Documentaries “Merchants of Cool” and “Generation like” both mentioned that marketers need to give consumers what they want. Well, then you’d think it would be really simple for marketers to ask consumers in focus groups what they want and then produce that. In some cases, this doesn’t work. As Steve Jobs once pointed out, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” So, how can marketers give consumers what they want when consumers don’t know in the first place?
One of the key assumptions underlying microeconomics is that the consumer is rational, meaning that the consumer knows what they want and seeks to make the most of the available opportunities given their constraints. However, this is not reality most of the time. A lot of us are influenced by outside factors. When we walk down a supermarket isle and hear a Spanish song, we might think of buying chips and salsa. Or maybe we walked by a really cool looking car and thought, “I need that.” We didn’t know we wanted these things until we saw it or were reminded of it. Try asking a consumer what they want that does not exist yet and you’ll discover that it’s pretty hard for them to imagine a concrete good. But once the good exists, consumers can then decide if they want it. This is a major struggle in innovation.
Other times, consumers might know what they want. For example, Wiley Cerilli used customer development in building SinglePlatform. Multiple other startups also were successful because they used customer development.
This shows that consumers sometimes know what they want. Do you know what you want?
I think this idea is super fascinating. It really makes you question how much of what we buy or consume we ACTUALLY wanted in the first place. It is also a little scary to know that companies and big corporations have so much control over our lives and what we want in on a day to day basis.
ReplyDeleteThis topic is really interesting because we, even as the consumers, can never predict what the next fad is going to be and it's often something we can never imagine becoming so popular. You also connected this all to the documentary we have been watching about how marketers are trying to manipulate consumers and find the next big thing, which makes this really easy to understand!
ReplyDeleteI find this post really interesting. Producers are trying to figure out what we want next, even though we don't even know what we want until we see it. I like the point you make how outside factors may also influence what we think we want, so if in a store, there are stimuli to trigger our desire for a new product, that will also make us want to buy it even though we may not have initially wanted it.
ReplyDeleteI really like the layered approach you took while addressing this topic. By starting with the underlying assumptions and then gradually building up towards how reality behaves helped to draw a distinction between the two. This also helps to tie into the notion of outside influence which was an interesting concept. The question of: Do consumer want what they want or what their influences want?
ReplyDeleteAfter thinking about the question you posed at the end of your post, I realized I really don't know what I want because I don't know what I'm missing until I have it. For example, I love drinking boba tea, but before I had ever tried boba tea, I didn't know I wanted it. Now, I want it all the time! The same could be said about a phone. When I was younger, I didn't want a phone. But now that I have one, I can't even go a couple days without it! This makes me wonder what new product, such as a new drink or a new piece of technology, will be ubiquitous in the future.
ReplyDeleteI think it was really interesting how you pointed out the difference between human needs and human wants and how that affect the market as a whole. And I liked how you connected back to how if a consumer doesn't know what they want than how does the market know what they want and at the same time, is the market assuming what we need? I think this question is very important to discuss because it essentially is talking about how the economy runs.
ReplyDelete