Before You Can Uncover Demand for Your Product, You Need to Understand these 3 Key Frameworks

The following is adapted from Learning to Build.

Oftentimes, we as innovators talk to people through the lens of our product and its features and benefits. Why is this feature important? What does it help you do? We think questions like this help us understand the buyer, because we get answers like, “It’s easy to use,” or “I love the interface.” But questions like this are about the product, not the buyer. As a result, they don’t help us uncover demand.

Uncovering demand is about you going into your customers’ lives. It’s about uncovering their struggling moment, the outcome they seek, and the progress that they are trying to make. It’s about the who, what, when, where, and why of how (or even if) your product helps them. It’s about seeing value from the customer’s perspective as opposed to value from the product perspective.

As an innovator or entrepreneur, you need to uncover demand. You need to understand how your product or service fits into people’s lives. And that all starts with interviewing customers who’ve used your product before and made progress. You need them to tell you the story of how they got here. More specifically, you need to uncover the three key buying frameworks that lead them to say, “Today’s the day.”

The 3 Buying Frameworks

Recently, my friend Amrita bought a Peloton, and my partner and co-founder Greg Engle and I sat down to understand why. Amrita is a busy, successful technology executive in her forties who lives in Toronto, Canada with her husband Bill. They own a beautiful 800-square-foot condo in an upscale building that includes a gym, but when Covid hit, Amrita found herself quarantined in her condo, and the gym closed, so she bought a $3,000 Peloton.

Greg and I wanted to uncover how Amrita made the decision to buy. What we found after unpacking our hour-long conversation is that Amrita — like so many other people, including your customers — was influenced by three buying frameworks. If you want to uncover demand for your product, you need to understand those frameworks.

The first framework is the three sources of energy or motivations. The second framework is the four forces of progress. The last framework is the timeline — the sequence of events and actions to make progress.

The Motivation to Buy

There are three different categories of motivation to buy: functional, emotional, and social. Let’s discuss each of them, using Amrita’s experience as an example.

First, functional motivation. How cumbersome is the purchasing process for the buyer — time, effort, and speed? In Amrita’s case, Peloton made the purchase easy. For example, Amrita told us that she had one conversation with Peloton before making the purchase, and setting up the bike was included in the delivery. She just needed to find a place for the bike in her home.

Next, emotional motivation. What fears, frustrations, and desires are driving the purchase? For Amrita, this purchase was driven by her emotional motivations more than anything else. She had insecurity about her weight and physical ability to keep up. She missed her alone time that the treadmill provided, and she also longed for that feeling of being addicted to exercise, like running.

Thirdly, social motivations. How do other people perceive, respect, trust, or acknowledge the person? Amrita chose a bike in great part to get her husband, Bill, from a “no” to a “yes.” She knows he likes to bike, so it increased her chance of his buy-in. Amrita also talked about the live classes with Peloton and how she longed for that community support to help her get back into regular exercise.

Overall, your goal when considering this framework should be to reduce the negative functional, emotional, and social motivations that are causing anxiety and serving as a barrier. At the same time, you must amplify the positive motivations to create pull for the product or service.

The Forces of Progress

The forces of progress are another critical component to uncovering demand. First, consider the push of the situation — your customer’s “struggling moment.” What forces were pushing Amrita toward buying a Peloton? The gym closed, and she was facing a long period of time without access to exercise equipment. Lately, she’d been feeling older, not able to keep up physically, or fit into clothes like she used to. Additionally, Amrita was no longer able to run as exercise.

Secondly, think about the magnetism of the new solution. The moment Amrita realized that something might get her back to a fitter lifestyle and help her make progress, the solution created magnetism; she started to imagine a better life where she felt and looked more like her younger self. She started noticing her friends rave on social media about being “addicted” and getting in a quick 20-minute workout between meetings. This created a pull toward progress.

Thirdly, consider the anxiety of the new solution. Despite her struggle and the pull the new solution created, there was anxiety. Could she get Bill to agree to the bike? How could she justify the cost? Where was she going to put the Peloton? These anxieties are important to understand because they hold people back from making the progress that they need.

Finally, think about the habit of the present. For example, Amrita’s current gym was closed, but eventually it would open. Would she decide later that she wanted to go back to the gym and regret the Peloton? Would she love biking as much as she loved running?

The Timeline to Progress

People’s forces and motivations drive their decisions, but not in a vacuum. Ultimately, the way people buy is a system that plays out over time. And the final part of that system is the timeline to progress, which includes six stages.

The first stage is what I call “First Thought.” Once you have the first thought, you’ve opened-up the space in your mind for the information. Without this first thought, there is no demand. But once you have it, you notice things you didn’t notice before.

Once you’ve created space in your brain, you start to fill that space by transitioning to the next stage: passive looking. People can passively look for years if there’s no event pushing them to the next step on the timeline. Whatever the event, it acts like a domino falling in your life that moves you along the timeline to active looking — the next step in the process.

Active looking is when people plan, spend time, and even spend money figuring out what’s next. It’s when they seek the solution to their struggling moment. Then, they move to deciding: making the tradeoffs and establishing value.

Next is onboarding. This is where the consumer determines if you’ve met the expectations set when they decided to lock in and buy your product or service. From there, they move to the last stage: ongoing use. This is where the jobs get done and the progress is achieved.

Discover What They Value

Considering these three frameworks in their entirety will help you discover what your customer values, and thereby uncover demand. Indeed, once you can see value from the customer’s perspective, you realize that value is not a feature or a benefit. It’s a tradeoff people make depending on the context they are in.

You can’t understand what tradeoffs people are willing to make, or whether your product will help them in their struggling moment, unless you understand these frameworks. Once you do, though, you will understand what pushes them toward a purchase or moves them away from it. Then, you can take steps to address those things in a positive way.

For more advice on how to uncover demand for your product, you can find Learning to Build on Amazon.

Bob Moesta is a builder, teacher, entrepreneur, author, and co-founder of The Re-Wired Group, a design and development firm based in Detroit, Michigan. Early in his career, Bob received an education in building and launching new products from renowned innovators Dr. Clayton Christensen, Dr. Genichi Taguchi, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, and Dr. Willie Hobbs Moore. The worldview he gained has enabled him to work on and launch thousands of new products over the last thirty years, be the founder of ten different companies, and become a mentor to the next generation of builders and problem solvers. Bob is an adjunct lecturer at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University and a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School, and MIT’s Sloan School of Management.