’s why we have to be bought), but when you look at this list – Puzzles, Messes to Tidy Up, Help People, Leave a Legacy, and others, it’s clear that work itself has value to the person doing the work.