Читать книгу Starting a Business QuickStart Guide - Ken Colwell PhD MBA - Страница 15

This may seem obvious, but in practice it’s not. The word “problem” indicates a negative emotion, but that’s not necessarily the case. Customer problems fall into two broad categories—resolving pain and creating delight. Really great products do both at the same time. Products that do neither have little potential for success.

Customers buy benefits, not features. All the flashy features in the world will not help if they don’t provide concrete benefits for the customer. This is why it’s so critical for entrepreneurs to think in terms of solving customers’ problems. Pain and delight are extreme emotions, and these are the sorts of emotions that cause customers to adopt new products. Incremental improvements and flashy features without benefits are unlikely to sway potential customers.

Quick Case: The smartphone market is littered with new entrants that ultimately failed due to the overzealous adding of features without tangible benefits. In 2005, ESPN, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, decided that what the smartphone users of the day were missing was an ESPN-branded phone. In the days before apps were the established standard, the ESPN phone could receive up-to-the-minute sports alerts and was truly a cut above other phones for the sports enthusiast when it came to sports news and scores. The phone flopped and was discontinued nine months later after reaching 30,000 customers—well below the 500,000 ESPN needed to break even on their investment.²

While the sports alerts feature certainly did provide enthusiasts with the benefit of very current news and scores, the phone fell short of consumer expectations in nearly every other way. The high price tag, cut-rate hardware, and restrictive contract failed to impress. Furthermore, ESPN committed to the release of this phone while simultaneously offering sports news and scores through services available from Verizon, Sprint, and other wireless carriers.

In the end, the phone did not do enough to solve the problems faced by its prospective customers, and it also failed to thrill. ESPN relied on brand recognition and a high-powered marketing campaign to pick up the slack in their value proposition—never a good idea.