Abstraction loses
Specificity wins
Hi all -
Let’s continue exploring demand - a topic that’s at the intersection of VERY IMPORTANT and VERY MISUNDERSTOOD.
If you’re new here, here are two recent posts that will get you up to speed:
If you buy into demand thinking - that something happens in a person’s life that causes them to consider purchasing - you’ll come across the generalization problem.
You encounter statements like: People only buy to increase revenues, reduce costs, or reduce risk. Or, people buy painkillers, not vitamins.
These statements might be right in the abstract sense (I’d argue they’re far too abstract to have any meaning beyond the back-patting commentariat online), but they are less than useless in practice.
Even the following statement, which I regard as more “true” than the statements above, is unhelpful in its current form:
Customers buy because something specific in their world caused them to need to change.
Until you make this statement concrete by figuring out the specific thing(s) causing your specific customers to need to change, it is useless to you.
Get really, really, really specific.
A related mistake is to abstract and generalize across the different triggers that cause people to need to buy. Triggers are spiky, spikes cause change; generalizing or averaging them smooths out the spikes.
Imagine two things cause your customers to need to change: They hire for a particular role, or a particular role leaves the company.
You’d be tempted to lump these two together as “workforce change”, which sounds good in business school but is a generalization that confuses customers. They just hired someone; or they just fired someone.
Treat triggers separately. The average of Trigger A and Trigger B = 0 customers.
A last thought - Living in the world of abstraction can filter out bad options (aka, targeting people who have no reason to change) but getting specific produces good options. The things that might actually be implementable.
Whether it’s thinking about growth, your product, or your strategy - be concrete and specific. And when you encounter abstract advice, assume the advice-giver doesn’t understand it unless she’s put it into specific practice.
Rob