Marketing malpractice
Thursday, June 15th, 2006According to Clayton Christensen in an article entitled Marketing Malpractice, there are 30,000 new consumer products which are launched each year.
Think about that: 30,000 NEW products… each year!
Each year, 90% of these products fail. That’s 27,000 failed products. Further, I’ve seen other sources quote that 96% of all product in all sectors fail to meet or exceed minimal revenue expectations. Holy Cow, folks! What in the hell are we doing out there??
Christensen contends that the root cause of this is a fundamental flaw in how we have learned to define customers in the abstract. The common practice taught to Marketing professionals is to segment the market by various elements such as demographic elements, geographic elements, behavioral elements, and psychographic elements. I can tell you that this is starting to change… but we still have a long way to go.
While it’s true that we’ve seen significant historical benefit in using this methodology, we’ve failed to see where its true limitations exist. Christiansen writes: “The great Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt used to tell his students, ‘People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!’ Marketing must philosophically make the switch from defining who they are targeting to the context of the solution. Or to state it in a straight forward way: Marketing needs to understand the “JOB” the product does, not the person.
Kawasaki shows us how we can back into this process inadvertently. But, the question is, can we change our ways and actually get to the point where we understand the context the customer elects to hire us?
What is preventing this? When we are on the job… Do we just get too enamored with our features? Have we translated what our customers have said and classified that feedback into something we think we heard? Are we using organizational filtering to make sure that we hear only the important information? What are we doing?
We owe it to ourselves, our companies, and our customers to find a better way.
