If there’s any common ground among all strategy, innovation, marketing, and new product development practitioners, it’s that we need to have a compelling and differentiated value proposition. But if we’re all aligned as to the importance of a value prop – are we similarly aligned as to what one is? (No, we are not!) So, just what is a value proposition? Before we can even get started with this discussion, let’s define a “product” broadly to mean more than just…
A market is a job and a job executor. This is all we need to know to understand the answer to the question, “Who is the customer?” To better explore this question – let’s begin with this: The goal of innovation is to help a customer to accomplish a job perfectly. Question: Who gets to say what “perfect” is? Answer: The customer (of course). Question: Who is the customer? Answer: The person executing the job. We innovate for the person…
How did jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) thinking begin? The cornerstone was laid way, way back in 1960 with the most famous HBR article ever written, Marketing Myopia. Ted Levitt told us us that “the railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. (but rather) …They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business.” He further explains that the movie industry should likewise…
From the book, New Product Blueprinting, we know that the B2B customer is generally more knowledgeable, more interested and more objective, which has implications for the quality of insight that we can learn from a customer interview. However, the most important difference, and the most meaningful for B2B market research has to do with the markets themselves: they are more concentrated. This simply means that there are fewer customers. Fewer customers for mining shovels than toothpaste. Think about it…packaging equipment, chemicals,…