The Myth of the Perfect Product | Customers, Etc.

You can have the best product and still lose.

A few weeks ago in my Marketing class, our professor was leading us in a discussion of a somewhat famous business case about Black & Decker from the mid-90s. The case focused on Black & Decker’s power tools division. They had been successful in the “Industrial” and “Consumer” segments but were lagging far behind competitors in the middle “Tradesmen” segment. Interviews with customers revealed the doubt in customers minds about the Black & Decker brand:

“. . . Black & Decker makes a good popcorn popper, and my wife just loves her Dustbuster, but I’m out here trying to make a living . . .”

“. . . On the job, people notice what you’re working with . . . if I came out here with one of those Black & Decker gray things, I’d be laughed at.”

The perception in customers minds was that Black & Decker was a brand more suited to home tasks and wasn’t up to the demands of an all-day job site. However, Black & Decker had done both extensive lab research and field tests¹ and their products were strongly competitive in nearly all product categories.

At this point in the class, the professor asked me directly:

Were the customers wrong?

Photo by James Kovin on Unsplash

Perception vs Reality

I felt caught off guard—was this a trick question?—and I started by answering that, well, yes, the customers were wrong. Clearly they had developed a biased opinion because the objective research (both in the lab and in the field) backed up that the product performed very strongly. But then I caught myself and changed my answer. Perhaps the customers’ perceptions were wrong in that they didn’t match reality, but they were still their perceptions. Were they wrong to have those perceptions?

“The customer isn’t always right, but they’re always right about how they feel.”

I can’t remember where I heard that quote, but I used to think of it in the context of angry customer emails, e.g. the kind of missive a customer might send after having a bad service interaction. It never really occurred to me that “the customer is always right about how they feel” would apply in situations where the customer had a misperception about the product. It seems the customer’s feeling carry over to product quality as well.

The allure of “make the best product”

I don’t want to give away Black & Decker’s decision—lest you decide you want to get your MBA and I spoil the case for you—but we can be clear about what Black & Decker didn’t do: they didn’t go and try to make the perfect power tool in response to their lackluster performance in the “Tradesmen” segment of the market.

Improving product performance would have been a valid idea at first blush, but they had already invested in objective research to prove the product wasn’t the problem. Once they had data that they product wasn’t the problem, they needed to find another approach.

Notably, Black & Decker also didn’t treat the issue as a customer education problem, as if they could only get customers to see how awesome their product was, they would obviously make the switch. “We just need to tell them how great we are!” Ugh. Rather, they accepted that the customers’ perceptions were valid for them, even if it didn’t match the market research.

Many of us have been at companies where it seemed like the strategy was “Make the best product at [x].” The problem with that approach is that customers don’t want the best product. Customers want the best product for them. They want a product that addresses their specific needs and pain points. In fact, your product can be rough around the edges in plenty of ways if at your core you’re solving an unmet customer need. The customer will be so relieved you are solving a need the rest of the market has ignored.

Sometimes the unmet customer need is indeed a better product. The key is that the focus has to be on the customer’s need, not your desire to develop a perfect product.

1. “All identifying marks and colors were removed from products (both B&D and competitors). The products were then used in actual work situations for one month. Users provided comments on product performance and their interest in buying the product when a replacement was needed. This user testing supported the findings of the laboratory tests…, i.e., B&D’s product quality was very strongly competitive in the large majority of product categories.”