Steps for Identifying Your Customer’s Actual Needs: The 5-What's?

Don’t confuse problems and customer wants from your customer’s actual needs.

The Need

If you are like most of us, if you see a problem, you likely jump to a solution.??You have an idea, you think it is brilliant, and you are sure everyone else will think it is brilliant too.??Indeed, if someone doesn't think your idea is brilliant, you likely think they are the ones with an issue.?

There is only one difficulty with this; your brilliant idea is wrong. After years of study, that is what Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi concluded.??Of course, there are exceptions, but they prove the rule.

In our workshops with over 500 teams and thousands of professionals, none has been able, at first, to answer compellingly and qualitatively the four basic questions contained in our NABC value proposition framework (Need, Approach, Benefits/costs, and Competition).??I am sure that seems surprising. After all, these teams were composed of superb professionals in major global companies, national laboratories, and universities.?

The failures seen were not due to a lack of IQ, education, or resources.??They were due to a more basic human failing – we all jump too quickly to solutions.??This mostly works in everyday life (“Hmm, do I want chocolate or vanilla ice cream.”) but business problems are too complex for that to be a successful strategy.?

Cziksentmihalyi, and many others, have shown that problems must be reframed to find the customer’s actual need and then the best way to address it.??Reframing is so important we use multiple reframing methods in our value-creation workshops. If you are interested, there are a number of excellent videos on reframing methods on YouTube, including those I like by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg.?

Identifying the core issues that define a customer’s actual need and its solution are at the heart of value creation.??Uncovering these issues is challenging, and if wrong, the proposed innovation will fail.??

5-What's?

We developed a framework, called the 5-What's?, to help people identify where they are in the value creation process and the steps needed to get to a solution.?In the literature there are other 5-What's, Why's, and How's, which share aspects of what is intended here.??They are all ways to look at a problem from multiple perspectives – that is, to reframe the issues to understand them better.??Of course, when solving complex problems, like when my team was developing HDTV, the problem usually has to be reframed dozens or hundreds of times.??

Here are the 5-What's???What is:?

1.????The situation in the ecosystem?

2.????The problem resulting from the situation?

3.????The reason the problem has not been solved?

4.????Your key insight into the actual customer need?

5.????Your key insight for a compelling solution that addresses the need?

These questions follow the sequence we see value creators go through as they work to identify an actual customer need and then a solution.??When they begin, they can vaguely describe an issue in their market ecosystem and the beginnings of a problem, but they then quickly jump to a solution – their brilliant new idea.??

As noted in a previous post, we call these presentations Big A’s because, within the NABC framework, they are all about the approach.??Critically, if you can’t address succinctly and quantitatively all the elements of your NABC value proposition, you still haven’t figured out what to do.??

Innovators are not necessarily wrong about the problem they have identified, but they are defining it at 20,000 feet, and it must be brought down, step by step, to ground level where it can be solved.?Through the steps listed, we help innovators recognize where they are at each stage and then use multiple reframing methods to help them understand what to do next.

Here is an example I often use because it is widely known. It is the best introduction of a new product on YouTube – Steve Jobs describing the original iPhone and how it will send Nokia phones to the history museum.?Jobs completely reframed the situation, the problem, the apparent customer want, the actual customer need, and the solution.??

1.????Situation: Exponentiality increasing applications and services on mobile devices.

2.????Problem: The tiny keys on Nokia phones are clumsy to use and slow at entering queries.

3.????Why not solved???Customers asked for more keys, but that was unable to keep up with the increasing number of services. Keys were never going to address the problem.

4.????Key insight into the actual customer need: There must be a reconfigurable display to provide an infinite number of unique "keys" for endless new services.

5.????Key insight into the solution: The mobile device was not just a phone; it was a small computer.??The touch screen with a complete operating system made that possible.

Wants Versus Needs

In this example customers said what they “wanted” – more keys.??They knew they had a problem, but they could only ask for what they knew.??Since customers seldom know what is possible, just asking them rarely uncovers the actual need.??That is, “wants” are not “needs.”??A much better question to ask customers is, “What do you?wish?you could do?”

Here is another example, “The upside-down ketchup bottle."??

1.????Situation: Many thick liquid products are hard to get out of their containers.

2.????Problem: Getting ketchup out of a bottle without pounding on it and spilling ketchup on the table.

3.????Why not solved: Large-mouth bottles do not easily allow a controlled about of ketchup to get out.

4.????Key insight into the actual customer need: An inverted ketchup bottle, so the ketchup sits on the bottle bottom along with a dispensing system, a bit like a toothpaste tube.?

5.????Key insight into the solution:??An inverted plastic bottle with a low-cost plastic nozzle to dispense ketchup in a controlled way when the bottle is squeezed.??When the bottle is not squeezed, the nozzle seals itself.??

Key Insights

Just one more thing.??Note the use of the term "key insight."??Every innovation requires many customer needs to be addressed, such as functions, services, ease of purchase and use, repair, and the business model.??And when building a new product, like the iPhone, there are many hundreds of new parts to be designed and developed.??

But generally, there are only one or two factors that define the actual customer need and its solution.??If you identify those key insights, you are likely working in the right direction. Conversely, if you get them wrong you will fail (e.g., more keys).??For example, with SpaceX, the key insight for achieving a dramatic cost reduction to transform the market was rocket reuse by landing rockets on their tails.??

Identifying those few key insights, as I noted, is challenging and almost always requires multiple rounds of reframing.??In subsequent posts, I will describe other reframing methods we use and why those methods make the i4i value creation methodology uniquely effective.

See: Curt Carlson, Harvard Business Review,?“Innovation for Impact”