The Bezos Strategy (And Yours?): Relentless Focus on the Customers’ Unchanging Needs

Jeff Bezos gets it.

He understands how to minimize market risk so that Amazon’s innovation investments reap rewards for years to come.

He does this by focusing on the customers’ unchanging unmet needs – i.e., customers’ “jobs to be done” and “criteria for success.”

Bezos understands that “You can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.”

Watch this 1-minute video of him explaining this:

Here’s the transcript:

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.

… [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible. And so, the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now.

When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

This is a great illustration of the basic insight that people choose which product/service to buy and where to get it based on their Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) and criteria for success. But wait – did you know that JTBD delivers much more?

JTBD enables companies to:

1. Identify and rank the biggest opportunities (i.e., unmet needs) in virtually any market with precision and statistical validity.
2. Obtain customer needs in a format that provides instructions about where to focus and what to do to innovate and grow in a reliable manner.
3. Discover hidden high-opportunity market segments and their unmet needs that competitors are unlikely to know about.
4. Conduct a competitive analysis that reveals how well your firm and your top competitors are satisfying each of the target customers’ important needs. This can be extremely valuable for competitive positioning, marketing, and sales.
5. Evaluate and select those opportunities in the market that are attractive for your firm to pursue for new value creation. This enables you to only pursue opportunities that have a good organizational/market fit before you attempt to establish product/market fit.
6. Determine the best way to pursue each attractive opportunity such as:

• 1. M&A or partnering
  2. Messaging and positioning
  3. Operational alignment
  4. Focused braining to devise new or improved product and service ideas that address the top unmet needs in the market, and thereby establish product/market fit at concept creation, before development, without guesswork.
• Inform your company strategy about “Where to play” and “How to win.”
• Determine which new or improved product/service ideas in the pipeline should be fast-tracked, redesigned, and terminated. Eliminate funding bad ideas.

This is a complete frontend innovation strategy that gives you a roadmap for multiple growth paths.

When creating new or improved product and service concepts, it enables you to reduce the number of iterations in development, quicken time-to-market, and increase success rates 3-5 times.

Are you tired of guessing where to focus and what to do to innovate and grow?

Ready to start having fun winning at innovation?

Schedule a free call with me to talk about your situation and explore how my firm can help you accomplish your objectives.