Feeling Of Guilt As Customer Value
Sometimes even founders don’t know what value they create for customers
Strategy — map it out yourself
Sometimes even founders don’t know what value they create for customers
In September 2009, I came home late in the evening. It was not the first time I did it. Actually, It’s hard to remember a single day when I came home at the same time as most ordinary people. The company I ran still struggled with the financial crisis implications, so I had to work much. My one-year-old son was sleeping in his cot. My wife said nothing but didn’t have to — I knew everything she wanted to say, and she was right.
Guilty fathers
A year ago, I conducted a strategic project for an International startup. The founders created a mobile projector able to project pictures, movies, or cartoons to any white, smooth surface. Their initial idea was to protect children’s eyes from harmful blue light any screen releases. Studies show that blue light can damage light-sensitive cells in the retina.
The device was nice-looking, small, and easy to use. But it was also quite expensive, and there was not a way to make it cheaper. Expensive devices are hard to market, so at first, the founders focused on mothers. Who wants to protect their children more than them?
But successive research revealed that there was another large customer segment they called “guilty fathers.” They were hard-working fathers who earned well but didn’t have the time to read a book to their kids. And they bought expensive gadgets for their daughters and sons to drown out guilt.
The feeling of guilt
The feeling of guilt is a powerful emotion. We do many things to get rid of it, even if we don’t realize it sometimes. For example, people buy many expensive gifts out of it. Exploiting this feeling may seem immoral at first glance, but it is yet another problem people have, and solving it can be a good deed.
• If your product can help guilty mothers work from home and spend more time with their children, is this immoral?
• If your solution helps a husband order a flower bouquet for his wife’s birthday, which he has to miss because of a business trip, is this sinful?
As a former guilty father, I think it is not.
Conclusion — the basic needs
• The feeling of guilt is one of the basic people’s needs. There are few of them — one of the scientists believed there were as few as 16 of them (read more in my artilce here).
• All your customers are human, even if they work for a company and purchase things not for personal use.
• Nothing human is alien to them.
• Do research, and identify the basic needs behind their purchasing decisions. The feeling of guilt is one of them.
• Improve your product in accordance with them.