Customers Included: How to Transform Products, Companies, and the World - With a Single Step by Mark Hurst & Phil Terry

Author:Mark Hurst & Phil Terry [Hurst, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Creative Good, Inc.
Published: 2013-09-30T14:00:00+00:00

DEFINING “UNMET NEEDS”

At first it may seem difficult to say what, exactly, qualifies as an “unmet need.” Is it something customers already know they need, or something they don’t know they want until they see it? Is it a desire for a tactical fix, or is it a wish for a systemic improvement? What if someone doesn’t literally need it but merely wants it—does that even count as a need? Perhaps we should draw out a matrix with all the permutations: known needs, not-yet-known needs, known wants, tactical wanted unknowns, and so on. Thankfully, there’s an easier way. We return once more to Peter Drucker’s book Management, which neatly clarifies the issue with a single concept.

The only purpose of a business, Drucker writes, is “to create a customer”—and that means satisfying some customer need. Perhaps the customer was already aware of the need, “like food in a famine.” Perhaps the customer wasn’t aware of the need until the solution appeared, like “a Xerox machine or computer.” Or perhaps the need didn’t even exist until “innovation, credit, advertising, or salesmanship” created it. These are all different types of unmet needs, but Drucker draws no distinctions between them. Instead, he writes, in all cases, the single purpose of a business is to fulfill the customer’s need.

Drucker’s words are a refreshing antidote to the common suggestion that customers “don’t know what they want” and should be ignored. Drucker says, in effect, it doesn’t matter whether customers know what they want or not; either way, it’s the company’s responsibility to discover an unmet need and fulfill it. That is, after all, the only reason the company is in business in the first place.

As the Prospect Park case study showed, finding out customers’ unmet needs is vitally important. It’s best accomplished as early in a project as possible, and thus we encourage our clients to spend time with their customers before starting development on the product. Not everyone agrees with this approach.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.