blogAlthough your customers might tell you, they really don’t know what they want.
On special holidays mom cooks pierogi for the family. She makes two kinds, those filled with mashed potatoe + cheese and the other with sauerkraut. What’s more, the pierogi I’ve had while eating out, and in the frozen section at Wegmans have stuck to this standard. For the longest time, if you asked me what I craved in a pierog it would have been mashed potatoe + cheese or sauerkraut.
That all changed when I visited the Rochester farmers market this past weekend. While walking past a food stand, my taste buds screamed at me to turn around. The menu had the normal variety of pierogie, in addition to a smorgash board of tantalizing fillings. These ranged from savory selections filled with bacon or packed with spinach, and sweet varieties stuffed with blueberries. In that moment my perception and appreciation for the humble perogie changed forever.
You might be thinking what’s the big deal? There are 15 variations of Dorito chips being sold. We live in world filled with food variety. True, but this has not always been the case. Malcolm Gladwell attributes the revolution in food companies offering products tailored by tastes to Howard Moskowitz. And it’s only been 20 years since Howard convinced Prego to launch their extra-chunky tomatoe sauce. Before that, we had been limited to buying plain sauce off the shelves.
Although we’ve seen an explosion in product variation there is still alot of variablility to discover in human preferences. This is especially true for service businesses, many who have yet to discover their niche. There needs to be more daring, spicy, chunky tomatoe sauce companies in the world. However, at the same time, you can’t rely on your customers to tell you outright what they want. People who’ve never tasted a blueberry perogie won’t be able to say that’s what they want until given a sample.
So here’s a few questions to ponder:
If people don’t know what they want, how do you determine their desires?
Is there a saturation point for choice? Reframing the question, is it possible to overwhelm with too much choice?
Tags: behavior
As Henry Ford would have said: If I had asked people what they wanted they would have told me: a faster horse… Maybe the best option is to come up with original or out of the box ideas on our own and then test them in small sample group.
Hi Mario,
That’s an apt adage for this post. However, didn’t HF also contradict his own wisdom when he said “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black”? I find it interesting that he was able to make the huge conceptual leap from horse to motorized transport, while initially resisting planned style obsolescence for vehicles (a decision which contributed to GM’s dominance in the auto industry).
Definitely an intriguing historical figure.
Thanks for commenting Mario.