What Customers Want from Your Products. By Clayton M.
Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall Editor's Note— Marketers have lost the forest for the trees, focusing too much on creating products for narrow demographic segments rather than satisfying needs. Customers want to "hire" a product to do a job, or, as legendary Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt put it, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole! " With Levitt's words as a rallying cry, a recent Harvard Business Review article, "Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure," argues that the marketer's task is to understand the job the customer wants to get done, and design products and brands that fill that need.
Purchase Decision Steps 3, 4 and 5. 3.
Evaluate Options Consumers’ search efforts may result in a set of options from which a choice can be made. Select All. A radio producer in Washington, D.C., got a promotion a few years ago on the grounds that he was a “good decision-maker.”
Self-deprecating to a fault, he reminded his bosses that many of the decisions he’d made since joining the station hadn’t exactly worked out. They didn’t care. “Being a good decision-maker means you’re good at making decisions,” one executive cheerily told him. “It doesn’t mean you make good decisions.”