Under-dogged

Missing the significance of customer experience is an easy but often fatal mistake that can kill your start-up.

I remember holding a view about fifteen years ago while presumably explaining to someone why I thought Sage, the large British accounting software group, was enjoying much more success than any of its competitors back in the late 90s (including me), that since Sage’s products were generally regarded not to be the best in the market then their success was somehow down to Sage just being better at marketing than anyone else. And it wasn’t meant to be a compliment.

In the case of late 90s Sage I’m sure many of its competitors were exactly like me in taking a degree of moral offence at how a bunch of apparently downmarket and mediocre products could trump qualitatively better competitor products through the power of shady, slick, almost-witchcraft marketing. It was almost like Sage was cheating. And, of course, what better way to come to terms with your defeat at the hands of a competitor than to illegitimise their victory.

Sage was no doubt better at marketing and its products weren’t generally regarded as being outstanding but that isn’t the point. The point is underdogs often misjudge (wilfully or ignorantly) the factors that lie behind their lack of success relative to more successful competitors. And it’s by thinking in this way that they actually double down on their under-doggedness and cement their ultimate failure — it’s a cruel sort of self-unfufilling prophecy.

Unfortunately in the real world of business (not the fantasy one you’ve constructed in your head where you’re awesome and just unlucky) what tends to separate market leaders from everyone else isn’t simply better marketing because the truth is that more often than not it’s better at almost everything that’s the winning recipe.

Yes, sadly, this means that many visionary products and the visionary geniuses behind them will idle in market obscurity and failure while some good-enough competitor products will soar.

This notion of being better at almost everything can be described another way — great customer experience.

On YouTube there’s a grainy video recording of a Q&A session Steve Jobs held at the Apple developer conference few weeks after his return to an ailing Apple in 1997 — at the time Apple was about three months away from going under.

Amid a series of pretty mundane questions a member of the delegation chose to rather awkwardly challenge Jobs on his decision to kill off a product line that judging by the contempt in his tone, the audience member was presumably very fond of.

Jobs justified his decision by explaining the concept of customer experience, possibly for the first time in the recent era, and about why starting with the customer and not just with your technically great product or idea was the path to success. It’s a great clip, you should watch it.

I see many products today that are technically speaking certainly good and sometimes even great. But most of them are destined to be underdogs because they’re being built from this narrowed, inside-out perspective of fixating on just the product or service, and not from the broader approach of striving to define and then deliver the best possible overall customer experience and working back from that.

To be fair, fixating on product is a perilously easy trap to fall into because we instinctively address and engage the market precisely through our product or service — they’re the most obvious and often most tangible touch-points between a business and its customers.

But then everything else; service delivery, quality, sales, forecasting, marketing, design, brand, management, planning, coaching, hiring, employee engagement, strategy, PR, funding — all the other important touch-points between a business and its customers’ experience just become secondary, tertiary or even non-existent disciplines inside your business.

And you know the rest.