Work it through: Understanding Your Customers
Customer understanding built in layers: choose whom to serve and whom to decline, learn the job they are actually hiring you for, sort your offer by the kind of satisfaction each part buys, then walk their whole journey to find where the experience breaks.
Seven steps, in the order the playbook gives them. Your work stays in this browser until you save it to a file.
Your ducks
Start with what the people believe, what the paperwork says and what actually happens. The issues where your ducks disagree are the ones to carry into the homework.
You have not filled in the ducks sheet yet.
The homework
What has to be found before any of the four frameworks is worth running. Put a name and a date against each one, and tick it when you have it in your hands.
The ducks
For Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning (STP)
For Jobs to be Done
For Kano Model
For Customer Journey Mapping
Step 1 of 4: Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning (STP)
Understanding starts with choosing. Divide the market on the things that actually drive choice rather than on whatever data is easiest to gather, then make the targeting decision most teams dodge: name the segments you will serve and the segments you will decline. Averaged messages land with nobody, and marketing spend spread across audiences with different needs buys you a little of everyone's indifference. Judge the work by the choice it forces; a segmentation that excludes nobody has not decided anything.
Watch forProducing a handsome segmentation and then continuing to market to everyone, which converts the whole exercise into wall art.
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What comes out, and how to read it
A defined set of market segments with supporting evidence, an explicit targeting decision that names the segments to be served and declined, and a positioning statement for each target that the whole marketing mix can be tested against.
- Judge the work by the quality of the choice, not the elegance of the segmentation. If the targeting step did not exclude any segment, or the positioning would read equally well for a competitor, the exercise is decorative.
- Check the chain of logic runs both ways: the position should only make sense for the chosen target, and the chosen target should be winnable given the position and your capabilities.
- Treat the output as a hypothesis to test in market. Perception research and sales response, not internal consensus, confirm whether the intended position has been achieved.
Step 2 of 4: Jobs to be Done
Segments tell you who; the job tells you why. People hire products to make progress in a specific circumstance, and the same person hires differently in different circumstances, which is why demographics predict so little. Reconstruct the timelines of recent, real purchases, and pay attention to the emotional and social dimensions of the job, because they frequently decide the sale even in business markets. Expect your competitive set to widen: whatever else gets hired for the same progress is your competitor, however unlike you it looks.
Watch forStated preferences are theories; the timeline of an actual purchase is evidence, so interview recent switchers while their memory is fresh.
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What comes out, and how to read it
A job statement describing the progress customers seek in a defined circumstance, a force diagram for the switching decision with evidence under each force, and a corrected competitive set that includes non-consumption and workarounds.
- The switch happens when push and pull together exceed anxiety and habit. If sales are stalling, look first at the blocking forces; most organisations over-invest in pull because it is the force they can see.
- The job defines your real competition. Whatever else gets hired for the same progress is a competitor, however unlike you it looks.
- Read the forces per circumstance, not per customer type. The same person hires differently in different circumstances, which is why demographic segments predict so little.
Step 3 of 4: Kano Model
Now sort your offer by the kind of satisfaction each part buys. Some attributes merely prevent dissatisfaction, and meeting them fully is a threshold to reach and then stop spending on. Some scale steadily with performance. A few delight because nobody expected them. The classification matters because satisfaction scores stall when investment keeps flowing into things customers now take for granted, and because yesterday's delighter decays into tomorrow's expectation. Run the paired questionnaire with real customers, segment by segment, and date-stamp what comes back.
Watch forClassifying features by internal debate and drawing the diagram afterwards gives you opinions arranged in an elegant chart.
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What comes out, and how to read it
A classification of each candidate attribute into must-be, one-dimensional, attractive, indifferent or reverse, backed by paired-question survey data and typically summarised with satisfaction and dissatisfaction coefficients, feeding a feature investment decision.
- Remember the canonical form is a two-axis chart, degree of implementation across the horizontal axis and customer satisfaction on the vertical, on which must-be attributes curve up to a ceiling of mere acceptance, one-dimensionals run diagonally and attractives curve up from neutral. The stacked bands here list the categories; the curves are the argument.
- Read must-bes as a threshold, not a ladder: meet them fully, then stop. Every pound spent exceeding a must-be is a pound unavailable for a one-dimensional or an attractive.
- Treat indifferent classifications as found money, the licence to simplify, and treat reverse findings as segmentation questions before treating them as feature verdicts.
- Date-stamp the results. Categories migrate with expectations, usually downward from attractive toward must-be, so a Kano study describes this market this year.
Step 4 of 4: Customer Journey Mapping
Finish by walking the whole experience in your customer's shoes, stage by stage. The worst failures rarely sit inside any one department, which is why every department's metrics can look fine while customers quietly leave; they sit in the handoffs, where ownership changes hands and nobody holds the whole thread. Map one journey per priority segment, validate it with actual customer research, and read the emotional curve before the touchpoint detail, because the deepest trough and the ending are what customers remember and retell.
Watch forA journey assembled by staff in a workshop, unvalidated by customers, reliably maps the org chart rather than the experience.
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What comes out, and how to read it
A stage-by-stage visual account of a defined segment's experience, showing touchpoints, customer goals, emotions and pain points, with the moments that matter identified and a prioritised, owned list of experience changes.
- Read the emotional curve before the touchpoint detail. The deepest trough and the final stages carry disproportionate weight in what customers remember and retell.
- Look for breaks at the seams: the worst failures usually sit between stages, where ownership changes hands inside the organisation and nobody holds the whole thread.
- Check the loop is closing. Retention and advocacy feed the next buyer's awareness and consideration; a map read only left to right misses the mechanism that compounds.
- Treat the map as a dated snapshot of evidence, to be re-validated as behaviour and channels shift, not as a permanent truth.
The review date
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