What Customers Want - A TMC Must Read
I wish I could tell some endearing story about how cool it was reading this book, or how I enjoyed spending hours gleaning the depths of knowledge to be discovered between these hallowed pages. I wish I could say that I wasn't fraught with stress at a faltering economy, or in a rush to visit family and friends at Christmastime and thus my attention wasn't so stretched in a hundred different directions. But I would be lying. I wish I could say that I was somehow more motivated, and less procrastinating, and thereby would deserve for you to carefully weigh my words, but that unfortunately would make me a liar too. So, unfortunately you will just have to deal with good ol' fashioned Chris Parks in all my pithy glory. (Tongue in cheek, and laughing at myself. Feel free to laugh with me.)
I am the last person on earth who should hold the pen to write a review of someone with as much credit and career experience as Anthony "Tony" Ulwick. He is a leader both in thought, and in practice in the field of innovation. Tony has worked with the likes of Johnson and Johnson, Microsoft, Kimberly-Clarke, Colgate, Palmolive, and many other names which qualify as "household names." He has published dozens of articles, appearing in prestigious publications such as the Sloan Management Review, has published his own book, built his own consultancy firm, and patented his methods. In short, Tony is the man.
With this in mind, I will approach this review with the healthy heaping of respect that Tony rightly deserves. The thinking, the tone, the clarity, and the power this book demonstrates establishes a far more worthy and worthwhile read than any of my silly efforts to review this great book. If you are as smart as I expect you are because you are reading this, you will be far better off reading the book than this review. That said...
Have you ever wanted to make innovation happen? Real innovation that unlocks the doors to stupendous market share and drives your company to unprecedented growth? Real innovation that walks right up to the same old products by the same old competition and punches them in the gut? Then this is definitely a good jumping off point for you. I distinctly feel that there is not quite enough information in here for a rank amateur in marketing and product development to take on the world. But there is some serious meat for an experienced marketer to sink their teeth into.
So what does Tony have to say? To put it simply, we don't know how to ask customers what they want, and even if we did, they simply have no capacity to tell us what they want. If they tried, the outcome would wind up being more of a Picasso painting than what they really wanted. (No offense to the venerable painter, or his loyal fans.) Tony hopes in this book to lead us to a better way of thinking that develops a more common ground approach as our collective business units take a look at innovation and how to make it happen in real and predictable ways.
To his credit, Anthony (Tony) Ulwick espouses more of a vision than a basic methodology. It is not as another reviewer wrote a "marketer's ode to manufacturing six sigma." It is no tribute to empowering mathematicians in pusuit of innovation. If I said that, I would be lying, and since I have done well at being honest thus far, let's not ruin my perfect record. Tony's vision in a nutshell is a company empowered to treat innovation as less of a miraculous event, and more of a thoughtful day to day regimen of business practice. This I must admit is a fresh breath of air.
I have a good friend and professional marketer who often declares, "That's like trying to schedule a breakthrough." This of course meant to represent that it is simply impossible to know how to do anything that can really truly be innovative and new. I always kind of accepted it, but after reading this book, I am ready to challenge that age old notion. Tony proclaims, and I am here to agree, you CAN in fact schedule innovation. That is the promise of Tony's methodology outlined in the book.
Tony's approach is at once novel and maybe embarrassingly obvious in some respects. It is to stop searching for customer value through identifying needs, and wants, and turn to what jobs they are doing and what kind of outcomes they are trying to achieve. It is not necessarily by asking the customer for the standard insights as modern customer facing practices would have us seek after.
Tony would be the first to point out that they have no idea what they want. Even if they did, they have precious little ability to understand the trade offs necessary to create appropriate solutions.
By seeking understanding of the "jobs" a customer is trying to accomplish, and observing how they measure the outcome of what they have "hired" the particular person/place/thing to do you can craft a new and empowering set of metrics. This could shine a light on what particular customer outcomes are under served, and which are already served well by either you or your competitor.
Feel a little skeptical? Yep. Me too.
Digging in I learned about the basic tenets of outcome driven methodology, and the need for identifying and understanding them. (There are three basic tenets, and I will risk skirting copyright law and throw them out there for you.)
So VOC prevents one from getting to the knowledge?
Well... Tony is definitely down on the classic "Voice of the customer" process to say the least. He describes it as "The blind lead the blind and then it gets worse, The customers imprecise statements are then translated into more "useful" terms by marketing and development teams, so the already questionable feedback becomes even more so."
Kind of bold statements. If he wasn't able to bring some good thinking in to back this up, then I would call this whole book an ad campaign for his consultancy. But I have seen some of the very issues he mentions. For example: I observed a research team set out to perform a cross country VOC project that started off wanting to prove a certain product was a worthwhile venture. Amazingly, when they came back, the data all seemed to magically "prove" their theory. The product idea was at best questionable, and ultimately never made it to the table at all. It was a great waste of money to say the least, and a massive waste of time to say the most. Did I mention frustrating as well?
If what I have seen in this case happens frequently (and I bet it does all the time) Then you will see why he decries a startling observation that "after twenty years of customer driven thinking, US companies find 50-90% of their product and service initiatives are failures." He makes the note that it is a downfall to the tune of $100 Billion per year. So, you have our attention Tony, what do you suggest?
Tony points out that new market innovations occur when a company discovers that people (individuals or businesses) are struggling to get a job done on their own because no products exist. When they devise a creative product or service that enables customers to get the job done faster and cheaper than before, the company ultimately creates a new market.
Not one to stick to theoretical examples, he cites case studies, for example Bosch when entering the circular saw market established a breakthrough product in the DS-20 saw. (Come on, an 80 year old industry with a breakthrough product? If that is infertile ground for innovation, I don't know what is. The product was in the top 100 innovations of that year.) He walks through the process used to craft this product, and does so in a way that leaves you with a unique sense of clarity.
I was not expecting this to happen. It began a significant shift in my thinking.
More importantly I began to understand just how this shift in thinking could lead me beyond just a differentiated product and far into the realm of augmented product. Part of Tony's methodology is to establish a method for not just identifying all of the possible outcomes from a job, but also to identify and rank exactly how important they actually are to a broad customer base. He notes and maybe rightly so that it seems altogether too simple, but I must admit it is really powerful in a simple way. One thing is for certain, this could be used as a powerful method for understanding vector of differentiation on a level I have rarely seen approached in a product oriented marketing study.
Imagine for a moment if you knew all of the outcomes that your company's customers were trying to gain when using your products. Immediately if you had this insight, you might very well discover that your own products already solve an important and unique outcome better than anything else out there today. You could exercise straightforward marketing on the outcomes you knew you served better than the competitors, you could set clear development paths for your product updates that addressed real opportunities in areas where you did not exceed expectations, and you could look deeply into your pipeline, and see what products you may or may not have which may more effectively address the outcomes your customers see as vitally important to the jobs they are trying to do. It would in short be a powerful way of establishing real metrics to develop whole product. It would be a powerful way of engaging word of mouth. You could create a Billion dollar line of products out of something buried deep in your product pipeline. (Which is exactly what Cordis did with their Palmz-Schatz stent.)
Please do not think for a moment that Tony tears down Voice of the customer and leaves you with nothing in it's place to help you with your research. He goes into great detail formulating an altogether different method. Some I agree with, some not as much. I admittedly am fond of how it chases a metric religiously. I truly wish more product development management would think this way.
Tony goes on to talk about market segmentation, and explains that as a company understands these outcomes, a company can group them and establish an outcome based segmentation model. He asserts that most of today's segmentation methods drive companies to target phantom segments, and I will be right there on the other side of the table to cry hallelujah. He is dead on. The method Tony outlines seeks to group customers as "Segments of opportunity." So customers are finally allowed out of their "vertical silos" which may be useful for thinking about in terms of sales, and management, but offer little help in the realm of development, creativity, and innovation.
Outcome based segmentation has the potential to truly leverage a development and marketing nirvana, as this kind of insight is just what is needed to make effective targeting, positioning, messaging, and other product and marketing decisions. You could (and the book encourages you to do this) craft strategies around marketing these very outcomes and undoubtedly see immediate increase in market share. This methodology for positioning is the holy grail for marketers, as they know exactly what elements to attack to win market share.
Tony goes on to discuss the implications of outcome driven thinking on brainstorming, and how and why it is useful to think of constraints while undergoing the process. Which outcomes should you group together and take on as top priority? He has a formula for that as well. One thing that is great about this book is that there are several (sanitized) examples to guide you as you imagine applying this process to your industry. This book actually takes me back to my manufacturing and quality control roots in a wonderfully engaging way. Much of what he is doing has roots in the more methodological approaches developed for manufacturing, quality, and materials business areas.
The book outlines methodologies for applying these principles. Examples: targeting where you want to focus value creation, Positioning the product and the messaging (I hate to admit I thought this to be a bit of a weak chapter because it focused more on what not to do, and held a long conversation about different type of marketing.), and prioritization. Each of these chapters although valuable seemed a long stretch to me. Possibly because I understood them prior to reading it, but also possibly because the book felt as though it lost some focus here. It made for a bit of digression. There are juicy tidbits, but it was lacking the punch of the first half of the book.
Chapter 8 on brainstorming was simply amazing. It really put into perspective how the brainstorming process could work if it was allowed some real direction. It was nearly exhilarating. But let's be honest. It's a book on marketing. How exhilarating could a book on marketing really be? Well, this one came pretty damn close. I consider it a staple for anyone who considers themselves a product innovator. If you challenge the notions in this book, you should damn well be able to explain at least to yourself why you think differently. If you can't then you as I now do need to give some serious thought and introspection to the principles outlined here.
Even if you don't radically change your company, and completely renew your organization to follow these ideas, it will do you a tremendous value to read this, reflect on what you learned, and implement it. If nothing more is accomplished besides providing a more exacting method for defining and crafting your solution drivers, it will be of astonishing value to both you, and your customers. After all, what do you have to lose? If Tony is right, some of the products in your pipeline today are heading towards filling in that $100 Billion dollar hades of new product introductions.
This is Christopher Parks checking out yet again, and you may hear me exclaim as I type away into the cyber night... Merry Christmas (Or happy holidays, however you like to hear it) to all and to all a good night !
By the way, if you would like a copy of this book and you live in the southern California area, shoot me an email. I bought two copies.
I am the last person on earth who should hold the pen to write a review of someone with as much credit and career experience as Anthony "Tony" Ulwick. He is a leader both in thought, and in practice in the field of innovation. Tony has worked with the likes of Johnson and Johnson, Microsoft, Kimberly-Clarke, Colgate, Palmolive, and many other names which qualify as "household names." He has published dozens of articles, appearing in prestigious publications such as the Sloan Management Review, has published his own book, built his own consultancy firm, and patented his methods. In short, Tony is the man.
With this in mind, I will approach this review with the healthy heaping of respect that Tony rightly deserves. The thinking, the tone, the clarity, and the power this book demonstrates establishes a far more worthy and worthwhile read than any of my silly efforts to review this great book. If you are as smart as I expect you are because you are reading this, you will be far better off reading the book than this review. That said...
Have you ever wanted to make innovation happen? Real innovation that unlocks the doors to stupendous market share and drives your company to unprecedented growth? Real innovation that walks right up to the same old products by the same old competition and punches them in the gut? Then this is definitely a good jumping off point for you. I distinctly feel that there is not quite enough information in here for a rank amateur in marketing and product development to take on the world. But there is some serious meat for an experienced marketer to sink their teeth into.
So what does Tony have to say? To put it simply, we don't know how to ask customers what they want, and even if we did, they simply have no capacity to tell us what they want. If they tried, the outcome would wind up being more of a Picasso painting than what they really wanted. (No offense to the venerable painter, or his loyal fans.) Tony hopes in this book to lead us to a better way of thinking that develops a more common ground approach as our collective business units take a look at innovation and how to make it happen in real and predictable ways.
To his credit, Anthony (Tony) Ulwick espouses more of a vision than a basic methodology. It is not as another reviewer wrote a "marketer's ode to manufacturing six sigma." It is no tribute to empowering mathematicians in pusuit of innovation. If I said that, I would be lying, and since I have done well at being honest thus far, let's not ruin my perfect record. Tony's vision in a nutshell is a company empowered to treat innovation as less of a miraculous event, and more of a thoughtful day to day regimen of business practice. This I must admit is a fresh breath of air.
I have a good friend and professional marketer who often declares, "That's like trying to schedule a breakthrough." This of course meant to represent that it is simply impossible to know how to do anything that can really truly be innovative and new. I always kind of accepted it, but after reading this book, I am ready to challenge that age old notion. Tony proclaims, and I am here to agree, you CAN in fact schedule innovation. That is the promise of Tony's methodology outlined in the book.
Tony's approach is at once novel and maybe embarrassingly obvious in some respects. It is to stop searching for customer value through identifying needs, and wants, and turn to what jobs they are doing and what kind of outcomes they are trying to achieve. It is not necessarily by asking the customer for the standard insights as modern customer facing practices would have us seek after.
Tony would be the first to point out that they have no idea what they want. Even if they did, they have precious little ability to understand the trade offs necessary to create appropriate solutions.
By seeking understanding of the "jobs" a customer is trying to accomplish, and observing how they measure the outcome of what they have "hired" the particular person/place/thing to do you can craft a new and empowering set of metrics. This could shine a light on what particular customer outcomes are under served, and which are already served well by either you or your competitor.
Feel a little skeptical? Yep. Me too.
Digging in I learned about the basic tenets of outcome driven methodology, and the need for identifying and understanding them. (There are three basic tenets, and I will risk skirting copyright law and throw them out there for you.)
1)
Customers buy products and services to help get jobs done. Only after a
company chooses to focus on the job, and not the customer, are they
capable of reliably creating customer value.
2) Customers use a set of metrics (performance measures) to judge how well a job is getting done and how a product performs.Tony calls these metrics, "Desired outcomes". (He also mentions there
are generally quite a few of them, as many as 50-150, with the exceptions of things like chemicals, and perfumes and such.) Also he mentions they are not
revealed by listening to the "Voice of the customer". "Voice of the customer" as it is classically known actually PREVENTS one from achieving this knowledge.
3) Once you understand these metrics, it is possible to make systematic and predictable innovations occur almost on "schedule. " So VOC prevents one from getting to the knowledge?
Well... Tony is definitely down on the classic "Voice of the customer" process to say the least. He describes it as "The blind lead the blind and then it gets worse, The customers imprecise statements are then translated into more "useful" terms by marketing and development teams, so the already questionable feedback becomes even more so."
Kind of bold statements. If he wasn't able to bring some good thinking in to back this up, then I would call this whole book an ad campaign for his consultancy. But I have seen some of the very issues he mentions. For example: I observed a research team set out to perform a cross country VOC project that started off wanting to prove a certain product was a worthwhile venture. Amazingly, when they came back, the data all seemed to magically "prove" their theory. The product idea was at best questionable, and ultimately never made it to the table at all. It was a great waste of money to say the least, and a massive waste of time to say the most. Did I mention frustrating as well?
If what I have seen in this case happens frequently (and I bet it does all the time) Then you will see why he decries a startling observation that "after twenty years of customer driven thinking, US companies find 50-90% of their product and service initiatives are failures." He makes the note that it is a downfall to the tune of $100 Billion per year. So, you have our attention Tony, what do you suggest?
Tony points out that new market innovations occur when a company discovers that people (individuals or businesses) are struggling to get a job done on their own because no products exist. When they devise a creative product or service that enables customers to get the job done faster and cheaper than before, the company ultimately creates a new market.
Not one to stick to theoretical examples, he cites case studies, for example Bosch when entering the circular saw market established a breakthrough product in the DS-20 saw. (Come on, an 80 year old industry with a breakthrough product? If that is infertile ground for innovation, I don't know what is. The product was in the top 100 innovations of that year.) He walks through the process used to craft this product, and does so in a way that leaves you with a unique sense of clarity.
I was not expecting this to happen. It began a significant shift in my thinking.
More importantly I began to understand just how this shift in thinking could lead me beyond just a differentiated product and far into the realm of augmented product. Part of Tony's methodology is to establish a method for not just identifying all of the possible outcomes from a job, but also to identify and rank exactly how important they actually are to a broad customer base. He notes and maybe rightly so that it seems altogether too simple, but I must admit it is really powerful in a simple way. One thing is for certain, this could be used as a powerful method for understanding vector of differentiation on a level I have rarely seen approached in a product oriented marketing study.
Imagine for a moment if you knew all of the outcomes that your company's customers were trying to gain when using your products. Immediately if you had this insight, you might very well discover that your own products already solve an important and unique outcome better than anything else out there today. You could exercise straightforward marketing on the outcomes you knew you served better than the competitors, you could set clear development paths for your product updates that addressed real opportunities in areas where you did not exceed expectations, and you could look deeply into your pipeline, and see what products you may or may not have which may more effectively address the outcomes your customers see as vitally important to the jobs they are trying to do. It would in short be a powerful way of establishing real metrics to develop whole product. It would be a powerful way of engaging word of mouth. You could create a Billion dollar line of products out of something buried deep in your product pipeline. (Which is exactly what Cordis did with their Palmz-Schatz stent.)
Please do not think for a moment that Tony tears down Voice of the customer and leaves you with nothing in it's place to help you with your research. He goes into great detail formulating an altogether different method. Some I agree with, some not as much. I admittedly am fond of how it chases a metric religiously. I truly wish more product development management would think this way.
Tony goes on to talk about market segmentation, and explains that as a company understands these outcomes, a company can group them and establish an outcome based segmentation model. He asserts that most of today's segmentation methods drive companies to target phantom segments, and I will be right there on the other side of the table to cry hallelujah. He is dead on. The method Tony outlines seeks to group customers as "Segments of opportunity." So customers are finally allowed out of their "vertical silos" which may be useful for thinking about in terms of sales, and management, but offer little help in the realm of development, creativity, and innovation.
Outcome based segmentation has the potential to truly leverage a development and marketing nirvana, as this kind of insight is just what is needed to make effective targeting, positioning, messaging, and other product and marketing decisions. You could (and the book encourages you to do this) craft strategies around marketing these very outcomes and undoubtedly see immediate increase in market share. This methodology for positioning is the holy grail for marketers, as they know exactly what elements to attack to win market share.
Tony goes on to discuss the implications of outcome driven thinking on brainstorming, and how and why it is useful to think of constraints while undergoing the process. Which outcomes should you group together and take on as top priority? He has a formula for that as well. One thing that is great about this book is that there are several (sanitized) examples to guide you as you imagine applying this process to your industry. This book actually takes me back to my manufacturing and quality control roots in a wonderfully engaging way. Much of what he is doing has roots in the more methodological approaches developed for manufacturing, quality, and materials business areas.
The book outlines methodologies for applying these principles. Examples: targeting where you want to focus value creation, Positioning the product and the messaging (I hate to admit I thought this to be a bit of a weak chapter because it focused more on what not to do, and held a long conversation about different type of marketing.), and prioritization. Each of these chapters although valuable seemed a long stretch to me. Possibly because I understood them prior to reading it, but also possibly because the book felt as though it lost some focus here. It made for a bit of digression. There are juicy tidbits, but it was lacking the punch of the first half of the book.
Chapter 8 on brainstorming was simply amazing. It really put into perspective how the brainstorming process could work if it was allowed some real direction. It was nearly exhilarating. But let's be honest. It's a book on marketing. How exhilarating could a book on marketing really be? Well, this one came pretty damn close. I consider it a staple for anyone who considers themselves a product innovator. If you challenge the notions in this book, you should damn well be able to explain at least to yourself why you think differently. If you can't then you as I now do need to give some serious thought and introspection to the principles outlined here.
Even if you don't radically change your company, and completely renew your organization to follow these ideas, it will do you a tremendous value to read this, reflect on what you learned, and implement it. If nothing more is accomplished besides providing a more exacting method for defining and crafting your solution drivers, it will be of astonishing value to both you, and your customers. After all, what do you have to lose? If Tony is right, some of the products in your pipeline today are heading towards filling in that $100 Billion dollar hades of new product introductions.
This is Christopher Parks checking out yet again, and you may hear me exclaim as I type away into the cyber night... Merry Christmas (Or happy holidays, however you like to hear it) to all and to all a good night !
By the way, if you would like a copy of this book and you live in the southern California area, shoot me an email. I bought two copies.
Comments