To Successfully Innovate Avoid the New Year's Resolution Fallacy
When creating brand new customer experiences, we need to commit to a higher level of evidence. This requires going beyond what people say they will do and measuring the level of skin in the game.
It is well known that corporate innovation is a difficult endeavor. Many customer experience ideas fail to hit product/market fit despite the best intentions of all the people involved. This is often because teams treat the process of validating new CX touchpoint like you would optimize or differentiate existing experiences. They fall into standard practices like relying on 3rd party market research or using survey based quantitative customer insights on preference of something that people have used or experienced. While these tools have there place, they are often focused on differentiation of things already in-market and only works if your target customer has an existing experience to reference. For net-new customer experience innovation, you can't rely on what people say they will do, but instead need to focus on what they actually do.
We call this the New Year’s Resolution fallacy, where people believe they will do one thing but ultimately do something distinctively different. If you were to open a pay-per-use gym on January 1st, based on the demand of what people say there were going to do, you would probably be broke by March 1st, or even earlier. This is also why gym's run auto-renewing contracts with enrollment fees over pay-per-use business models, but that is a separate topic. For corporate innovation of net-new CX we require a distinctively different approach.
CX innovation is about iteratively reducing the risk of failure. A great idea focused on the wrong customer or poorly executed will inevitably fail. Many focus groups are great to quickly sift through ideas, but the true test of usage and engagement requires deeper level of engagement then reacting to abstract representations of concepts. We need to focus on the goals of what would drive usage and consideration.
Let’s start before the New Year’s Resolution and think about a New Year's party. Anyone who has thrown a New Year’s party for the first time has wrestled with the worry of if anyone would show up or how many. If you casually ask someone in December if they will come to your party, you will get a lot of initial interest. If you then ask them to sign up on an Evite or Facebook event, you will tend to get a little less accepts than you did by just asking. If you then reach out and ask folks to volunteer to bring food or drinks, you will find a smaller group of people willing to put their hand up. If you decide to rent a space, and ask folks to contribute to the rental fee, often this will leave the host paying a hefty sum. Finally, if you ask people to invite friends of theirs to try and fill the space for your initial New Year’s party, you may see that very few folks are willing to put their reputation on the line.
This follows a pattern that is common in how people make the decision to use or try something new. They are happy to commit when the value of their commitment is quite low. To understand the true level of conviction someone has; you want to get people to contribute a level of evidence of intent that is in limited supply and very valuable to them personally. Once you have people committing their time, their reputation, or their money, you should feel rather confident that you have created something so valuable that they are engaged. When developing new customer experiences, it is safe to say that the strength of evidence follows a pattern.
For this reason, corporate innovation should spend the least amount of money or time developing an idea until you have more concrete evidence. Avoid the New Year’s Resolution trap by developing approaches that build successively more substantial evidence instead of taking people at what they say. Successful CX innovation teams make the mindset shift from 'if you build it, we will buy it' to 'if you buy it, we will build it'.