When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become great at making products people will buy by Klement Alan

Author:Klement, Alan [Klement, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: NYC Press
Published: 2018-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Put It to Work

This chapter is a cautionary tale of what can happen when the principles of Customer Jobs are ignored or unknown. Here are a few things you can do to help you avoid making the same mistakes.

Don’t restrict competition to products with similar functionality or physical characteristics. Don’t assume two products are competitors because they look or function similarly. There are two related mistakes people make about what is and isn’t competition for a product.

Thinking that two solutions compete against each other because they share similar characteristics. Even though PCs and mainframes are both computers, they don’t compete in the slightest.

Restricting the definition of competition to products with similar characteristics. Godrej and Christensen believed that the only competition for their electric refrigerator was other electric refrigerators. They also believed they were creating a new market of refrigerator alternatives. Unfortunately for Godrej, neither of those opinions was true. Consumers were already using several refrigerator alternatives.

Keep your mind open to what counts as competition. I recently talked with a woman who told me about switching from her morning coffee to a kale smoothie with a shot of wheatgrass. Who would’ve thought a cup of coffee and a kale smoothie could be competitors?

Every innovator, whether creating a new innovation or improving an existing one, should have a clear idea of how his or her customers see competition. When you’re creating a new innovation, you need to answer the question, “What are customers going to stop buying when they start buying our solution?” And if you’re creating a new feature for an existing product, you need to ask, “What behaviors or other products is this feature going to replace?”

Talk with your customers! Your competitive model can come only from them. Models of competition and markets that don’t come from customers are almost guaranteed to be wrong.

Don’t study the relationships among customers, products, and competition just from afar. You must actually talk with the customers who use these products. Ask them what else they’ve tried to get the Job Done. Were there other options they wanted to try but didn’t or couldn’t? Did they combine solutions because no single solution worked well? Through questions like these, you can triangulate what customers do or don’t consider as competition.

Confirm that competition exists between products by finding customers who switched. At the time of this writing, PC sales have dropped to historic lows; they’ve been on a decline for quite some time. Some people claim that this drop in PC sales is due to the smartphone. But is that true?[49]

Remember, correlation does not equal causation. There’s only one sure way to prove a causal link between smartphone sales and PC sales: find people who stopped using their PCs and started using smartphones. Unless you can find evidence of a switch, the suggestion that any competitive relationship exists between the two is pure conjecture. Yes, some people may have entirely stopped using a PC in favor of a smartphone, but a lot of people own and use both.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.