A Short Meditation on Customer Needs

(Modeled after “If-by-whiskey,” the famous 1952 speech by Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat, Jr.)

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 where I stand concerning 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 customers cannot tell us what product, service, technology, or materials will best meet their needs, or what product or service features should be included in an offering, or how an offering should be designed, or what engineering, material science, technology, chemistry, or other specialized fields of knowledge must be applied to develop the best offering, if you are saying that patients cannot tell the doctor us what treatment plan will best address their illness, an illness that they may not have heard of nor can pronounce, then certainly, customers cannot tell us what they want.

However, if by “customers cannot tell us what they want” you mean customers cannot tell us 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 to receive the benefits of a product or service, or the circumstances in which it is difficult to get a task done, or what decisions that are trying to make, or how they want to feel and avoid feeling in a particular circumstance, or how they want to be perceived and avoid being perceived in a particular circumstance, then certainly, customers can tell us what they want. Customers generally don’t have the expertise to tell us product or service specifications, but they can tell us what they want to accomplish, how they want to feel and be perceived.

Customer “needs” are separate and distinct from solutions. We must never confuse the “drill” (a solution) with “making a hole” (the job to be done). This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.

What’s the difference? Remember: the drill is not the hole. We cannot expect customers to generate solution ideas (better drills) but they can us what they want to accomplish (make a hole).

(A version of this article first appeared in The Business Journals, March 11, 2016).