Page 96 - MYM 2016

Marketing Secrets of Industry Disruptors
diseases such as diabetes, for example,
big data can help anticipate on which
day patients will need their insulin drugs renewed, ending the need for them to go to the drug store and wait in a queue, only to nd out that their medicine is out of stock.
All the best recent disruptions have one important factor in common: they involve companies with the marketing common sense needed to solve customers’ headaches by using technology and cutting costs.
Below I brie y outline the top ve marketing principles embraced by disrup- tors like Mediq.
Solve a customer headache
Although marketing gurus have always said that business executives should know what their customers want and need, the problem is that very few customers actually know themselves what they desire. Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, used to say, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse!” (Vlaskovits, 2011).
Mediq, an up-and- coming disruptor in the healthcare eld, is enjoying success because of its ability to solve customer headaches, such as always needing to go in-person to the pharmacy. Source: www.mediq.com
Coming up with meaningful customer insights has always been a key mantra in marketing. My belief is that most great marketing insights come from observation and common sense. Steve Jobs proved excellent at that game when inventing
the iPhone, the iPod and iTunes. Nobody sent Jobs an email saying, “these are the products, services, or experiences we need.” What some people call “vision,”
I call “common sense and observation.” Although there is no foolproof recipe for obtaining these insights, four key steps can help develop them: observation of customer behavior, identi cation of a customer headache, re ection, and exper- imentation. e observation collects facts: the customer buys hundreds of CDs from di erent places and plays them on a huge stereo at home. e customer headache is not being able to listen to music when out and about. Re ection combines the rst two steps (e.g., “It would be great if I could carry 10,000 songs around with me on a device I can t in my pocket”). Experi- mentation tries out possible combinations of the previous elements (“Could this be done on a gadget smaller than a pack of cigarettes? A small hard drive could be the
96 | MINd YOUr MarkETING OCTOBEr 2016