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What Keeps Potential Consumers from Consuming?
Did you ever stop to think about the legitimate barriers that might be preventing potential participants (consumers) from using what you produce? The Innovator’s Guide to Growth identifies four different barriers that can constrain growth…and they may be worth thinking about. Here they are:
- Skill-Related Constraints: Complexity keeps large groups from participating. What if certain steps of the complex process could be made simple? Could another layer participate?
- Wealth-Related Constraints: This is an obvious constraint in some ways and tough to see in others. Is there a way you can remove a constraint, similar to the way Southwest made air travel a realistic competitor to the bus (as opposed to other airlines)?
- Access-Related Constraints: The best way to think of this constraint concerns products or services that can only be used in certain places (think telephones before wireless).
- Time-Related Constraints: Some activities make participation difficult because they are too time consuming. A disruptive innovation like eBay makes it possible to collect and trade Beanie Babies by opening up the possibility of buying and selling at home.
What constraints are preventing your organization from expanding your reach?
Picked up How Customers Think by Gerald Zaltman for a little light beach reading…uh, no. Interesting stuff though. And it has so much to do with everything we’re trying to do. Basic premise? Lack of awareness of how customers really think is behind some huge misses in the world of marketing (and a lot more).
"Most marketing managers operate from a paradigm–a set of assumptions about how the world works–that prevents them from understanding and serving customers effectively (p. ix)."
Guess what…they’re not the only one. This is one of those books that can take a little longer to read but gets marked up plenty. Lots here that will make it into my thinking this summer. Noting that one of the most damaging patterns in considering new ideas is premature dismissal, Zaltman introduces a practice that will definitely make it into my set of basic questions:
We must suspend our judgment of an unfamiliar idea when we first encounter it and ask ourselves, "Would we value this idea if it were true?"
Can you see yourself adding this question?
Foresight vs Hindsight
Are you the type that needs facts and figures to make important decisions? Or do you rely on gut feelings or intuition? The challenge right now might be that we’re no longer in a time when gut sense is reliable.
Traditionally, managers depended on experience and intuition to develop insights―"gut feel," if you will. Most often a gut feel is based on past experiences. Gut feel and intuition are important, but in a fast-changing competitive environment, experience of the past is less and less valuable. Foresight, not hindsight is of value. (p. 83, The New Age of Innovation)
Consumer-Centric vs. Firm-Centric
In the global transition from boilerplate and off-the-shelf to personalized and custom-to-the-need, the pivot point is "firm-centric" vs. "consumer-centric" (For our purposes, let’s call it "customer-centric" so we can debug the negative connotation of "consumer."). One important element of the "personalized" future is the idea of allowing the customer to co-create the experience. This is a huge part of what’s happening with iTunes, Google, and Build-a-Bear.
You don’t think this is coming for all of us? Think about the number of times that one of your core programs doesn’t work for individuals in your customer base. Insisting they buy what we have because we know what’s best is a lot like Henry Ford saying that a Model T buyer could have any color they wanted as long as it was black.
Granted, there is a tricky element in this discussion because of the elegance of simple. But it is coming. And it will be everywhere. Want more on the idea? Check out this free preview of a C.K. Prahalad talk on the subject.
