Don’t Continue To Bet The Ranch On A Product ‘Benefit’ Your Customers No Longer Care About
It’s axiomatic that your product has to have the features, advantages and benefits customers value. But customer preferences change so rapidly that it’s easy to fall behind pursuing and perfecting product features nobody wants or cares about anymore. Reflect on a few obvious examples:
A home “away from it all” is giving way to “live-work-shop” and “downtown living.” For years, housing developers focused on building living communities in what used to be cornfields — in the wide open spaces. More recently, they’ve learned people don’t like to drive everywhere and would rather live near restaurants and shopping offered by downtown areas. Homes in many of those countryside developments are now harder to sell, and some developers have been caught with half-finished projects nobody wants to buy.
Home buyers seem willing to trade-off some congregating space for more bedrooms and baths. Homes from a few years ago featured big family rooms as their selling point. Nowadays, people want more sleeping/bath suites. Designers have scrambled to re-work the floor plans for their home, apartment and town house models.
High fidelity seems less important with “virtual” music. For decades, a whole industry developed around stereo hardware that promised high quality sound when playing vinyl and, though to a lesser extent, tapes and CDs. But listeners seem not to care as much about sound quality now that they get their music in digital files.
Larger screens reversed the push to smaller cell phones. Everyone wanted smaller and smaller cell phones for ease of portability. But as users began using their phone devices for games and surfing the web, screen size suddenly took center stage. Many users decided they were willing to accept a larger footprint in exchange for the larger screens of Samsung phones, and Apple had to play catch-up with the 6 and 6P, after letting others grab significant market share.
Families eating at home are moving to fresh-ingredients meal kits over heat-and-eat prepared foods. Food companies spent the post-WW II years inventing processes to make meals that could be prepared quickly at home by harried people getting home from work. The focus was on saving time on the slicing, dicing and cooking aspects. Then it turned out that families wanted to use real, fresh ingredients and didn’t really mind the prep time — regarding it as an activity the family could do together. The center of the food store still stocks packaged products but, more and more, shoppers are spending more time on the periphery in the fresh fruits and vegetables departments or ordering from food-kit delivery companies if they want to save time on the shopping end.
High-quality lenses, camera skills and professional photo finishing have less perceived value now that there’s a do-it-yourself capability on your phone. Since the invention of the photograph, people have valued pictures they can view and display in their homes. Professional photographers prided themselves on their photo composition, the expensive cameras they used and their skills in the darkroom. Now that everyone has a camera in their phones, most people seem quite satisfied with their own picture-taking skills and like the fact that they can print their own work product at the drug store. (A photographer friend of mine said he never thought he’d see the day, but he recently put his darkroom equipment out at the curb for collection on bulk day!) Sure, photos taken with a real camera with a fine, imported lens have better resolution, but fewer people seem to care.
A “good sense of direction” is no longer a differentiator in getting from place to place. Driving a cab or livery car depended on the ability to find your way from here to there. That skill was a limiting factor on the number of people who would drive themselves in unfamiliar territory much less think about taking a job as a driver for hire. But today’s navigation systems in most late model cars and in everyone’s cell phone, make it easy for almost anyone to work their way to their destination. It means that many people don’t need drivers as much anymore, and ironically, it’s also opened up the car service industry to thousands of otherwise directionally-challenged new drivers almost overnight. Traditional taxi and livery companies are working hard to come up with new advantages and benefits to compete in this new environment.
USE IT NOW: What features, advantages and benefits are driving your product development that may no longer be important to — or valued by — your customers? In a previous article, we mentioned the importance of learning exactly what it is customers like about your product — why they buy it. A brief, concise and targeted customer survey is one way to find out.