NEELY READY Ï GROWING WITH CONFIDENCE
Predictable marketing requires an understanding of the circumstances
in which customers buy or use things. Specifically, customers Ï people
and companies Ï have ’jobs’ that arise regularly and need to get done.
When customers become aware of a job that they need to get done in
their lives, they look around for a product or service that they can ’hire’
to get the job done. This is how customers experience life. Their thought
processes originate with an awareness of needing to get something done,
and then they set out to hire something or someone to do the job as
effectively, conveniently, and inexpensively as possible...Companies that
target their products at the circumstances in which customers find
themselves, rather than at the customers themselves, are those that can
launch predictably successful products.
- Clay Christensen, The Innovator’s Solution (2003)
Adopting a customer-centric focus
The examples given earlier describe a business from an insider’s perspective – from the
perspective of the business owner. The path to true business clarity is to describe your business
is from your customer’s perspective.
Your customers are not interested in what business you think you are in. They probably have little
knowledge of its history, how you got started, or how your business got to where it is today.
Your customers are completely self-centred and entirely selfish. They view your company and its
products and services through a
single lens: How well do these
products and services satisfy my
current needs?
There is often a disconnect
between the way consumers
think about the product or
service they need, and the way
those products and services are
sold.
Your customers do not define or
even think about their product or
service needs according to your
internal view. They are driven by a
single-minded desire to satisfy their
own needs – to address the
problem they are seeking to solve
or to achieve the outcome they
seek.
As a result, there is often a disconnect between the way consumers think about the product or
service they need, and the way products and services that could potentially satisfy that need are
marketed to them.
When you start to look at the products and services offered by your business from the point of
view of your customers, and the needs and wants they are trying to satisfy, you start to see your
business in a very different way. If we were to revisit the hammer analogy, it now starts to make
Copyright ¨ Mark Neely 2008
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