There’s a Better Way to “Refresh Your Brand”
We know from study after study that the key to successful growth is having a clear understanding of customers’ unmet needs. It’s very hard to innovate, differentiate, and grow if you don’t know where your target customers’ needs remain unmet by your own offerings and your competitors’ offerings. Without this information, companies are forced to guess what to do to create value for their target customers and, not surprisingly, that leads to high failure rates, a lot of frustration, and wasted time and money. This is largely unnecessary but very common for many companies today.
Many top branding firms follow a common practice to help clients differentiate their brands for growth: talk with customers, learn what they like and dislike about the brand, and then:
- Leverage the positives
- Eliminate the negatives
- Identify trends in the product/service category that can be leveraged
While this can be very powerful and, yet, sometimes it is insufficient for three reasons:
- It looks backwards at what customers valued when what is needed is a look forward to determine what they will value in the future
- It does not include inputs from non-customers
- It does not identify and rank opportunities for innovation and growth with statistical validity
1. It looks backwards when what is needed is a look forward
Certainly, keeping and/or accentuating a company’s historical strengths makes a lot of sense, but only if those strengths will be valued by the market in the future. Sometimes, as author and executive coach Marshall Goldsmith has said, “What got you here won’t get you there.” Leveraging historical strengths alone may not be enough to win tomorrow .
To be successful creating new value in the future, leaders must understand what customers are trying to accomplish, feel, and experience with their products and services. As the late Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt famously said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter inch drill; they want a quarter inch hole!” While customers cannot tell us what products,or services, or features they want(it’s not their expertise), they can tell us what they want to accomplish, feel, and experience in a specific circumstance. Consequently, customers can tell us what they want: products and services that help them get their important unsatisfied functional, emotional, and social jobs done better.
2. It does not capture inputs from non-customers
While talking with customers is always a good idea, it’s a biased sample — they already like your offering. For most companies, the biggest opportunity for growth is converting non-customers. That means talking with non-customers to discover the barriers to consumption be it money, education, time or something else that is keeping them from buying your product or service. Obtaining this information will help the firm win more new customers.
3. It cannot identify and rank opportunities for innovation and growth with statistical validity
When we define “customer needs” as the functional, emotional, and social jobs customers want to get done, and the criteria they use to measure success when executing their functional jobs, we find that customers can tell us what they want. This makes is possible to obtain a comprehensive set of need statements in any functional market (where customers are trying to get functional job(s) done). And because these customer needs are separate and distinct from product or service solutions, they can be put into a survey and deployed to a representative sample of target customers to be rated for importance and satisfaction. Those needs that are both highly important and poorly satisfied are opportunities for innovation and growth. The more important and less satisfied a need is, the greater the opportunity for innovation and growth it presents. This enables companies to identify and rank the opportunities in their market with statistical validity which, of course, gives leaders clarity and confidence about where to focus and what to do to drive innovation and growth. There is no more reliable way to create unique value for your target customers and competitive advantage for your firm.
However, admittedly, developing surveys and getting statistical validity may be overkill for many companies. Companies can still get excellent results simply by understanding what type of customer information to obtain (jobs and criteria) and how to get it in a manner that identifies the opportunities, i.e., customer needs that are both highly important and poorly satisfied. Instead of using a survey to do this, however, set up the interviews so interviewees understand that you’re not there to talk about solutions but the jobs they are trying to get done and how they know it’s been successful, with a focus on those jobs and criteria that are both important and unsatisfied. This, too, can provide game-changing insights.
(A version of this article first appeared in The Business Journals, December 23, 2016.)
