3.4 Literature Review: The Age of the Customer
Before digital start growing, the traditional media and business philosophy had an inside-out view. Their focus was build around product, its scale and other business values, but not around their customers’ needs in any degree as in a digital environment. It can be explained by the lack of effective facilities to measure their audience. In the media, metrics, polling, vox pops are used, but the quality of data is inferior due to the digital facilities which allow to measure clicks, visits, eye tracking and others. Due to these reasons traditional media had a strong role to be an opinion leader.
In the digital world the game has changed. Due to measurement facilities, digital business projects now are able to learn more about their customers and can quickly get their feedback just by observing their behavior through digital metrics, A/B testing and surveys. The outside-in view brought the environment into a new era — Age of the Customer — by delivering a great customer experience. Moreover, having a constant contact via smartphones users themselves became opinion leader and shape their content and service environment on their own.
Using an outside-in or human-centered methodology, all current leading methodologies like Design thinking, Value Proposition Canvas, Lean develop their product concepts by finding new ways to meet their customers’ needs more rapidly than ever before, because in the Age of Digital Products’ abundance and distractions, we still have only a 24 hour day.
Though human beings are the same as they have always been, customers’ ability to get what they want has changed, and therefore their needs can and should be met — more often and more completely than ever before in human history.
In this aspect a classic hierarchy of needs like Maslow’s famous one is reconsidered by James McQuivey in his book Digital Disruption (2013). Maslow’s most contribution to the study of human needs is that human needs are shared by the entire race, regardless of one’s geographic location or in the landscape of human culture.
Basically, in Maslow’s view, all people start at the bottom of the pyramid, fulfilling basic physiological needs, and only then progress to satisfying higher-order needs once they have a stable source for fulfilling lower-order needs.
Thus, adapting Maslow’s hierarchy doesn’t imply that we should “revert” to lower levels of need when we are frustrated with our inability to fulfill higher-order needs. Accordingly, it doesn’t explain how digital consumers behave or how to harness their power.
Brain science now shows that there is no central authority in the brain that oversees the making of executive decisions. In other words, people don’t behave in rational and ordered ways. Instead, conflicting needs compete with each other, and they have a tendency to manifest themselves urgently in response to circumstances — either threats or opportunities. James McQuivey (2013) proposes four fundamental human needs models, and combined these meet the most essential criteria — they explain how human needs affect individual behavior while being expressed in a way sufficiently simple to guide digital disruptors to a better product strategy.
Thanks to digital, people now have the ability to meet more of their needs more often and to a greater degree than the previous generations. In fact, it’s not just the case that digitally empowered consumers can meet more needs, they can meet more needs simultaneously. For example, buying an iPhone several years ago might have satisfied a few such requirements, but purchasing an iPhone today satisfies many more needs, more deeply, and all at once, due to the diversified possibilities of an iPhone. This updated model of fundamental needs help digital disruptors to imagine solutions capable of satisfying multiple needs.
McQuivey (2013) proposes some techniques to map out future product features involving these fundamental needs that help to seek the adjacent possible solutions and thus create a new path of innovation.
Other methods like “Jobs To Be Done” and “Value Proposition Canvas” appeal to the same fundamental needs through speaking to customers, observing their behavior, asking ‘why’ questions and defining their latent wants, motivation points and pain points that can be mapped as a journey map or Customers Profile with a list of jobs, pains and gains.
Having known customers’ needs, and by prioritizing their pains and gains, the most important indicator of disruption for startups is to create a unique value proposition that dramatically changes the basis of competition and creates a new market replacing Scarcity with abundance.
