Walking the Walk: Having Your Customers Love You by Emery Stewart

Author:Emery, Stewart...
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-05-21T23:03:05.939000+00:00

How Do You Know How Your Customers Feel?

What you really want to do is get out and understand what people are doing, how they’re doing it, what’s going on in their lives, what their issues are, and what the problems they have are. You have to learn what a phrase like “it just works” means to them. You need to not only see and hear this sort of thing, but understand it at a level that helps you look for opportunities. You need to get yourself outside of your own little box and immerse yourself until you feel you have landed on a genuine and usable discovery. Then, out of that discovery, you build a map of ideas and opinions and assumptions, and you go off and create stuff. Later, you need to go back and validate against those assumptions.

From your discovery you should learn that this idea of yours is something people need; this is the way they do things now; and this is how they want to do it. You go off and design to that. Then you take what you’ve designed and you put back in front of the people from whom you learned about the discovered need and you say, “Okay, use it,” and you wait and see what happens. Well, you notice one guy can’t find the on-off switch, and another person can’t get the lid open easily, and yet another person has trouble reading a screen. So you are validating your assumptions, learning whether you’ve hit them or not.

If on the other hand you start by saying, “Okay, we’re going to do this product; let’s ask people what they like.” You wind up with the sort of mediocre outcome that comes of designing by committee because people when thinking as a group end up liking a really kind of bland product—that’s what makes most of them feel comfortable.

If you go off and develop this thing and later you play show and tell again, they say, “Yeah, yeah, I like that.” So you bring it to market, and lo and behold, everything out there has changed and moved forward, and what you have is a boring product that’s based on the collective opinions of the 7 out of 12 people who liked it. We refer to it as the 7 out of 12 syndrome. You’ll be basing your entire business strategy on the fact that 7 people out of a group of 12 expressed a “like” in this certain direction or that.

At Apple someone would come in from HP or Sun, or wherever, and really struggle with this for a while. They would say “Wait a minute, you guys are putting all this effort into this stuff, but you’re not consumer testing it.” They wanted to apply all the usual corporate process-driven metrics. This path can lead to death, or at least mediocrity. Mediocrity is what you end up with if you try and make something everybody likes. Apple did not target the iPod at everybody.

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