Get A Job
What job is your product interviewing for?
The metaphor of the job applicant is powerful and simple to understand. I use it often when working with clients to align the features of a product with the aspirations of the consumer. I first ran across it in The Innovators Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen, and it fits completely into my larger philosophy of marketing as matchmaking, products with personality, and all the rest. It’s nice when the world lines up like that.
Christensen thinks about it like this: instead of building a product that solves a problem, build a product that does a job. He uses as an example research that showed that people buy milkshakes for the morning commute not because they love milkshakes in the morning, but because they pass the time better than other car-friendly morning snacks. They last longer, you have to work to eat them. If you’re selling food to people in the morning on the basis of, say, taste or convenience, you’re looking at the problem wrong–those commuters need food that will give them something to do more than they need gourmet car eats.
That’s a fine kernel of an idea, but I like applying it much more broadly. When a consumer encounters a product on the shelf (or a business in the mall, or a service offered in the mail) the interaction is no less than a job interview. If the consumer is shopping, he or she has a position to fill, and (just like when interviewing people for any job) that position may or may not have a solid description, required skills, and preferred experience. The product on the shelf must communicate that it has all the requisite skills, but also the right attitude and maybe a fresh approach.
Or maybe the consumer is an employer not currently hiring, but who runs across someone who he can tell would be great for his company. In that case, the prospective employee should be communicating “here’s what I can do for you that you didn’t even know you needed” messages. What the interviewee–our product–should never do is promise everything to everyone. You wouldn’t hire a person who makes promises like that, so why would anyone hire a product that does? Just like anyone on a job search, we need our products to have done their homework: to know about the company they’re interviewing with, what they’ll be expected to do, and how they can deliver on, and surpass, the expectations of a new employer.
The metaphor goes on. Marketing copy is a resume: those things that make for a good, eye-catching, informative resume are no different from what must go on the packaging of a consumer product. The “out-of-box experience” is the first day on the job: did it go well? Is the employee what he seemed to be during the interview? How well does he fit into the culture at the new job?
Take a look at your product. What job is it really applying for? Is it saying the right thing to get hired?
[Photo by Spo0ky]
