Clayton Christensen: What do customers want from your products?

At the World Innovation Forum in New York City, Harvard’s Clayton Christensen delighted the audience with his classic story of the “milkshake” (as seen at the top right of the picture) to illustrate the following question that all marketers face: What do customers really want from your products? As Christensen explains, customers “hire” products to do “jobs” for them — it is up to companies to create the right types of products to fill these jobs appropriately. Rather than segmenting by customer demographics or by product category, companies instead should consider “the job to be done.”

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Photo courtesy of Dov Friedmann – PhotographybyDov.com