Customer Manufacturing Update: Lean Thinking

There's not much argument that knowing what is really important to your customers and prospects can help you sell more effectively. The "trick" has always been trying to find that out. Countless marketing "experts" have developed methods and approaches over the years. And yet most new products and services introduced to the market fail to meet expectations or to provide a reasonable return on investment. What's the problem?

One common research method is to ask the customer what's important. Seems like a pretty reasonable approach, and it really doesn't work. If it did, more products and services would be successful, and sales people would have an easier time selling. So why doesn't "asking" work?

Because, you usually ask the wrong questions. Why? Well, usually because you ask people what's important to them by creating a list of "attributes" for them to indicate how important each one is. This doesn't work for two reasons:

You usually don't have an understanding that when you created the list you may have left off what was really important, and
You don't differentiate between important items that are not differentiators and those that might be

Some "important" items are really just the "price of admission." An instrument manufacturer might query customers about how important "accuracy" is. Upon hearing that it is very important, they might plan to push this feature. In reality, if the instrument wasn't accurate, the customer wouldn't want it at all. This feature is very important, but it is not a point of difference unless the supplier can further determine that this is a missing attribute from the competition. So can you tell if an important feature is a possible point of difference?

Yes, but not the way most researchers try to do it. What happens is that when people are asked how they rate existing products or services on a "satisfied" scale, the "price of admission" items usually rate as important and already satisfied. This is further compounded by the fact that most people will not rate highly important things that they don't know much about. This is often manifest in questions that ask "technical" or expertise oriented questions, such as whether an ingredient is important. If the respondents don't know much about the ingredient, they will invariably rank it as unimportant. If asked about the benefit derived from that same ingredient and its relative value, they will answer honestly.

Further, you must remember that words like "important" are "fat words." That is, they are subject to interpretation. For someone to respond that something is "important" to him or her, they must feel it is rational to answer that way. The respondent is often biased to want to "look good" to the researcher. Most people will respond with rational and socially acceptable answers.

A good example of this is the phrase, "makes you feel young." Most people will not report this as important and yet Pepsi has used it successfully to hold a very strong #2 position in soft drinks for decades. Similarly, people usually claim price is not important so they don't appear "cheap" or focused on price instead of value. So what can you do?

Our advice, stop looking for a short-cut, quick fix or easy answer. If this were actually easy, there'd be no competitive advantage to solving it. It isn't easy and most people are still looking for the "easy" answer. We believe that in-depth, one-one, qualitative, interviews by a skilled, professional interviewer is the right answer. Whether you do it with in-house staff, or a third party, there's no substitute for well crafted conversation. If you'd like to learn more about this, click on the link below.

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