Playing It Safe is Risky
Making incremental change may not be enough anymore if you want to get noticed. If you want to be seen by your customers as unique. Innovative. The one to go to.

For five years now almost every Wednesday from March to November I go to the local market to shop at the Mr Herb stall. Here’s the story about how he came about to be. Years ago he went with his family on holidays to Italy and became enchanted with their local markets selling amazing, fresh produce. He asked himself: — why can’t we have that in Poland? He started a farm and today he is a major supplier to the best Warsaw restaurants. Next to it he pops up twice a week at the different markets and sells his amazing veggies to the regular folk like myself. There might sound like a story regular enough but there is more to it.
In any market in Poland you are typically offered produce selected by the seller. At Mr Herb you choose your produce yourself. You can smell every tomato, touch every beetroot and try out every green leaf before you purchase it. And what a pleasure it is to make this selection not being rushed because another client it waiting in the line. Obviously, you will buy more than you need. Because of the pleasure of having a choice, the autonomy of selecting exactly what you want and the stimulation for your imagination when you see of this richness around.
This is only one part. The second is the purchase process. Typically, we end up there having a large IKEA bag filled up-to-the-roof. Sure, there is some weighing of the stuff we selected and some calculations going on. But the result seems to be strangely consistent: if we have the bag filled in half we pay about 12$. If it is almost full, we spend 30$. When it is so heavy it is almost impossible to lift it, it will cost us more or less 50$. Frankly, I sometimes think that this process of summing up the purchase is a bit of a theater — they know what they are going to charge you once you get your bag in front of their eyes . They just need to do some magic to make it feel justified. Regardless, any time I buy there, I have this overwhelming feeling of an amazing bargain often tipped with the free gift from them. Because why not.
We went there last Wednesday and bumped into Mr Herb himself. He was worried that some of the tomatoes brought from the field were rotten. — It will destroy my reputation — he said. — It’s not going to be that easy — was my reply — one rotten tomato is not going to destroy the value of this amazing experience. At least not that easily.
When I came home I started thinking what makes Mr Herb so unique? If you ask anyone to list a few companies they truly like and admire people go blank. Nothing comes to mind. Nothing is easily recalled. What makes me tell stories about him to anyone who cares to listen (you included)? Why am I not telling them about other companies?
Offering just a little bit
Many companies, when they try to attract customers go for “a little bit”. Your bank offers you a slightly better credit rate, your telecom provider gives you a tiny discount on your plan, your shop provides you with a slightly easier check-out process. In the “Purple Cow” Seth Godin says:
“… offering […] a little bit is just a waste of time. The influential sneezers, the people with a problem to solve — they’re open to hearing your story only if it’s truly remarkable: otherwise you’re invisible.”
So, if you offer just a tiny improvement, there is nothing to talk about. Nothing to create a story around. A narrative that is going to be told by one person to another. Why? Because nobody is excited by the same but a little better. It’s boring.
The critical minority
Why is everybody designing the little stuff? Because they are aiming at the majority of their market place. They want to please the masses. To satisfy the average customer. Someone who is not keen to risk. Who wants to play it safe.
In Poland we have two large discount chains LIDL and BIEDRONKA (Ladybug). For years, these shops didn’t have small shopping baskets (you know, those that yo can carry in your hand). You could either take a fully blown trolley or you had to carry the products you wanted to purchase in your hands. It seemed to totally make sense as probably about 80% of their customers shopped regularly on Saturdays and were buying stuff for the entire week for the whole family. But these guys were buying the cheap stuff. They were going there because it was a bargain offer. They were purchasing a lot but not the most expensive stuff. The staff that has the highest interest rate. Which is most profitable for the company.
It took a long time for both chains to realize that the people who were coming over three times a week and bought 5 products were the guys spending significantly more money comparing to the remaining customers. And both chains were effectively discouraging them to do so by not offering the small shopping baskets. While focusing on the behavior of the majority, they were missing out that these customers were the critical minority for them. People who will make shopping at the discount chains a new fashion. People who will want to buy wine from them not for 4$ but for 14$.
Once both chains finally got the point and made these customers feel taken care of (with small shopping baskets, reasonable selection of wine and other more up-market products) they altered the grocery shopping behavior across the country. Suddenly, it was not embarrassing to buy there anymore. It was smart thinking. It was a new life-style.
Following the majority of customers would have never changed that situation. These people were not interested in buying expensive cheese and wine. They were not looking for sushi. Or for bio-bananas, mangoes, papayas and hummus. But, once these products got introduced to the discount chains, once the fashionable people kept on purchasing them, also the more conservative customers got ready to try the new exotic tastes. And that’s how the success was made and the word of mouth got generated.
Boring is easy, different is risky
Whenever a company faces the dilemma of trying something new, it makes their decision makers feel uncomfortable. How are they going to know that it can be a potential success? How can they measure it? How can they guarantee that their stakeholders are going to be satisfied and allow them to keep their position? The thing is, there are not guarantees. Almost…
If you consider using the outcome as a KPI, it is reasonable to stay boring and easy. If you are boring, there is little risk that people will criticize your solution. That they will trash it. Hate it. Tell everybody they you are out of your mind.
Being different brings about the potential for dislike. I remember years ago I proposed to introduce an alternative way of teaching the design process to the students at the school I was lecturing at that time. Everybody hated that idea. Not only fellow lecturers (although the system allowed them to run their course for two weeks and have the rest of the semester at their disposal to do whatever they wanted to) but also the students who saw a new way of teaching as so different they didn’t know how to think about it. Everybody hated me for it. It was a miracle that the program run, there was so much resistance against it. The bottom-line was this though: a year later no one wanted to have it any other way.
The problem is that that initial dislike is seen as too much risk for many companies that are run by short-term goals. It is easier to offer an easy incremental feature (like an extra discount or a slightly better offer) than try to go full monty with a new idea. This is why so relatively few companies are recognized as truly customer-centric. This is why for few are remembered, talked about and genuinely liked.
Yet, if you decided to forget about looking for an outcome as your KPI and instead started measuring the vector of change, things can turn out quite interesting. What is this vector of change? Dave Snowden writes quite elaborately about it but if I were to sum it up, I would say this: the vector of change is getting more narratives of your customers like this and fewer like that. If you want your customers to call you brave and innovative, what needs to change so they will actually use these words in the stories they tell about you to each other? If you want to be unique — what should change to provoke them to say that about you? Sounds simple, yeah! But requires a lot of courage.
You might also ask how such a measurement can be made. My absolutely favorite method are the love and hate letters, which I was writing before about. But I can imagine a dozen of other methods to extract the narratives from your customers and figure out what changes and what stays the same in these stories. Because unless the stories change the perception of your company will be what it is today no matter how many incremental changes your are going to introduce.
Daring to be unique
There is one last thing though — being that unique requires guts. And it requires a long time perspective. Not until the next quarter. Not until I am seating in this chair. It demands to think beyond the financial gain. And often beyond you.
Remember the story of Apple at the times when Steve Jobs was kicked out from there? Why did he get kicked out in the first place? Sure, he was uncontrollable and annoying. But most of all, he didn’t want to play the safe game. He didn’t want to follow the market dominated by Microsoft at that time. So, the safely thinking and risk averting investors decided it was better to get rid of the trouble-maker. But, you know what, playing safe is as riskiest as you can get. Because it leads in one direction only. Towards the red ocean of the fierce competition fighting for the lowest price to offer. Sure, some of the daring ideas might not work. And that’s ok. But if a few of them do, you are in for a win. Or at least you get a chance to be noticed and recognized. Talked about. And isn’t it a good start if you want to build a strong market position?
This is exactly the conclusion I got to when thinking aboutMr Herb and his approach to business. Is he losing pennies on his rather rough calculation of what his customers purchase? I am sure he is. Is he left with the worst produce at the end of the day after everybody selected the juiciest products? Certainly. But regardless of it all, he sells all he has out week in, week out. He works with the best restaurateurs and is celebrated across the culinary circles in Poland.Articles are written about him. He has tons of followers on Facebook and Instagram. He is seeked after.
Daring is hard. Daring is risky. But at the end of the day it pays off.
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Aga Szóstek, PhD is an experience designer with over 18 years of practice in both academic and business world. She is a creator of a tool supporting designers in ideation process: Seed Cards and the co-host in the Catching The Next Wave podcast.

