Marketing Malpractice is Preventable

According to researchers at John Hopkins University, the biggest mistake doctors make is misdiagnosing patient problems. It’s estimated that misdiagnosing errors lead to permanent damage or death for as many as 160,000 people each year and resulted in nearly $39 billion in malpractice claims paid out from 1986 – 2010. While “misdiagnoses are among the most common, costly, and harmful medical errors, they are also some of the most preventable.” (The Wall Street Journal, p. R1, 11/18/13).

While the consequences to life and physical well-being are much more serious when medical malpractice occurs, companies are committing marketing malpractice every day because they attempt to generate and sell solution ideas without conducting a diagnosis to determine what their customers want or need.  (See Clayton Christensen’s HBR article Marketing Malpractice).

The problem is that most companies don’t know how to diagnose their customers’ condition; they don’t know what kinds of customer inputs to capture or how to obtain them. After decades of capturing the wrong type of customer inputs, many companies/leaders have come to the erroneous conclusion that customers have latent unarticulated needs, needs that cannot be articulated, needs that cannot be discovered until a prototype is developed and presented to them.

This is simply false when we focus on discovering what customers are trying to accomplish rather than product or service specifications. While customers cannot tell us what the best solution should be, they can tell us what they want to get done, e.g., clean the floor, get in shape, prepare a meal, etc. Discovering what customers want to get done before generating solutions provides a target for the company’s creativity. It’s hard to hit a bull’s eye when you don’t have a target. Discovering what customers want to get done is the target that turns innovation and growth into a predictable and repeatable business process.

Physicians would never expect patients to prescribe the treatment plan. That’s the physician’s responsibility based on many years of training and experience. Similarly, suppliers should never expect their customers to generate solution ideas for their problems/objectives because they are no more qualified to do this than patients are in generating treatment plans. It’s the suppliers’ responsibility to generate great solutions based on their training and experience. The good news is that we can discover what customers want to get done,  the criteria they use to measure success, and where they struggle all of which is totally independent of any solution. This is a customer diagnosis.  With an accurate diagnosis in hand, we can now develop winning solutions that deliver superior value to customers.  While misdiagnoses of customer needs are among the most common and costly mistakes companies make, they are also some of the most preventable.