Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)

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39 pointsvismit200027 comments

The problem I tend to see is that companies say they're doing JTBD research, but they're actually just running attribute preference surveys (asking customers to rank features, from a list of things the company would like to build, rather than starting off by assuming you don't know what customers require).

Listening to what people say they want (feature preferences) almost always diverges from what they actually want the product to do (a functional, emotional, or social outcome). That gets more complex when we think about that there's different levels by which you can evaluate what someone wants, which in the JTBD word are thought of as jobs as progress (why they're doing the thing), and jobs as outcomes (how they're doing the thing). There's another famous example, which is from Bosch's circular saw evolution. Professionals said they wanted lighter tools (and that's true), but the constraint they experienced as a result of weight was the impacts that had. So you can solve for weight, or you can solve for improved usability. Symptoms vs causes sort of thing.

This is also why product teams should involve marketers, and why marketers should understand research design. The teams who I've seen do this well at this aren't running quick preference tests and A/B tests on features most of the time. They're generally more focused on running continuous feedback loops, where they conduct broader research, then engage in grounded theory style interpretation to understand what they can do, look at field validation to figure out what they should do, and then iterate.

For B2B especially as a side note, if your value proposition is something like accountability or proof of value, but your product's workflows don't make accountability or proving value effortless, fixing that workflow will do more for brand perception than any campaign, because nothing nukes good comms like a poor experience.

This is all very true. I always try to push for customer interviews to be as much about formulating new hypotheses as they are about validating existing hypotheses.

I want to scream [1] every. single. time. a business wants to talk to me. Every second of the conversation is just the same thing, over and over: here are my boxes. Please put yourself in one of my boxes.

There is no room for my feelings or free expression. It is inconvenient to the agenda of whoever created the survey.

If companies are so desperate to know what customers want, how come no one, in the past 25 years of my life as a consumer, has ever had any time to ask me a single real question?

[1] At least that's how I would feel if I hadn't numbed myself to this decades ago. Now I just escape. I hang up, I click the X, I think of nothing but getting away from this thing that, no matter what its motivation, no matter what product or cause it's selling, has exactly the same agenda: "would you like to dehumanize yourself for five minutes, so that I can make a data table that I was paid to make by someone who doesn't know what they're doing or why?"

"how come no one, in the past 25 years of my life as a consumer, has ever had any time to ask me a single real question"

There's a lot of shit marketers, is my short answer.

Like, a lot.

Too many layers and competing interests. The person who ends up creating the survey realistically cares much more about going home 1 minute earlier or with 1% less neural energy spent. They've got their kids to manage when they get home.

Do you use any products from a one-person shop? They will be so much more likely to ask you real questions. Not guaranteed, of course, as some people are just clueless. Those usually don't last long as business owners though.

That's precisely what I'm wondering about now.

Is it possible that all real product ideas come from the mind of a single person, understanding and interacting with other people as actual people? And corporations are some sort of Thing that takes humanity and squishes it into a Box, a Box with one very narrow goal: to freeze the product idea from the single person and mass-produce it, "scale it up" so that millions of people are aware of its existence and are able to use it?

I mean, Google didn't even invent Google Docs. Some random little startup did. Google just bought it, then made it discoverable and usable to millions.

Which is not a small thing, I guess. But I don't know what the marketing department is for. Other than putting Google Docs on billboards, maybe, or their digital equivalent.

Doesn't need to be a single person, but yes, all good products come from someone or a (generally) small team, spotting something, and fixing it.

As for the marketing department - depends on definition, but assuming you mean (as it mostly is nowdays) comms, it's two things:

1. Making sure that potential future customers know you exist, so when they enter the market to buy, they know you're relevant and can purchase from you.

2. Making sure that when someone is in the market to buy now, that they're more likely to buy from you, because you have a compelling reason for people to pick you, and not the other brands in the space that they can think of.

Mostly 1, some of 2, if the marketing team is good. Ratios vary as to how much though by more than you'd think, depending on industry, customer lifecycle, brand maturity and so on.

I think it's very often repeated that the hardest thing about growing a business is keeping the culture, and it's simply impossible past a certain size unless you literally develop a cult of personality like Jobs or to a lesser extent Musk. Extremely few manage to do it. And when the culture goes, that's what you get: least effort. And the least effort is to do what you're saying, "just do more of the same, but bigger, or with a hint of chocolate".

At least in most of the modern world. I think this effect is a _little_ weaker in China. It definitely used to be much weaker in the West too, at some point in time. But individualism, cultural capture by big capital, yaddah yaddah.

I think the problem is that it's rare for people to be capable of empathizing at that level and be capable of doing all the types of things that the leader of a large company needs to be able to do. It's also like a game of telephone. It's not enough to just empathize with the customer, it actually has to be turned into a product or experience. In big companies this means it gets communicated through multiple layers and each of those layers will warp and shift the actual empathy for the customer.

But honestly, I think the biggest issue is that leaders don't even realize they have this problem. I don't think it's the lower level employee being lazy. I think it's the leader not realizing how important customer and market empathy is, and not baking it into the company culture and processes. I agree wholeheartedly with the op comment at the top of this thread.

It's one of the reasons why monopolies lead to such bad experiences and products because there's no competitive pressure to empathize with the customer.

Hahaha. I'm sorry but I find this funny. I discovered jobs to be done in 2017, then dove deep into outcome-driven innovation and spent years consulting as a practitioner who interviewed people on behalf of my clients. My clients would push for their hypotheses to validate, but instead I would approach the interviews as open-ended exploratory empathy building exercises.

I would start out my interviews with things like " in your own words, what is the purpose of what you do?" And then engage in an open conversation stopping by at questions like what do you enjoy the most about what you do, what do you find the most difficult, what do you find the most tedious, what's the most important thing that you need to get done that you're the least satisfied with?

Most of my questions would be follow-up questions. I would also do a lot of active listening.

What I find funny is that people would often be a bit resistant to doing these interviews, but almost every single interview went long because the interviewee was clearly enjoying it so much. I tended not to ask whether they had a hard stop at the start of the interview, but instead would ask if they had a hard stop about 15 minutes before the scheduled end time. Of course, when interviewees truly did have a hard stop we would end on time, but I swear about 80% of the time. Interviews went long, sometimes 2 hours long. I started to realize that part of what I was doing was providing therapy.

Often the clients hypotheses wouldn't be validated, but I could almost always point to what the interviewees would value and what opportunities were there.

I don't do this anymore because most of the clients I worked with couldn't see the value in it, and I'm sure for very similar reasons that you were lamenting in your comment.

I'm grateful for the experience. I performed over 500 of interviews like this across many different industries from Frontline workers to c-suite of Fortune 500 companies. The experience was so valuable. Now I build product firsthand and exercise the skills I developed with my own customers and the market I serve, and being in a tight feedback loop is working really well so far. It's fun to build things people want.

Which reading material would you recommend to get up to speed with outcome-driven innovation and JTBD.

And why didn't your clients see value in this? Was it because these insights didn't make its way to their service or product?

What's the current demand for JTBD and ODI consulting?

>Professionals said they wanted lighter tools (and that's true), but the constraint they experienced as a result of weight was the impacts that had. So you can solve for weight, or you can solve for improved usability.

"I want a lighter hammer, smaller bags of concrete, etc" Drake turning away --> "I want a heavy hammer with a long handle, and big bags plus a dolly/block & tackle" Drake nodding in approval

It is a bit sad that people have to be taught this; I am presuming the product people are a kind of humans too. But when I see their outputs, maybe this Christensen guy is right.

I tried to adjust the background image on microsoft Teams video calls this morning; the UI I had to use or rather figure out, to achieve that, was a major depression. (1) the settings menus in teams are well hidden, for reasons unclear to me(). (2) but the _actual_ settings you need are hidden unless you START a meeting call. (3) but, the _actual_ settings are a long chain of ".. but are you sure you REALLY want to see the ACTUAL settings?", where you must continue to click 'more settings', 'advanced settings', 'full actual settings' (I am paraphrasing.)

() I suspect what they are though.. Something about dumbing the UI down to the level where the people in charge of teams can understand them, plus some kind of fear of UI designs where any given screen or view contains more than 1 or 2 elements (the second element being "show further settings").

We are dumbing down UI to the level of people with no hands, no eyes, no brains, which I presume is the target audience. I must have mah minimalism.

Though I did not follow the idea of chunkier fruit in those travel milkshakes, isn't that what clogs the straw, which is not ideal for a 1-hand treat.

The article presents the fruit as a way to make the milkshake more "interesting", addressing the fact that existing customers were purchasing milkshakes in part to make their commute less boring.

Weirdly, there's no followup on whether the changes improved sales, margins, or other goals.

It's what always happens when there's a disconnect between the product built and the actual thing people want to do. In marketing, we differentiate between Jobs-As-Activities (the task of "changing a background") and Jobs-As-Progress (the user trying to go from something being unsatisfactory to something better).

When UI feels dumbed down to that level, or hidden behind advanced settings, it’s often because the product team ends up treating users as a gestalt persona, rather than thinking about their constraints around time and attention. The most meaningful innovations occur when customer insights influence development before launch; sadly, that frequently doesn't happen. People launch the thing, come up with features they could add, ask what people want from that list (and potentially don't even do that) and then add stuff like barnacles accumulating on a ship.

The thing I find the most hilarious about all these companies jamming llms in all over the place is that they don't ever put it where it makes the most sense to me - to manage the settings.

They could do away with all these mazes of settings and configurations and just have a little chat thing. You pop open and then tell the AI hey I want to change the background and then it just does it. You could have a huge and complex array of settings that would be a headache to navigate in a typical form format, but a breeze with an llm that has an API into them.

As an aside, another one that I just find hilarious is the LLM implementation into Google sheets. I'll ask it. "Hey how do I do this?" and then it goes "I don't know" and I'm like WTF why is this here

This example is always cited as different from the "demographics" approach. But it literally started by segmenting the buyers, and then focussing on a previously unrecognised demographic sector (car commuters).

Clay Christensen is smart, and one of the many things he is smart about is marketing Clay Christensen.

How is "car commuters" a demographic segment?

Does the word "demography" mean anything?

Is "people who like to buy milkshakes" a demographic segment too?

Good segmentation is mostly not by demography nowadays. At best, demographics are a correlative element to something more fundamental, usually economic, behavioural or psychographic.

> Clay Christensen is smart

Not anymore. He died in 2020.

Marketers would call your car commuter segment an "occasion." Perhaps more than finding new demographic segments (age/race/income/etc), food bev & QSR look for novel "occasions" like car snack, desk grazing, pre/post-workout, airport indulgence, social apertif, etc to drive sales growth

(One might also think of "functional foods," "mood boosters" etc which are neither an occasion nor a demographic. Perhaps these in particular are closer to a true JTBD)

This echoes my experience. I can't sit down at a computer and start doing a new thing with a browser with 15 tabs open from the day before and expect it to go well- it's like waking up and walking right into a room with 5 stereos playing 5 different songs at once and trying to practice guitar.

The problem with general surveys is that you find out what people who don't buy your product think that they might like. Then they don't buy your improved product either.

A second problem is that we're unaware of what we responded to. That's one of the things that A/B testing reveals.

I'm a big fan of JobsToBeDone, but partially because of this milkshake example, it took me years to grok.

As I see it, the milkshake example isn't about innovation, it's about actually having human-to-human conversations with customers and appreciating customers define their own competitive set, so perhaps closer to Gibson's "the street has its own use for things."

Outside of those two points, I'm not sure what repeatable lessons exist in the milkshake story for innovation, and because of that, it's probably doing more harm than help to JTBD as a concept.

I disagree. The whole point of it is to shift the frame of reference away from the product and into the customer's job to be done. Ironically, we call it the milkshake example instead of the eating breakfast on the way to work example. But the lesson embedded in it is there all the same.

Personally, I found this example really helpful to wrap my head around jobs to be done theory.

It switched their frame from trying to innovate on the milkshake itself to the whole experience. Instead of making the milkshake chunky or thick or sweet or whatever they move the milkshake machine up closer to the door so people can be in and out faster.

I'm curious why you didn't see it this way. Did you miss something, or am I missing something?

If I recall correctly, the impetus for Christiansen to even look into this was to answer the question: “why are there so many milkshakes sold in the morning via drive thru?”

That’s a different question than, “how do we make our breakfast menu more popular?”

Now, perhaps the latter question begat the former, but either way it is not a product innovation story, it’s a customer/market research story articulating the shape of customer demand (which I fully support).

If there was a second part of the story - like, McD started marketing milkshakes in their breakfast menu and sales shot up ##% or they developed a breakfast flavor milkshake and sales shot up - then we’d have the product innovation story.

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