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

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Foreword

Foreword by Rick Pedi and John Palmer

Unpacking Demand Generation

Demand isn’t spontaneously generated. No one wakes up in the morning and suddenly thinks, Today, I’m going to buy a new car. Some combination of events always comes together to generate that demand. We call those forces push and pull. (Customer Force)

Push. People won’t change when they are happy with the way things are. Why would they? People change only when circumstances push them to be unhappy with the way things are. These pushes can be external or internal.

Pull. If a push is the engine that powers customer motivation, the pull is the steering wheel that directs motivation. Customers experience two kinds of pulls: (1) an idea of a better life and (2) a preference for a particular product

The pull for a better life.

It’s important to be able to answer the question “How will customers evolve when they have the right solution?” One way of thinking about this type of pull is to see what happens when customers don’t recognize how life can be better (or refuse to act to improve it).

these customers are aware of their desire to change but choose to do nothing about it.

People choose not to improve their lives for many reasons. Psychologist Gary Klein posits that customers must engage in various mental simulations before they take any kind of action. They need to make sense of their desire to evolve, and they need to create expectations of how life will be better when their struggle is resolved. A customer who fails to do either of those mental simulations will not be motivated to make a change

The pull toward a solution.

their motivation to choose one solution over another

when we focus on the forces that generate demand, we see that the context of the customer’s push shapes his or her desire to change. This affects the criteria used to choose one solution over another

The reason that many options coexist is that the pushes that shape a desire for change contain many variations

Variations in the pushes that customers experience also explain why the same customer might go back and forth between different products for the same JTBD.

Push and Pull Shape The JTBD

There is no demand—and therefore no JTBD—unless push and pull work together

Generating demand.

Appreciating the interdependency between push and pull is why Elon Musk decided that Tesla’s first electric car would be a premium, high-end model. Musk believed he needed first to persuade customers that an electric car could be attractive, perform well, and be practical

Failing to generate demand.

When you fail to appreciate the forces of progress generation and the interdependencies between them, you get an innovation like the Tata Nano. In 2008, Tata Motors believed it could offer a low-end, feature-minimal car that would shake up the automobile market. Various Harvard professors wrote books and case studies about its success, claiming that it was “a runaway best seller,” a “disruptive innovation,” and that it “may disrupt the entire automobile distribution system in India.”[26] However, the reality proved quite different. Nano sales have been abysmal. After six years of production, annual sales in 2015 were only 18,531. In the end, Tata spent $400 million developing a flop.

Why did the Nano fail? It didn’t have enough pull. In its cost-cutting frenzy, Tata didn’t offer a stereo and air-conditioning—features that customers expected from a car. Poor design made it roll over easily and prone to fire, and its weak engine made it underpowered for mountain driving

If your product doesn’t help customers make progress, price doesn’t matter

Unpacking Demand Reduction

Forces that reduce or block demand should be investigated and managed with the same enthusiasm as demand generation. Why? These forces are just as much competitors as any product produced by a competing business.

Anxiety. In 2001, a collection of researchers lead by George Loewenstein identified two types of emotions that create anxiety: anticipatory emotions and anticipated emotions

The former are the feelings experienced only at the moment of decision, while the latter are what we expect to feel in the future. Within the context of JTBD and the forces of progress, I respectively call them anxiety-in-choice and anxiety-in-use.

Anxiety-in-choice. We experience anxiety-in-choice when we don’t know if a product can help us get a Job Done