As a marketer, I’m always trying to answer the question “Who is my target market and what outcomes/results are they willing to pay for?” It’s easy to get excited about delivering a new product that you yourself are excited about. Or one that is very close to what you’re already delivering. It’s very hard to distance yourself from your emotions and biases and think critically about what your customers actually want. I just read a great example of this on Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge site.
The HBS article highlights a new case study about the paths two companies took to bring “mobile banking to the unbanked.” These are individuals who typically live in poverty, maybe in remote villages, and don’t have savings accounts but they still need help managing their finances. Ultimately, the more successful of the two, M-PESA, realized that the intended customers didn’t want bank accounts at all—they wanted better ways to send money home to their families (i.e. city workers sending money home to family members in villages). M-PESA also picked the right money exchange points: Mom-and-pop stores that every village has in abundance.
This is a great read about not making assumptions about your market and critically thinking about customers’ actual versus perceived needs.
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