4 Steps to Launch an Offering (or a Presidential Candidate Like Trump)
Presidential candidates are “new offerings” presented to the American public every election cycle. Here are four steps that I take with clients to help them determine what their customers really want, along with some thoughts about how this approach applies to presidential candidates as well. This approach dramatically increases innovation success rates.
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Define your target market.
Identify the group of people for whom you want to create value. No product or service (or candidate) can be all things to all people. People have different needs, and value the same needs differently. Success depends upon choosing your target market wisely. It should be a market you believe you can address exceptionally well. Success requires choosing well.
Point of difference: While candidates often make their appeal to some segments of the population more than others, unlike products, they have a responsibility to serve all the people.
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Discover what your target customers want to accomplish.
The late great Harvard Business School professor, Theodore Levitt, was famous for telling his students that “People don’t want to buy a ¼ inch drill; they want a ¼ inch hole!” This illustrates that customer needs are separate from solutions. People buy products and services to get functional and emotional tasks done, such as to “make a hole”. This is true in every industry, even politics. Voters don’t want to elect a president; they are hiring the president to get functional and emotional tasks done, such as:
- Increase household income
- Improve public schools
- Protect the country from terrorism
- Feel safe
Much to the dismay of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, people don’t want to elect a “true conservative;” they just want to get important things done! Evidently, GOP voters believe Trump is best qualified to get these tasks done, even though he is not a true conservative.
One of the benefits of defining “needs” as tasks to be accomplished is that customers can tell us what they want. The old adage that “customers cannot tell us what they want” is simply not true if we focus on what people want to accomplish rather than on solution specifications. Voters can tell us what they want the next president to accomplish without knowing anything about how he/she will accomplish it. There is almost always an opportunity for innovation and growth that comes from redefining and expanding your market to include new tasks customers want to get done.
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Determine which customer needs are unmet.
It’s not enough to simply identify what your target customers want to accomplish. You must identify which needs they consider important and unsatisfied as well. These are unmet needs. If you don’t identify and focus on unmet needs, you will waste your time and money addressing unimportant or already well-satisfied needs.
Take Democratic presidential hopeful Lincoln Chafee, for example, who launched his presidency recommending that the US adopt the metric system. To be fair, he was recommending this as a way to improve the economy but, to the American people, this seemed remarkably unimportant. In covering the arc of Chafee’s short campaign, Politico commented that its “impact was measured in millimeters.”
Additionally, if a need is already well-satisfied, don’t waste time trying to exceed expectations satisfying it more. Offering a second dessert to diners whose appetite is already satiated adds no value; it will not differentiate you. Only important unsatisfied needs are worthy of pursuit because only they offer an opportunity for you to create new value and differentiate.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, launched his bid for president talking about his plan to protect the border. Despite his controversial statements, he immediately got traction because this is an important unsatisfied need for a large part of the population. Other candidates should not have been surprised. This can easily be revealed if you know what information to obtain from customers/voters.
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Develop solutions that address the big opportunities with your unique capabilities.
Good strategy is formulated by addressing an important unsatisfied need with your unique capabilities. Trump and Sanders are both promising to help middle-class families get ahead. Trump has diagnosed the problem as the mismanagement of government and the economy, and is promising to use his business skills to restore capitalism (Make America great again). Sanders, on the other hand, sees capitalism as the problem, so he is promising to implement socialist programs. Both men are using their unique strengths to help middle class Americans get ahead. I think one reason Hilary struggling is because she’s offering more of the same that we have had for eight years.
Point of difference: voters want a leader who has the right personal qualities and worldview to meet the challenges of the time. The character of the candidate becomes of the utmost importance because there will be many unexpected challenges that he or she must manage.
Summary:
To make innovation a predictable business process, discover customers’ unmet needs (what they want to get done) first and then develop solutions that address them. Corporate leaders and politicians alike can identify their target customers’ unmet needs upfront and then use them to:
- Generate breakthrough ideas
- Guide the development of new solutions
- Create better messaging and positioning
- Create a tight fit between what customers want and what is actually delivered.
Gaining clarity about what people really want is the first step towards success whenever we want to create value for them, whether it’s business or politics.
