5 ms·

Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)

39 points by vismit2000 8mo ago

fifticon 8mo ago
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(). (2) but the _actual_ settings you need are hidden unless you START a meeting call. (3) but, the _actual_ settings are a long chain of ".. but are you sure you REALLY want to see the ACTUAL settings?", where you must continue to click 'more settings', 'advanced settings', 'full actual settings' (I am paraphrasing.) () I suspect what they are though.. Something about dumbing the UI down to the level where the people in charge of teams can understand them, plus some kind of fear of UI designs where any given screen or view contains more than 1 or 2 elements (the second element being "show further settings"). We are dumbing down UI to the level of people with no hands, no eyes, no brains, which I presume is the target audience. I must have mah minimalism.
- fifticon 8mo ago
  Though I did not follow the idea of chunkier fruit in those travel milkshakes, isn't that what clogs the straw, which is not ideal for a 1-hand treat.
  - thaumasiotes 8mo ago
    The article presents the fruit as a way to make the milkshake more "interesting", addressing the fact that existing customers were purchasing milkshakes in part to make their commute less boring. Weirdly, there's no followup on whether the changes improved sales, margins, or other goals.
- pwatsonwailes 8mo ago
  It's what always happens when there's a disconnect between the product built and the actual thing people want to do. In marketing, we differentiate between Jobs-As-Activities (the task of "changing a background") and Jobs-As-Progress (the user trying to go from something being unsatisfactory to something better). When UI feels dumbed down to that level, or hidden behind advanced settings, it’s often because the product team ends up treating users as a gestalt persona, rather than thinking about their constraints around time and attention. The most meaningful innovations occur when customer insights influence development before launch; sadly, that frequently doesn't happen. People launch the thing, come up with features they could add, ask what people want from that list (and potentially don't even do that) and then add stuff like barnacles accumulating on a ship.
- FloorEgg 8mo ago
  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
pwatsonwailes 8mo ago
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 the product to do (a functional, emotional, or social outcome). That gets more complex when we think about that there's different levels by which you can evaluate what someone wants, which in the JTBD word are thought of as jobs as progress (why they're doing the thing), and jobs as outcomes (how they're doing the thing). There's another famous example, which is from Bosch's circular saw evolution. 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. Symptoms vs causes sort of thing. This is also why product teams should involve marketers, and why marketers should understand research design. The teams who I've seen do this well at this aren't running quick preference tests and A/B tests on features most of the time. They're generally more focused on running continuous feedback loops, where they conduct broader research, then engage in grounded theory style interpretation to understand what they can do, look at field validation to figure out what they should do, and then iterate. For B2B especially as a side note, if your value proposition is something like accountability or proof of value, but your product's workflows don't make accountability or proving value effortless, fixing that workflow will do more for brand perception than any campaign, because nothing nukes good comms like a poor experience.
- squirrel6 8mo ago
  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.
  - getnormality 8mo ago
    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 of my life as a consumer, has ever had any time to ask me a single real question? [1] At least that's how I would feel if I hadn't numbed myself to this decades ago. Now I just escape. I hang up, I click the X, I think of nothing but getting away from this thing that, no matter what its motivation, no matter what product or cause it's selling, has exactly the same agenda: "would you like to dehumanize yourself for five minutes, so that I can make a data table that I was paid to make by someone who doesn't know what they're doing or why?"
JohnCClarke 8mo ago
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.
- getnormality 8mo ago
  How is "car commuters" a demographic segment? Does the word "demography" mean anything? Is "people who like to buy milkshakes" a demographic segment too?
- pwatsonwailes 8mo ago
  Good segmentation is mostly not by demography nowadays. At best, demographics are a correlative element to something more fundamental, usually economic, behavioural or psychographic.
- pfdietz 8mo ago
  > Clay Christensen is smart Not anymore. He died in 2020.
- CGMthrowaway 8mo ago
  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)
btilly 8mo ago
The problem with general surveys is that you find out what people who don't buy your product think that they might like. Then they don't buy your improved product either. A second problem is that we're unaware of what we responded to. That's one of the things that A/B testing reveals.
RankingMember 8mo ago
This echoes my experience. I can't sit down at a computer and start doing a new thing with a browser with 15 tabs open from the day before and expect it to go well- it's like waking up and walking right into a room with 5 stereos playing 5 different songs at once and trying to practice guitar.
garrickvanburen 8mo ago
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.
- FloorEgg 8mo ago
  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?
  - garrickvanburen 8mo ago
    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.

39 points by vismit2000 8mo ago

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(). (2) but the _actual_ settings you need are hidden unless you START a meeting call. (3) but, the _actual_ settings are a long chain of ".. but are you sure you REALLY want to see the ACTUAL settings?", where you must continue to click 'more settings', 'advanced settings', 'full actual settings' (I am paraphrasing.) () I suspect what they are though.. Something about dumbing the UI down to the level where the people in charge of teams can understand them, plus some kind of fear of UI designs where any given screen or view contains more than 1 or 2 elements (the second element being "show further settings"). We are dumbing down UI to the level of people with no hands, no eyes, no brains, which I presume is the target audience. I must have mah minimalism.

fifticon 8mo ago
Though I did not follow the idea of chunkier fruit in those travel milkshakes, isn't that what clogs the straw, which is not ideal for a 1-hand treat.
- thaumasiotes 8mo ago
  The article presents the fruit as a way to make the milkshake more "interesting", addressing the fact that existing customers were purchasing milkshakes in part to make their commute less boring. Weirdly, there's no followup on whether the changes improved sales, margins, or other goals.
pwatsonwailes 8mo ago
It's what always happens when there's a disconnect between the product built and the actual thing people want to do. In marketing, we differentiate between Jobs-As-Activities (the task of "changing a background") and Jobs-As-Progress (the user trying to go from something being unsatisfactory to something better). When UI feels dumbed down to that level, or hidden behind advanced settings, it’s often because the product team ends up treating users as a gestalt persona, rather than thinking about their constraints around time and attention. The most meaningful innovations occur when customer insights influence development before launch; sadly, that frequently doesn't happen. People launch the thing, come up with features they could add, ask what people want from that list (and potentially don't even do that) and then add stuff like barnacles accumulating on a ship.
FloorEgg 8mo ago
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

pwatsonwailes 8mo ago

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 the product to do (a functional, emotional, or social outcome). That gets more complex when we think about that there's different levels by which you can evaluate what someone wants, which in the JTBD word are thought of as jobs as progress (why they're doing the thing), and jobs as outcomes (how they're doing the thing). There's another famous example, which is from Bosch's circular saw evolution. 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. Symptoms vs causes sort of thing. This is also why product teams should involve marketers, and why marketers should understand research design. The teams who I've seen do this well at this aren't running quick preference tests and A/B tests on features most of the time. They're generally more focused on running continuous feedback loops, where they conduct broader research, then engage in grounded theory style interpretation to understand what they can do, look at field validation to figure out what they should do, and then iterate. For B2B especially as a side note, if your value proposition is something like accountability or proof of value, but your product's workflows don't make accountability or proving value effortless, fixing that workflow will do more for brand perception than any campaign, because nothing nukes good comms like a poor experience.

squirrel6 8mo ago
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.
- getnormality 8mo ago
  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 of my life as a consumer, has ever had any time to ask me a single real question? [1] At least that's how I would feel if I hadn't numbed myself to this decades ago. Now I just escape. I hang up, I click the X, I think of nothing but getting away from this thing that, no matter what its motivation, no matter what product or cause it's selling, has exactly the same agenda: "would you like to dehumanize yourself for five minutes, so that I can make a data table that I was paid to make by someone who doesn't know what they're doing or why?"

JohnCClarke 8mo ago

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.

getnormality 8mo ago
How is "car commuters" a demographic segment? Does the word "demography" mean anything? Is "people who like to buy milkshakes" a demographic segment too?
pwatsonwailes 8mo ago
Good segmentation is mostly not by demography nowadays. At best, demographics are a correlative element to something more fundamental, usually economic, behavioural or psychographic.
pfdietz 8mo ago
> Clay Christensen is smart Not anymore. He died in 2020.
CGMthrowaway 8mo ago
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)

btilly 8mo ago

The problem with general surveys is that you find out what people who don't buy your product think that they might like. Then they don't buy your improved product either. A second problem is that we're unaware of what we responded to. That's one of the things that A/B testing reveals.

RankingMember 8mo ago

This echoes my experience. I can't sit down at a computer and start doing a new thing with a browser with 15 tabs open from the day before and expect it to go well- it's like waking up and walking right into a room with 5 stereos playing 5 different songs at once and trying to practice guitar.

garrickvanburen 8mo ago

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.

FloorEgg 8mo ago
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?
- garrickvanburen 8mo ago
  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.