Knowing what people want.

The age old problem of trying to work out what people want is of critical importance if your job is trying to design something that will influence their behaviour or make them give you money for something you’ve made.

It used to be thought that simply identifying a problem and solving it was enough to get customers. However there are many examples of highly desirable products that don’t do anything useful or certainly not enough to justify the inflated price tag and every failed startup founder will tell you that their solution was good but people just didn’t buy it. There are also lots of examples of design changes that cause people to buy for inexplicable reasons…

“Imagine you’re sitting in the boardroom of a major global drinks company, charged with producing a new product that will rival the position of Coca-Cola… The first thing I would say is something like this: ‘We need to produce a drink that tastes nicer than Coke, that costs less than Coke, and that comes in a really big bottle so people get great value for money.’ What I’m fairly sure nobody would say is this: ‘Hey, let’s try marketing a really expensive drink, that comes in a tiny can ...and that tastes kid of disgusting.’ Yet that is exactly what one company did… that drink was Red Bull.

Before Red Bull launched outside of Thailand… a specialist in reseraching the flavouring of drinks, had never seen a worse reaction to any proposed new product… ‘I wouldn’t drink this piss if you paid me to’ was one refrain.’ Yet over six billion cans are now sold annually.”

- Rory Sutherland (Alchemy, The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense)