by Dan

I’ve received many gifts over the years, during birthdays and for Christmas. I’m grateful for each and every one, but some stand out from the pack.  When I stopped to consider the shared qualities that set these exceptional gifts apart, surprisingly, price wasn’t a factor.  The ones  I remember the most all cost less than $10.

I was a gangly, awkward teenager.  Like most kids in my high school, I did my best to make friends and generally fit in.  Unlike some, I was also a bit of an overachiever and focused more on academic accomplishment than the latest fashion trends.  On my sixteenth birthday, a friend of mine gave me a beaded hemp and shell necklace. At first, I balked at the gift - male jewelry wasn’t for me!  Yet when I wore it to class, it elicited enough compliments to make me feel more confident.

I ended up loving that choker and it became an important piece of my adolescent self-image.  A gift that I never would have considered purchasing for myself quickly morphed into something I couldn’t imagine being without.

I’ve since tried to take a similar approach both in the gifts I give to people as well as the businesses I build.

Many marketing experts advocate that you listen to your customers and pay careful attention to their feedback.  While this is a necessary task, this by itself is insufficient.  Give your customers what they ask, and you’ll end up with the same stale offering every other competitor in the market has.  To truly break through the noise, you need to offer something they never knew they needed.

This is no easy feat.  It certainly isn’t the result of a sudden flash of inspiration.  It’s the culmination of a deep understanding of your customers and the subtleties of their motivations and desires.  To delight your customers, you must effectively know your customers better than they know themselves!

This is the kind of insight that propels the few start ups that discover it to the top.  Consider the Tivo.  The essence of Tivo is really quite simple - it allows you to consume television programming on your own schedule, rather than the time slots dictated by the networks.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve explained the device to people, only to hear a response along the lines of, “why in the world would I need something like that?  That’s what I’ve got a VCR for.”  Yet inevitably, a look of comprehension will dawn on their face the first time those people actually use one to watch a show.  Exclamations run a wide range:

“I can just record shows with a press of a button?!”

“Omigod, I can just skip through the commercials…”

“Holy sh#$!  Where can I buy one of these things?”

This device that no one thought to ask for, that even when explained, no one seemed to want, has revolutionized the way people watch television.  Every cable operator has had to integrate DVR functionality into their set top boxes or risk losing their customers.  Tivo customers are rabidly loyal to the product and for the most part, couldn’t imagine going back to watch television “the old way.”

Imagine if Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay had simply taken their customers’ feedback at face value.  We’d still be stuck wrestling with VHS cassette tape, and Tivo would not be the $850 million household name that it is today.