Title: Demographics Won’t Make a Great Milkshake
Context: Don’t make a product people want to buy, make a product people want to hire.
Synopsis: Understanding what customers want is difficult work. First off, there’s a lot of them and they don’t always look, act and behave in exactly the same way. Secondly, they usually aren’t too eager or too good at sharing the real motivations behind their purchasing patterns. Finally, we – the people making things for these other people to buy – are generally crap at digging beneath the surface of customer’s real needs and want. Add all that up and there tends to be a huge disconnect between the things people are willing to buy and the things we make for them. That’s pretty much a guaranteed lose/lose situation and explains why most new products fail even in the face of exhaustive market research. The opportunities arise when we stop trying to appeal to demographic data and instead begin to understand the job description our products and services need to fill. In other words, stop trying to design for customer abstractions and start solving the problems of actual customers instead.
Best Bit: “We’ve all heard the saying, ‘people don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.’ Yet marketers continue to segment their markets by the type of drill, not the hole.”
via zurb.com
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