Business Insight Zone

This law sounds so basic it hurts, yet I’ve seen it ignored routinely, at various organizations throughout my own career and in all the years I’ve been covering business:

No one ever bought ANYTHING unless they figured it would solve some problem for them.

Okay, in some cases, the problem was ginned up by clever marketers (”Aren’t you hungry for Burger King NOW?”).

In some cases, the cure was worse than the disease. (I’m thinking of the more cloying varieties of Glade air freshener.)

But generally, the formula runs like this:

YOUR problem
needs
MY solution

As an aside, the fundamental truth of this is why the term “solution” has been so badly overused in the past ten years, especially in the realm of high-tech.

Savvy merchants and inventors and restaurateurs and manfacturers have known this all along, even if they didn’t use such pretentious language for it. Consider a few examples:

• People want honest goods at an honest price, and they want to shop from the comfort of their own homes — but they also want the peace of mind that they can return things with no hassle. (That’s the business of L.L. Bean and Lands’ End in a nutshell.)
• People want cleaner, brighter, more reliable light in their homes and businesses. (Hello, Thomas Edison.)
• When people are traveling, they need to eat, but they never know whether the local place along the highway is any good. They want a meal they can count on. (This was the insight that allowed Ray Kroc to build McDonald’s into an empire.)
• People surfing the Web need a much better way to find what they’re looking for, and advertisers want some way to reach people who are looking for the kinds of things they offer. (As we discussed the other day, this is the simple/profound genius of Google.)
• The Navy needs much better ways of wiping out enemies with minimal risk to its own personnel. (It’s not pretty, but it’s Lockheed Martin’s stock in trade.)

Examples are easy to come by. In fact, please look around you for a successful organization — it doesn’t even need to be a profit-seeking enterprise — and put that example in the comments.

Whatever examples we choose, the lesson is clear: people need things, whether it’s heavy-duty trucks or fun trans-Atlantic travel or relief from erectile dysfunction. They have problems, and they’re looking to US to solve them.

Yet SO very often, we in the business world lose sight of this. Yes, budget meetings and value-proposition messaging and call-center hold times and cycles per second and, by all means, depositary ratios are highly important. Of course they are.

But they are ALL trumped by the need of the customer. Every last one of these hard, important things means NOTHING until and unless the customer’s problem is solved.

As you finish reading this, pull back and ask yourself some of the naive questions that have animated great business leaders from the Fuggers to Henry Ford:

• What business are we really in?
• What do our customers most want from us?
• How can we give it to them?
• How can we give it to them BETTER?

Then go and take action solving someone’s problem!

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See more entries in this series here:

• The Basic Basics — an Omnibus.

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(Library of Congress image via trialsanderrors. Larger version here.)

Category: Management