Is Your Product Worse Than Plastic Flowers at a Wedding?
Artificial flowers solve two customer problems — they live forever and cost less than real flowers. Also — fake flower companies have made great strides since the invention of silk flowers, in replicating the look and feel of a real flower. Manufacturers have added realistic looking fake dirt also, that’s a nice touch.
Plastic flowers can bring everlasting beauty to a sad looking office, convention hall, or hospital lobby. They can save your company thousands of dollars in care and future purchases. Plastic flowers can be a great option when you just need something fast.
If you look at revenue — fake flowers are a total success. The industry is measured in Billions of dollars as of 2022.
But — you know artificial flowers are copycat of a product much more valuable and delightful.
In 1964 The New York Times published an article about the rise in popularity of artificial flowers, and they mentioned something that struck me, “plastic flowers are not much in demand for those two great American status events — weddings and funerals…after you look at them for a while, a lot of the beauty is lost.”
Are your customers choosing your product because it solves only the most visible or immediate problem, but in time they realize they would prefer a different product? Is your product just a temporary fix or copycat of something more authentic?
Pros of fake flowers as a product:
Lifetime cost low
Ongoing maintenance is low (zero water, pruning/cutting)
They never die, and people have a fear of death
Ease of purchase/use (go online and buy them in 2 mins)
Cons of fake flowers as a product:
Fake flowers do not clean your environment/air
You and your guests know they are not the real thing
There is no joy derived from actions like cutting fresh flowers and planting them in new places
Fake flowers look worse over time — unlike real flowers that grow more beautiful and flourish in new ways in front of your eyes
Fake flowers are harder to clean than the average person realizes
Fake flowers do not have a beautiful fresh aroma
You would be embarrassed to use fake flowers at your wedding or loved ones funeral.
Where am I going with this?
If you are indexing your product roadmap and outcomes to keeping up with the joneses and not solving real long term customer problems/business outcomes in a contextual chain— then you might end up with some great short term products for novelty seekers.
These types of users are very low LTV and churn out fast. You should rather focus on delivering more delight and long term contextual value to your core (high LTV) customers/users.
I do product for an independent research and analytics firm called KLAS Research. We measure HIT vendors to help benefit healthcare organizations (providers) in their quest to purchase the right technology or services for their health networks. The data we own is vast and we have a proven method for gathering feedback from customers of HIT vendors.
We rate HIT vendors across a variety performance metrics and can predict long term success and an ability to drive meaningful outcomes for their customers. Think one hit hit wonder vs The Beatles.
A colleague of mine (VP of Customer Experience) at KLAS who happens to be an expert in this space — mentioned that sometimes HIT vendors who are scoring lower in their market segment will react by hastily building cheap widgety dashboards like a machine gun approach of trying to hit every customer target. This can be agnostic of their actual product/market fit and product roadmap.
Example — we have a question in our software survey that asks the provider if they are getting their “Money’s Worth.” Having a very high score on this question and average scores on other questions could be a strong indicator that the vendor is going downhill or will lose market share very fast. They might be heading down the fake flower of HIT functionality tunnel.
“Product Functionality” is another category that providers rate their vendors on — and if the vendor is filling a very specific and very niche need, and they do it really well, they stop there.
What happens is the market matures and the problems that healthcare providers have evolve— so they want to unlock more features and successive functionality. But this vendor has put all its product eggs in one basket so they scramble and get passed up.
These cheap widgety dashboard approaches result in short term spikes in NPS scores and then burn out. I.e. they put the feature factory on overdrive and its not sustainable or tied to a north star goal.
How do you build the anti-fake flower Product Roadmap?
Did someone say North Star Strategy? Why was your product built to begin with? What is the product/market fit?
Instead of overusing vanity metrics like downloads/DAU/MAU try indexing against an NPS/CSAT score, or feature adoption rate, and back it up with lots of qualitative research with your customers phrased like, “Do you know there is a product that solves your problems better, and you are already leaning towards replacing us with that product?”
Look at counter metrics against your success metrics and work harder on roadmap strategy.
Don’t just measure session time, but look at events per session, and look at behavior flow more forensically. You can balance traffic with conversion rate.
The New York Times article mentions that after you look at the fake flowers for a little while, the beauty is gone.
Its all about utility!
This all points back to a different article I wrote about value being dependent on utility, and the concept of diminishing marginal utility, see here: https://medium.com/agileinsider/thank-you-but-ive-had-enough-value-for-today-2cdb3acd881
If your product strategy is basically reduced down to having UX ask some early adopters, “What’s the quickest win we can get for you, what's hot right now in the market?” And its not tied to the north star goal and long term roadmap — the value and utility diminishes.
If you aren’t building products that leverage the past choices while also thinking of the future outcomes — then you will end up with digital plastic flowers.
https://www.nytimes.com/1964/08/23/archives/the-flowering-of-fake-flowers.html
