To companies designing their customer insight systems, Swoz Consulting CEO Scott Wozniak recommends first checking out the work done by Clayton Christensen and his team around the “jobs to be done” theory.
As Wozniak writes in a recent column published in Business Report, Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, summarizes his theory by saying, “People don’t simply buy products or services. They hire them to make progress in specific circumstances.” To put it simply, they don’t want your stuff; they want how your stuff makes their lives better.
Wozniak shares that one of his favorite applications of their work is the milkshake project Clayton and his team did when they were hired by an unnamed fast-food company to increase milkshake sales.
In America, the vast majority of milkshake sales happen in the evening, Wozniak notes. It’s considered an evening dessert, consumed with dinner or enjoyed after dinner as a treat. “However, this company wasn’t satisfied with that. It had an asset (milkshake machine) that was largely idle all day,” the columnist writes. “So, in an attempt to increase milkshake sales, it started creating new flavors.”
After a lot of testing with customers, the eatery identified a few flavors that people loved. The company rolled out the product to all its locations, ran a major national ad campaign, only to discover the customers didn’t really care. Sales went up only a little—and most of them were still in the evening.
Realizing it had missed something, Wozniak notes, the company leaders brought in Clayton and his team. This time, they didn’t start with the product; they started by watching the customers. Specifically, they wanted to see the few customers who did buy milkshakes during the morning and afternoon. Who were they? What did they do before, during and after the milkshake purchase? Where did it fit into their lives? What was the ‘job’ they were ‘hiring’ the milkshake to do?
Read Wozniak’s full column to see what researchers discovered.
