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Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)

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Re: Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)

#21

Post by garrickvanburen »

I'm a big fan of JobsToBeDone, but partially because of this milkshake example, it took me years to grok.

As I see it, the milkshake example isn't about innovation, it's about actually having human-to-human conversations with customers and appreciating customers define their own competitive set, so perhaps closer to Gibson's "the street has its own use for things."

Outside of those two points, I'm not sure what repeatable lessons exist in the milkshake story for innovation, and because of that, it's probably doing more harm than help to JTBD as a concept.

Re: Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)

#22

Post by FloorEgg »

getnormality wrote: post #9
squirrel6 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all very true. I always try to push for customer interviews to be as much about formulating new hypotheses as they are about validating existing hypotheses.

I want to scream [1] every. single. time. a business wants to talk to me. Every second of the conversation is just the same thing, over and over: here are my boxes. Please put yourself in one of my boxes. There is no room for my feelings or free expression. It is inconvenient to the agenda of whoever created the survey. If companies are so desperate to know what customers want, how come no one, in the past 25 years o…

Hahaha. I'm sorry but I find this funny. I discovered jobs to be done in 2017, then dove deep into outcome-driven innovation and spent years consulting as a practitioner who interviewed people on behalf of my clients. My clients would push for their hypotheses to validate, but instead I would approach the interviews as open-ended exploratory empathy building exercises.

I would start out my interviews with things like " in your own words, what is the purpose of what you do?" And then engage in an open conversation stopping by at questions like what do you enjoy the most about what you do, what do you find the most difficult, what do you find the most tedious, what's the most important thing that you need to get done that you're the least satisfied with?

Most of my questions would be follow-up questions. I would also do a lot of active listening.

What I find funny is that people would often be a bit resistant to doing these interviews, but almost every single interview went long because the interviewee was clearly enjoying it so much. I tended not to ask whether they had a hard stop at the start of the interview, but instead would ask if they had a hard stop about 15 minutes before the scheduled end time. Of course, when interviewees truly did have a hard stop we would end on time, but I swear about 80% of the time. Interviews went long, sometimes 2 hours long. I started to realize that part of what I was doing was providing therapy.

Often the clients hypotheses wouldn't be validated, but I could almost always point to what the interviewees would value and what opportunities were there.

I don't do this anymore because most of the clients I worked with couldn't see the value in it, and I'm sure for very similar reasons that you were lamenting in your comment.

I'm grateful for the experience. I performed over 500 of interviews like this across many different industries from Frontline workers to c-suite of Fortune 500 companies. The experience was so valuable. Now I build product firsthand and exercise the skills I developed with my own customers and the market I serve, and being in a tight feedback loop is working really well so far. It's fun to build things people want.

Re: Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)

#23

Post by FloorEgg »

getnormality wrote: post #15
deaux wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too many layers and competing interests. The person who ends up creating the survey realistically cares much more about going home 1 minute earlier or with 1% less neural energy spent. They've got their kids to manage when they get home. Do you use any products from a one-person shop? They will be so much more likely to ask you real questions. Not guaranteed, of course, as some people are just clueless. Those usually…

That's precisely what I'm wondering about now. Is it possible that all real product ideas come from the mind of a single person, understanding and interacting with other people as actual people? And corporations are some sort of Thing that takes humanity and squishes it into a Box, a Box with one very narrow goal: to freeze the product idea from the single person and mass-produce it, "scale it up" so that millions of…

I think the problem is that it's rare for people to be capable of empathizing at that level and be capable of doing all the types of things that the leader of a large company needs to be able to do. It's also like a game of telephone. It's not enough to just empathize with the customer, it actually has to be turned into a product or experience. In big companies this means it gets communicated through multiple layers and each of those layers will warp and shift the actual empathy for the customer.

But honestly, I think the biggest issue is that leaders don't even realize they have this problem. I don't think it's the lower level employee being lazy. I think it's the leader not realizing how important customer and market empathy is, and not baking it into the company culture and processes. I agree wholeheartedly with the op comment at the top of this thread.

It's one of the reasons why monopolies lead to such bad experiences and products because there's no competitive pressure to empathize with the customer.

Re: Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)

#24

Post by FloorEgg »

garrickvanburen wrote: post #21

I'm a big fan of JobsToBeDone, but partially because of this milkshake example, it took me years to grok. As I see it, the milkshake example isn't about innovation, it's about actually having human-to-human conversations with customers and appreciating customers define their own competitive set, so perhaps closer to Gibson's "the street has its own use for things." Outside of those two points, I'm not sure what repea…

I disagree. The whole point of it is to shift the frame of reference away from the product and into the customer's job to be done. Ironically, we call it the milkshake example instead of the eating breakfast on the way to work example. But the lesson embedded in it is there all the same.

Personally, I found this example really helpful to wrap my head around jobs to be done theory.

It switched their frame from trying to innovate on the milkshake itself to the whole experience. Instead of making the milkshake chunky or thick or sweet or whatever they move the milkshake machine up closer to the door so people can be in and out faster.

I'm curious why you didn't see it this way. Did you miss something, or am I missing something?

Re: Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)

#25

Post by FloorEgg »

fifticon wrote: post #2

It is a bit sad that people have to be taught this; I am presuming the product people are a kind of humans too. But when I see their outputs, maybe this Christensen guy is right. I tried to adjust the background image on microsoft Teams video calls this morning; the UI I had to use or rather figure out, to achieve that, was a major depression. (1) the settings menus in teams are well hidden, for reasons unclear to me…

The thing I find the most hilarious about all these companies jamming llms in all over the place is that they don't ever put it where it makes the most sense to me - to manage the settings.

They could do away with all these mazes of settings and configurations and just have a little chat thing. You pop open and then tell the AI hey I want to change the background and then it just does it. You could have a huge and complex array of settings that would be a headache to navigate in a typical form format, but a breeze with an llm that has an API into them.

As an aside, another one that I just find hilarious is the LLM implementation into Google sheets. I'll ask it. "Hey how do I do this?" and then it goes "I don't know" and I'm like WTF why is this here

Re: Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)

#26

Post by CGMthrowaway »

pwatsonwailes wrote: post #6

The problem I tend to see is that companies say they're doing JTBD research, but they're actually just running attribute preference surveys (asking customers to rank features, from a list of things the company would like to build, rather than starting off by assuming you don't know what customers require). Listening to what people say they want (feature preferences) almost always diverges from what they actually want…

>Professionals said they wanted lighter tools (and that's true), but the constraint they experienced as a result of weight was the impacts that had. So you can solve for weight, or you can solve for improved usability.

"I want a lighter hammer, smaller bags of concrete, etc" Drake turning away --> "I want a heavy hammer with a long handle, and big bags plus a dolly/block & tackle" Drake nodding in approval

Re: Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)

#27

Post by CGMthrowaway »

JohnCClarke wrote: post #7

This example is always cited as different from the "demographics" approach. But it literally started by segmenting the buyers, and then focussing on a previously unrecognised demographic sector (car commuters). Clay Christensen is smart, and one of the many things he is smart about is marketing Clay Christensen.

Marketers would call your car commuter segment an "occasion." Perhaps more than finding new demographic segments (age/race/income/etc), food bev & QSR look for novel "occasions" like car snack, desk grazing, pre/post-workout, airport indulgence, social apertif, etc to drive sales growth

(One might also think of "functional foods," "mood boosters" etc which are neither an occasion nor a demographic. Perhaps these in particular are closer to a true JTBD)

Re: Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)

#28

Post by uxcolumbo »

FloorEgg wrote: post #22
getnormality wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to scream [1] every. single. time. a business wants to talk to me. Every second of the conversation is just the same thing, over and over: here are my boxes. Please put yourself in one of my boxes. There is no room for my feelings or free expression. It is inconvenient to the agenda of whoever created the survey. If companies are so desperate to know what customers want, how come no one, in the past 25 years o…

Hahaha. I'm sorry but I find this funny. I discovered jobs to be done in 2017, then dove deep into outcome-driven innovation and spent years consulting as a practitioner who interviewed people on behalf of my clients. My clients would push for their hypotheses to validate, but instead I would approach the interviews as open-ended exploratory empathy building exercises. I would start out my interviews with things like…

Which reading material would you recommend to get up to speed with outcome-driven innovation and JTBD.

And why didn't your clients see value in this? Was it because these insights didn't make its way to their service or product?

What's the current demand for JTBD and ODI consulting?

Re: Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)

#29

Post by garrickvanburen »

FloorEgg wrote: post #24
garrickvanburen wrote: post #21

I'm a big fan of JobsToBeDone, but partially because of this milkshake example, it took me years to grok. As I see it, the milkshake example isn't about innovation, it's about actually having human-to-human conversations with customers and appreciating customers define their own competitive set, so perhaps closer to Gibson's "the street has its own use for things." Outside of those two points, I'm not sure what repea…

I disagree. The whole point of it is to shift the frame of reference away from the product and into the customer's job to be done. Ironically, we call it the milkshake example instead of the eating breakfast on the way to work example. But the lesson embedded in it is there all the same. Personally, I found this example really helpful to wrap my head around jobs to be done theory. It switched their frame from trying…

If I recall correctly, the impetus for Christiansen to even look into this was to answer the question: “why are there so many milkshakes sold in the morning via drive thru?”

That’s a different question than, “how do we make our breakfast menu more popular?”

Now, perhaps the latter question begat the former, but either way it is not a product innovation story, it’s a customer/market research story articulating the shape of customer demand (which I fully support).

If there was a second part of the story - like, McD started marketing milkshakes in their breakfast menu and sales shot up ##% or they developed a breakfast flavor milkshake and sales shot up - then we’d have the product innovation story.

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