Customers Can Tell You What They Want, Just Not What to Build
The Mississippi judge, law professor, and state representative Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat, Jr. gave a famous speech in 1952, If-By-Whiskey, when people were polarized about the prohibition of alcohol. He inspired me to speak my mind on another controversial topic today.
“My friends, I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about the commonly held belief that ‘customers cannot tell us what they want.’ All right, I will tell you what I think concerning this matter.
If by ‘customers cannot tell us what they want’ you mean what product, service, technology, or feature specifications will best meet their needs, or how an offering should be designed, or what other specialized fields of knowledge should be applied to develop a new offering, if you are saying that patients cannot tell the doctor what treatment plan will best address their illness, an illness that they neither know nor can pronounce, then certainly, I say customers cannot tell us what they want.
However, if by ‘customers cannot tell us what they want’ you mean what problems they want to resolve or prevent, what objectives, tasks, or goals they want to accomplish, what steps they have to go through to complete a task, or what steps they must execute to obtain the value of your offering. Or the circumstances in which it is difficult to get a task done, or what decisions they are trying to make, or what makes it frustrating or difficult to get their job and desired outcomes done, or how they want to feel and avoid feeling in a particular circumstance, or how they want to be perceived and avoid being perceived, then certainly, customers can tell us what they want.
The key is not the room. Customer ‘needs’ are separate and distinct from solutions. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.”
(If you’d like to turn this insight into action, with fewer speeches and more method, I’m releasing the Customer Needs Blueprint soon: Waitlist)
