Exploring customer perspectives and context can help us uncover new opportunities. We may build a technologically superior and robust product, but that alone cannot guarantee that our product will succeed. Product success can depend on how customers adopt our product, how they perceive our product’s value, and the alternatives that exist in the market among other things. We cannot predict how products will be received by our customers. Customers may adopt our product in ways we didn’t expect them to. By keeping an ear to the ground and a check on the pulse of the market, we can tweak our product experience to identify new value propositions in our Impact Driven Product.
In this chapter, we will explore the following topics:
- Why do well-made products fail?
- Categorizing customers by level of engagement
- Feedback channels and when to use them
- Incorporating feedback into the product backlog
“What’s really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn’t said anything?”– Oracle, The Matrix
Charles Duhigg, in the book, The Power of Habits, explores the launch of Febreze, its initial failure, and how understanding customer context and motivations made it a success. The following is a summary of the case study described in the book.
Procter & Gamble (P&G), a corporate behemoth with a wide range of household products had an interesting experience launching Febreze. It was an innovative product that could eradicate bad odor. It was inexpensive to manufacture, and it could be sprayed on fabrics in homes and car interiors.
The product was so phenomenal in eliminating odor that the team was very confident about its success in the market. The marketing team created ad campaigns using the cues, routine, and reward framework of the habit loop, that Charles Duhigg explains in his book. The cue was an everyday situation where we encounter bad odor. The routine (the team hoped) was to spray Febreze. The reward was eliminating bad odor:
P&G was confident that with its innovative technology and its ubiquitous need in regular households, Febreze was going to be a hit. After the launch, the company waited for a week, two weeks, a month, and two months. Febreze sales hadn’t taken off at all. It was a failure. The entire team was confounded. It seemed to them that they had done everything right. The product was effective, it was easy to manufacture, they had their distribution channels in place, the ads were well made, the launch was perfect, and there was a clear need for such a product in the market. What was going on, then? Didn’t people want to eliminate odor? Their initial market research interviews had revealed compelling data that people wanted to eliminate odors, not just mask them, so then why didn’t Febreze take off as expected?
P&G started to investigate. It interacted with and observed people’s household cleaning routines. That is when the team hit upon their first observation that challenged a fundamental assumption they had made about how people perceive harsh odors in their houses. They realized that we become desensitized to the smells in our lives. If you’re a cigarette smoker, then you don’t smell smoke after a while. As Charles Duhigg observes in the book, even the strongest odors fade with constant exposure. The cue of the habit loop wasn’t kicking in, since people were unaware of the bad odor.
The second key insight came when they also noticed how consumers used Febreze. They were using it as a finishing touch after their regular cleaning routine. One of the customers they interviewed observed, “spraying feels like a little mini-celebration when I’m done with a room.” Febreze was not a part of the cleaning routine, instead it was the reward at the end of the cleaning routine.
P&G now had a tangible solution to their problem. The product was great, but it was the positioning and its value to the customer in relation to their context that had to be changed. Their ads now advertised Febreze as a reward at the end of the cleaning routine, and they also added perfume to the product, to emphasize that Febreze was a prize for cleaning efforts. A year later, Febreze brought in $230 million.”(Source: The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg – http://charlesduhigg.com/new-york-times-magazine/.)
An instance of product adoption and its relation to human behavior, can be found in Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point. A study was conducted in the ‘60s about the importance of fear in learning. One group of participants was taught about the importance of tetanus inoculation. Another group was given a booklet with the dangers of tetanus. A camp for getting the tetanus shot was set up. Surprisingly, even though the latter group said they were more likely to get the tetanus shots (after reading the booklet), almost none of the participants from either group actually got their tetanus shots. Neither fear nor education had been effective in nudging the participants to take action. In a repeat of this experiment, the team included a map of the local area showing where they could get tetanus shots. This was given to both groups. A large number of participants from both groups got their tetanus shots this time. Where fear and education had failed, a simple map succeeded (source: The Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell – https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-tipping-point/chapter-three-the-stickiness-factor).
These amazing stories from P&G and from the tetanus shot study, tell us a lot about why product adoption isn’t straightforward and well-defined. If we asked people why they didn’t take the tetanus shots, we would have received a lot of explanations, none of which could have pointed us to the solution of showing a simple map. We cannot guess the context under which our product is being used by our consumers. Looking purely at data, without its context, may not really help in improving our product experience.
Feedback doesn’t always come wrapped in nice packages. It is usually never clear, specific, or constructive. It never tells us what action to take. Unearthing product insights is only possible when we understand the context under which consumers use our product. That is, if we get feedback at all to begin with.
The purpose of seeking feedback is to help us assess whether the assumptions we have made about our product hold true or not. In the case of Febreze, the assumption was that the product would become an integral part of the cleaning routine. What the consumer context told the team was that it was a reward at the end of the regular cleaning routine. It also gave them the valuable insight about people being nose blind when it comes to smells in their lives. If they hadn’t gone to the core of the consumer context, the P&G team could have continued to make improvements to the product, without changing their fundamental assumptions. They would have made many more enhancements to try to make people adopt Febreze as part of their cleaning routine, and each attempt would have hit a roadblock because people were unaware of odor problems, and they weren’t really looking to change their cleaning routines.