Summary: What is your customer’s ideal solution? Whilst you might not always be able to provide it, it may inspire you to producing something better than the currnent leading brand.
You should know by now you can’t just give consumers exactly what they want. Yet you might find useful ideas that you can blend with your own to create something that is a close match to the consumer’s ideal solution, or makes a great ideal solution from within the company. Remember you will have to do a lot of thinking for consumers by thinking in ways they do not… this often comes from accepting some hard nosed commercial realities – sure you can give them more leg room on your economy class airline and meals – but the price will double.. now what does the budget conscious consumer think of the value you’ll offer them? “Give me back cheaper seats!” they’ll scream!
Look at the consumers ideal solutions all along the Consumer Value Line, can you innovate there as well?
Look across time and trends to create unique superior value
We’ll go onto this in far more detail when we come to Step 4 – Context. For now, have an eye on buying trends, sociocultural trends, technology trends, regulatory trends and environmental trends.
Look for clear irreversible trends in their ascendancy, and their impact on value and business models for the ideas that you have. Solutions should fully take advantage of these trends which can be years in the making.
For example, whilst the music industry fought the illegal download of music trend, Apple looked at what people were actually doing. They then tried to help them. They addressed the Value Pains of customers downloading illegally – poor music quality, high search time, and the Value Pains of those buying from stores – having to purchase whole albums, travelling, or waiting for delivery, and the Value Pains of producers – loss of revenue. It did so by creating ITunes where each song could be downloaded/transferred no more than 7 times enough for any users but too little to make it easy to share! In stead of fighting the trend, it observed what people were doing and then created a product to help them meet those jobs and outcomes better.
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said at 3:44 pm on August 27th, 2010
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