Explore what could well be stopping users from switching to your product
I was recently listening to a podcast in which I heard someone describe his product as a “technological solution” — yep, cringey right?
Anyways, I digress. In the past week I have been pondering on The Switch, the big step we require of users to adopt our products and what we can do today to give us an advantage.
The theory
In the late 90s, Harvard academic Clayton Christensen who worked on innovation spoke about how customers are hiring products to fulfill a specific job in their lives.
Most companies can’t define and articulate what a customer need is, let alone who to identify one — Mike Boysen
The benefit is in being able to design products that target opportunities with a focus on satisfying their needs. This has even led to teams segmenting their users by their needs, doing competitive analysis by jobs or even crafting their stories in this manner.
My thread-style rant on Twitter only scratches the surface:
Bob Moesta and Christ Spiek have done some amazing work with the Rewired Group on JTBD and working alongside other scholars have developed the framework looking at the key forces that cause customers to switch from one product to another.
One interesting thing about this diagram is that it highlights loss aversion which comes from prospect theory. Prospect theory is an evidence-based behavioral economic theory who’s fundamental finding is that people make decisions based on the value of gains and losses from a reference point.
Retargeting
A big thanks to Samuel for bringing me in on this video posted by 500 startups on retargeting with Facebook (Facebook currently get’s really specific with it’s audiences I’m playing around with a campaign I’ve kicked off)
What do we do now?
Now that we understand a bit more about the theory and the power of retargeting I hope we can understand why it’s so powerful.
Switching products isn’t easy and it can be even more complicated for the user when there are seemingly many products with divergent thinking. By understanding the jobs theory better we can enter the conversation that’s already happening in the potential customers mind after they have left our website/app and address the forces that block us from changing to improve our chances of success.
FURTHER READING: Check out this article from Dave Rothschild.
Thanks for hitting the 💚 if you enjoyed reading this.
