A Bunch of Raving Loonies

There was once a group of suppliers who were given a tour of a mental hospital.

One of the visitors had made some very insulting remarks about the patients.

After the tour, the visitors were introduced to various staff members in the lunchroom.

The rude visitor chatted with one of the security staff members, Bill, a kindly and wise ex-policeman.

"Are they all raving loonies in here then?" said the rude man.

"Only the ones who fail the test," said Bill.

"What's the test?" said the man.

"Well, we show them a bath full of water, a bucket, a jug, and an egg cup, and we ask them what's the quickest way to empty the bath," said Bill.

"Oh, I see, simple - the normal ones know it's the bucket, right?"

"No, actually," said Bill, "The normal ones say pull out the plug. Should I check when there's a bed free for you?"

The Danger in Accepting the Premise

Most of us accept the fundamental premise that what you see is what you get when it comes to “the market.”

To borrow an example from Bill, the security guard, we find a market full of egg cups and jugs, and we decide that our bucket is better for emptying the bath…

We get so fixated on current solutions that we forget about solving the actual problem. As a result, we unwittingly accept the gravitational pull of comparative mediocrity.

Don’t make a bigger container; pull the plug!

This type of thinking is institutionalized (double entendre very much intended) in nearly every business book, class, seminar, etc.

We’re encouraged at every turn to find our “competitive differentiation” or how we can “disrupt the market.”

We act as if the market is some magical force outside of human control or assume that the only way to solve your customer’s problem is by making incrementally better widgets than the current suppliers.

“We’re X, but faster.”

“We make Y, but cheaper.”

“The market demands X, so we’re making it better.”

…all good ways to become seen as a commodity.

Stop Funding Your Competitor's Marketing Budget

Traditionally, we thought of our products as the hero.

We “won” when our product was better than the other company’s products…

This framework demanded that we start by looking at the competitive landscape, reverse-engineer the leading solutions, relentlessly focus on incremental improvements, and spend our entire marketing budget highlighting those improvements…

Here’s an example from remote sensing in agriculture:

“More datapoints than manual scouting alone.”

The minute we mindlessly follow this well-trodden path to comparative analysis, we agree to let our competition (the incumbent) define the problem, prescribe the solution, and set the value for the benefit.

All the customer is thinking about now is their experience walking fields, and that one year they caught the outbreak of that one pathogen in their crop because they happened to walk past it…and the sale is over, you have already lost.

In agtech, we have naively anchored our new, innovative solutions to current practices, effectively canonizing time-tested methods as the gold standard for that specific discipline.

Instead, we should answer the question: why does the customer want 100x more data points? In other words, what are they trying to accomplish? What is the problem?

Why Design Your Category

We need to take back control and build relationships with our prospects based on the conditions we set for the market.

When someone says, “x product is better than y product,” that is never objectively true. It is a subjective statement based on the definition of the problem that an individual is trying to solve.

For example, the iPhone beat the Blackberry to become the ideal smartphone for most people because the problem statement was refocused from email to applications.

Apple didn’t say, “we’re better at getting your email on your phone,” that would have been accepting RIM’s (Blackberry) definition of a smartphone. Steve Jobs and Apple said, “here’s what on-phone applications can do for you,” and redefined what a smartphone did in the customer’s mind.

Then they tipped the market by promoting that idea.

Get Started Today

Here is how I would recommend we start doing this better today:

1. ?Identify the gap. What problems do you solve? Make a list.
2. Define the vision. What does your customer’s life look like in 5 years?
3. Name it. Give your solution a real name that gives people a good idea of how you're going to solve this problem. ?

Key Considerations:

• Make sure to capture customer problems, not product features.
• Identify the most valuable challenges you help your customers overcome and group them to help you set your vision. ?
• The vision is about what you see for the customer. This is an exercise in empathic leadership, don't make it about you.
• You are naming a category, not your company. Make sure that the name is about your solution. It should be something you could easily see your customer explaining to their boss.

Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.

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