"Hearing" what customers don't say

"People don't want a 6-inch drill. They want a 6-inch hole in the wall." is a frequently used quote in today's marketing. It is meant to dispel the myth of the product as an end in itself. As is well known, however, products are interchangeable and are often "misused" for purposes other than those intended by the manufacturer. Even marketing guru Peter Drucker said, "The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it's selling him." The problem is that people are usually bad at expressing what they need. "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses'" is a popular quote from Henry Ford.

So one of the great challenges of marketing is to find out what a customer wants to do or - better yet - achieve. However, with the knowledge of what jobs people want to do, you can optimize your offer to the customer's intention or come up with ideas for better solutions more easily. But how do you find out what the customer really wants and which methodical approach is suitable for finding that out?

A story of homesickness

Christos (name changed) is in his early thirties, wears dark-tinted glasses and is bald. He is sitting relaxed, leaning back on a chair. We have grouped around him and are listening attentively as he answers the questions of one of our workshop participants who is interviewing him. We - that's our interview workshop participants and my co-trainer. Christos is of Greek descent and grew up in Germany. We interview him about his coffee drinking habits. He tells us how he used to drink Frappuccino in the summer a few years ago. Then a friend turned him on to Cortado. While this is a coffee drink of Spanish origin, he always orders it when he goes to his Greek bar.

Several times a week he visits this place, with the ambiance typical of the country. This visit has become a cherished routine. He always orders his coffee there in his native language. A certain barista has to prepare the coffee because if someone else does it who can't do it perfectly, the authenticity of the experience is ruined. The coffee drink is served in a glass. So you can see whether the double espresso and the milk foam have the right ratio and whether they mix with each other.

The next day we meet Christos again in the corridor. We ask him if we could describe our impression of the interview and what purpose we interpret the ritual. He answers in the affirmative and so we describe to him our interpretation: we "slept" one night over the interview and compared it with our own experiences. "We believe that you are homesick for Greece and have introduced this ritual to relieve this painful feeling". In response, after a brief hesitation and with wide eyes, Christos looked at us and said that we were absolutely right in our guess. He added that he had not realized this himself and that this realization would be very important for him.

Bringing in your own experience

When interpreting the actions of subjects, it is possible to draw from one's own wealth of experience. I myself, for example, lived with my family in the U.S. for many years and was glad at the time that after about 2 hours of driving we could visit a place which, with its half-timbered buildings, looked like a village in the Bavarian Alps and where you could eat typical German specialties. Even if the pickup trucks parked at the "Platzl" spoiled the picture a bit, the experience was suitable to feel a bit of feeling home.

By the way, the whole thing also happened the other way around: Back in Germany on a visit, we liked to go to Starbucks to feel like we were in Seattle for a few minutes.

Knowledge of latent needs as a superpower

Knowing about the latent needs - in this case, wanting to cure homesickness - you could target your business to do this "job", and create the highest possible authenticity and thus a high experience value.

Here are a few more examples of discovered latent needs from our consulting practice:

• Instead of finding a nursing facility, ensure a dignified last phase of life for the relative.
• Instead of riding a cargo bike, take the stress out of your daily routine.
• Instead of finding a successor for the business, honor the entrepreneur's life's work.

Customers often cannot express the underlying purpose of a product use, which is at a high level. It is pursued unconsciously. The subsequent actual benefit is sometimes not even known when a product is purchased. It only emerges during use and thus becomes a purpose.

Knowledge of this purpose can be used in a variety of beneficial ways: not only for product design, as suggested above, but also in marketing and sales. For example, one can share with potential customers the actual product benefits in the form of #stories. One can also use this knowledge to more consciously targeting people who are looking for such a benefit. Moreover, one can already address people who have just begun to feel a need for a new solution.

Systematically identify the real purpose of products

But how do you find out the underlying purpose of products if customers can't even pronounce them, or if test subjects only describe their activities in the interview? The answer is: you have to interpret it. After an overall consideration of all tasks to be done, it can be recognized with a little reflection and discussion. Here the consideration extends from jobs-to-be-done #jobstobedone at a low level in the form of an activity to a higher level, in the form of a goal. "If a subject wants to successfully complete all of these tasks, then the purpose of the product is ..." is a formulation thhelp findfinding it.

In order to carry out this analysis, however, it is first necessary to map out the "landscape" of jobs-to-be-done. In our consulting practice, we collect these jobs-to-be-done with the help of customer interviews. Once we determine we have captured the jobs well enough within the project scope we are examining, and no notable ones are added, we map them on a "job map." We summarize and generalize the same or similar jobs-to-be-done. The job map is structured hierarchically, with jobs of an activity nature at lower levels and those of a targeted nature at higher levels. This makes it possible to see the hierarchical relationships between the jobs: i.e., which jobs feed into which higher-level jobs and what the variations of the jobs within a cluster look like.

The job map is created like a puzzle, where you put the pieces together and slowly a picture emerges. Even if it is not 100% complete, with some distance it becomes recognizable what can be seen on it.

As part of our approach, we divide the job map into 3 areas:

1. The jobs-to-be-done related to the purchase,

2. the jobs-to-be-done in the experience phase and,

3. the jobs-to-be-done of the highest order (or main purpose)

Through this systematic approach and representation, we can solve the problem outlined at the beginning with the 6-inch drill. We can read from the job map which functional, emotional, and social "jobs" customers actually want to perform. The difficulty that customers cannot express how their situation could be improved can also be resolved more purposefully with this approach. With appropriate creative techniques, innovative solutions can be devised that better accomplish customers' jobs.

Picture: Section of a job map relative to finding a care solution for a sr. relative

Customer-centric strategy development

Identifying and defining latent needs should be an integral part of customer-centric strategy development. One method that makes use of the identification of latent needs is Customer Progress Design (#customerprogressdesign). Instead of target groups, this approach segments according to the jobs to be performed by the customer. The need for progress is placed at the center of the development of new products, but also of the marketing and sales strategy.

The aim is to provide the best possible support for people in their quest to improve their lives or their business. With the above-mentioned set of instruments, it should be consistently pursued to facilitate progress making.

Further information on the Customer Progress Design method is available at https://unipro-solutions.com/en/methode.

Eckhart Boehme is an internationally recognized Jobs to Be Done expert and developer of the Customer Progress Design method. He was the initiator and co-developer of The Wheel of Progress? Canvas - a tool for the structured evaluation of customer interviews. Eckhart served as the expert advisor to the German editions of the Jobs to Be Done "bible" Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen et. al. and Eric Ries' The Startup Way.