Creating A Killer Product

Forbes explores how to create products that customers want to buy:

Consider the recent efforts of a fast-food chain that wanted to improve milk shake sales and profits. The chain first took the usual "focus group" route, assembling panels of customers to ask if making the shakes thicker, more chocolaty, cheaper or chunkier would satisfy them more. The chain got clear inputs on what the customers wanted. But after the changes were made, nothing much happened to sales or profits.

So a new set of researchers came in. Their task was to understand what customers were trying to get done for themselves when they hired a milk shake. This approach helped the chain's managers see things that traditional market research had missed.

The researchers spent an 18-hour day in a restaurant. What they found was surprising: Nearly half of all milk shakes were bought in the early morning. Most often, the shake was the only item purchased, and it was rarely consumed in the restaurant. What was going on here?

Turns out most of the customers had hired a shake for very similar reasons: They faced a long, boring commute and needed something to make the trip more interesting. They weren't really hungry but knew that if they didn't eat something soon, they certainly would be hungry by 10 a.m. They also faced constraints: They were in a hurry, often wearing their work clothes, and had only one free hand.

To get this job done, some customers hired bagels. But bagels got crumbs all over their clothes and the car. If the bagels were topped with cream cheese or jam, their fingers and the steering wheel got sticky. Sometimes they hired a banana. But it got eaten too fast and didn't really solve the boring-commute problem. The breakfast sandwiches the restaurant served (sausage or ham with egg) made their hands and the steering wheel greasy. If customers tried to drag out the time they took to eat the sandwich, it got cold. Doughnuts didn't last through the 10 a.m. hunger attack.

The milk shake did the job better than almost any available alternative. It could take as long as 20 minutes to slurp one through the thin straw. That staved off boredom on the commute. It could be consumed cleanly with one hand, with little risk of spillage. The customers felt less hungry after consuming the shake than after using most of the alternatives. And never mind that it wasn't the healthiest thing to consume. Making you healthy wasn't the job the milk shake was hired for.