Customer Needs: You can’t just ask customers what they want | Milner Strategic Marketing

Customer Needs: You can’t just ask customers what they want

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With the news of Steve Jobs stepping down as Apple CEO, the media has been full of reviews of the man and his company. When I was researching the “Marketing Secrets of Silicon Valley”, one of my interviewees in San Francisco reminded me that Steve Jobs wasn’t a techie or a designer but “the greatest marketer in Silicon Valley”. Looking back on some of Steve Jobs’ quotes I found the following.

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and try to give them that. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”

And there you have not only the Apple philosophy but the key issue for all high tech marketing. By the time your customers can articulate their needs in a way you can act on, they are already dreaming of something new and better. So how do you invent future products and services without a series of random guesses or divine inspiration?

Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak said “You need the kind of objectivity that makes you forget everything you’ve heard, clear the table, and do a factual study like a scientist would.”

We have three techniques that may deliver part of the solution:

  • Scenario planning. Think through and identify the most impactful futures and start designing products and services around these. Scenario planning doesn’t give you the product but it does free up your mind in a structured way to think about how the world could look.
  • Conjoint analysis. What is more important, a €20 reduction in price or an extra 3 hours battery life on your next smartphone? What would you like more in your new office, free broadband or an extra 5 square metres of space? Conjoint analysis allows you to ask your target customers to rate the relative merits of all the key attributes of your next product, even before it is designed. You can create the perfect combination of the variables. It may not support a revolutionary design but it could support a dramatic evolution.
  • Strategic planning with outside people. Great teams of experienced, educated people can sometimes slip into “group think” where some ideas are “givens” and others are taboo. These invisible walls can limit creativity so external input from Non-Executive Directors, industry experts, Trade Associations, new hires and others is important to stay open minded.

Whilst no-one can guarantee that these approaches will deliver breakthrough designs, they allow you and your company to think about future customers, future needs and future markets in a structured and factual way. It will help to set a long-enough time horizon so that you can get ahead of your customers and build something they will want in the future rather than something they wanted yesterday.

There is an alternative. You could just hope that there is a person in your company who is the next Steve Jobs, but that is a bit of a long shot.

If you want to talk through the situation at your company then give please contact us and we can go from there.

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