Want Your Product to Succeed? Then You Need to Understand the “Struggling Moment”
(Royalty free image: https://unsplash.com/photos/mGP8gyGb8zY. Credit: Unsplash / Denny Müller)
The following is adapted from Learning to Build.
What’s the difference between a Snickers and a Milky Way? On the surface, these two products seem similar. They’re both candy bars that are made in the same plant with chocolatey ingredients and sit side by side in the candy aisle. When viewed from the supply-side, they seem to compete with one another.
So why would someone buy a Snickers versus a Milky Way? As it turns out, the who, what, when, where, and why — the context in which people buy a Snickers versus a Milky Way — is completely different. Let’s take a closer look, because understanding this context (what I refer to as the “struggling moment”) has profound ramifications for whether or not a product succeeds.
Solving the Struggle
Typically, people buy a Snickers when they’re hungry, missed their last meal, are running out of energy, have lots to do, and are short on time; they need a boost. Snickers fits this situation quite well because it feels like food — the nougat, caramel, and peanuts form a ball when you chew it, and you swallow it like food.
As the Snickers hits your stomach, the growling and hunger pangs stop because that ball absorbs the acid in the stomach and gives the body the energy it needs. Snickers competes with a cup of coffee, a Red Bull, or a sandwich. I would say Snickers is not a candy bar; it’s fuel.
Conversely, a Milky Way converts into almost a liquid within three chews and slides down your throat, coating your mouth with chocolate and endorphins. It can take as long as 20 minutes to eat, and you savor the experience; it’s a candy bar. Milky Way competes with ice cream, brownies, and a glass of wine.
Snickers and Milky Way are fundamentally different in terms of the struggling moment that they solve. Therefore, they are fundamentally different in terms of the demand that they fulfill.
Understanding this dynamic was a game changer for Snickers. Once they uncovered the demand and began marketing to people in their struggling moment, sales skyrocketed. Snickers is now the bestselling candy bar in its category with over $4 billion in sales.
Supply Versus Demand
To uncover demand, you must understand way more than who your customer is. What’s causing them to make a purchase? It’s understanding value from the customer-side of the world as opposed to the product-side of the world. It’s about realizing the progress that people are trying to make based on their context. Your product or services are merely part of their solution.
Demand is caused by a struggling moment and the thought, “Maybe I can do better…” Without the struggling moment, there is no demand. Demand is framed by who, when, where, and why. The problem arises when you are solely focused on the supply-side view of your product or service and see everything through that lens: How do I make it? How do I position it? How do I measure it? How profitable is it?
In this scenario, the consumer is nebulous — an imagined, personified version of the customer — an aggregated set of demographic and psychographic information. You aggregate and triangulate the consumer around the product through correlative data. You think of your creation in terms of competitive sets within a category or industry.
If Mars, Inc. had viewed Snickers from the supply-side, they would have focused on Milky Way as the competition. They would have zeroed in on making Snickers more delicious — taste-testing Milky Way and Snickers side by side, comparing ingredients, and tweaking the contents. In the end, they would have had two candy bars that were a parody of each other, missing a $4 billion opportunity.
Focus on the Demand Side
When you innovate from the demand side, you realize that the customer has a completely different perspective. They usually have a completely different reference point of your product (think Snickers versus Red Bull instead of Snickers versus Milky Way).
Their context revolves around the new desired outcomes they seek, and their competitive sets aren’t actually competitive sets but candidate sets: “I can do this, or I can do that.”
The customer has no idea how Snickers bars are made, and they don’t care. In most cases, they can’t tell you that a Snickers would even solve their struggling moment until they’ve tried it or until you step in to let them know.
Both supply and demand are important perspectives. In fact, as an innovator or entrepreneur, you need both, but in my experience, most innovators and entrepreneurs are more focused and skilled at the supply-side. It’s critical that you understand how demand works. How does your product or service fit into people’s lives?
For more advice on how to innovate from the demand side, 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.
