Competing Against Luck
·
How to Hear What
Your Customers Don’t Say
from: Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and
Customer Choice
Most companies want to stay closely connected to their customers
to make sure they’re creating the products and services those customers want.
Rarely, though, can customers articulate their requirements accurately or
completely—their motivations are more complex and their pathways to purchase
more elaborate than they can describe. But you can get to the bottom of it.
What they hire—and equally importantly, what they fire—tells a story.
That story is about the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of their
desire for progress—and what prevents them from getting there. The challenge is
in becoming part sleuth and part documentary filmmaker—piecing together clues
and observations—to reveal what “jobs” customers are trying to get done. In our
book, “Competing Against Luck,” we define a “Job to Be Done” as
the progress a consumer is trying to make in particular
circumstances.
Jobs to Be Done have always existed. Innovations have just
gotten better and better in the way we can respond to them. So no matter how
new or revolutionary your product idea may be, the circumstances of struggle
already exist. Consequently, in order to hire your new solution, by definition
customers must fire some current compensating behavior or suboptimal
solution—including firing the solution of doing nothing at all. Wristwatches
were fired in droves as soon as people began carrying mobile phones that not
only told them the time but could sync with calendars and provide alarms and
reminders. I fired my weekly Sports Illustrated when I could suddenly
flip on ESPN. Companies don’t think about this enough. What has to get
fired for my product to get hired? They think about making their product
more and more appealing, but not what it will be replacing.
A customer’s decision-making process about what to fire and hire
has begun long before they enter a store—and it’s complicated. There are always
two opposing forces battling for dominance in that moment of choice and they
both play a significant role.
The forces compelling change to a new solution: First of
all, the push of the situation—the frustration or problem that a customer is
trying to solve—has to be substantial enough to cause them to want to take
action. A problem that is simply nagging or annoying might not be enough to trigger
someone to do something differently. Secondly, the pull of an enticing new
product or service to solve that problem has to be pretty strong, too. The new
solution to the Job to Be Done has to help customers make progress that will
make their lives better. This is where companies tend to focus their efforts,
asking about features and benefits, and they think, reasonably, that this is
the roadmap for innovation. How do we make our product incredibly attractive to
hire?
The forces opposing change: There are two unseen, yet
incredibly powerful, forces at play at the same time that many companies ignore
completely: the forces holding a customer back. First, habits of the present
weigh heavily on consumers. “I’m used to doing it this way.” Or living with the
problem. “I don’t love it, but I’m at least comfortable with how I deal with it
now.” And potentially even more powerful than the habits of the present is,
second, the anxiety of choosing something new. “What if it’s not better?”
Consumers are often stuck in the habits of the present—the
thought of switching to a new solution is almost too overwhelming. Sticking
with the devil they know, even if imperfect, is bearable. I refused to upgrade
my mobile phone for years, in spite of all the whiz-bang things my assistant
assured me the new phone could do, because I was comfortable with the
one I had. This is largely because, as Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman has
shown, people’s tendency to want to avoid loss is twice as powerful
psychologically as the allure of gains.
The anxieties that come into play are powerful: anxiety about
the cost, anxiety of learning something new, and anxiety of the unknown can be
overwhelming. Why do many consumers hang onto their old mobile phones, even
when they might get some trade-in value toward a new one? “What if the new one
fails at some point?” “What if I find myself in some kind of unanticipated
situation where I need a backup phone?” “What if . . . ?” Health clubs have
only recently come around to the idea that locking customers into annual
contracts creates so much anxiety that it prevents them from joining in the
first place. Innovators all too often focus exclusively on the forces pushing
for change—making sure that the new solution for resolving a customer’s
struggle is sufficiently alluring to cause them to switch. But they completely
ignore the powerful forces blocking the customer’s decision to make that
change.
Excerpt from Competing Against Luck by Clayton M.
Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan. Copyright © 2016 by
Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan.
Reprinted courtesy of HarperBusiness, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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