“Every Company is Running for Office. To Win, Give the Voters What They Want”
The second of Alan’s principles deals with customers’ desires and expectations. While marketers could expand on this topic in a plethora of ways, Alan breaks desires down to three things tied to American culture followed by the question every business leader should ask:
- Practicality and the desire for things that simply get the job done - “Does it Work?”
- Adaptability and the capacity for continuous improvement - “Can we Make it Work Better?”
- Love for innovative ideas and solutions that improve lives - “Is it New and Better?”
What I like about these three things is their very objective focus. By addressing one, we have to ask many more questions to achieve an answer. Sometimes the answer is intuitive, and other times it isn’t. What does a competitive analysis, customer service, or design/engineering have to say? What do managers and executives think, but haven’t publicly expressed?
There’s two areas I’d like to highlight: Quality and Audience.
Quality - How well do the primary/secondary products and services perform against established goals and competitive benchmarks? Is there a reason for the surplus or deficiency? Is there a bottleneck or trampoline that’s influencing performance, as perceived by the customer?
Audience - Are we targeting the right people? Does our product/service fit their expectations for quality, price, service, or other attributes? Have our communication touch points been well designed to convey that quality? Have we taken sufficient steps to measure customer satisfaction and what quality aspects can be improved? Have lead users or customers been involved in the product development process, whether from ideation or usability testing?
When we conduct a qualitative acid test like this perhaps through brief questionnaires to various stakeholders and customer segments, combined with some competitive analysis, the answers to the three questions will become clear.
But remember to keep asking 
Note - This review is based on my reading of Alan Webber’s “Rules of Thumb” which I received as a gift from the publisher. Visit the Facebook Fan Page for more insights.
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