“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.” So pronounced Harvard Business School Professor Theodore Levitt in his 1974 book Marketing for Business Growth.
This quote is so well-known, Innovator’s Dilemma author Clayton Christensen quoted Levitt in his 2016 book The Clayton M. Christensen Reader.
Just one problem: it’s wrong.
Let’s say Mary wants to hang a photo of her parents. She doesn’t want a drill to be sure, but she also doesn’t want a hole. She doesn’t even really want to hang the photo. What does she want? The emotional experience she gets when she looks at the photo.
Such is the challenge of customer delight. It’s not sufficient to deliver products customers are willing to buy. Even meeting the expressed goals of customers isn’t good enough. We can’t stop until our customers are delighted.
So, have we finally cracked open the mystery of sales and marketing? Have we put our finger on the essence of successful business?
Not so fast. “What Is customer delight? It’s bullshit, that’s what It is,” espouses Michael Redbord, Vice President and General Manager, Customer Hub at HubSpot.
Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2018/02/27/customer-success-pull-the-other-leg/.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, ServiceNow is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: bazzadarambler.
