Whose Job Is It To Learn?

How many times have you talked about educating the consumer?  When the consumer fails to use your product correctly, how do you respond?  With more instructions or with fundamental changes?

I worked once with a client whose cleaning product had a terrible reputation - consumers complained that “it never works” and “it just makes the problem worse”.  But in fact, the entire category was like that, so one brand was as good or bad as the other.  When we conducted ethnographic research, we learned that the prodct wasn’t the problem - consumer usage was!  Consumers used the product incorrectly.  They used too much, they used it the wrong way.  They ignored the instructions and allowed their natural inclinations to scrub kick in, but in fact, the best results came from lightly dabbing.  Scrubbing just made the problem worse, grinding in the dirt.  And when consumers were confronted with failure, they just went back, used more product and scrubbed harder.  It was a recipe for disaster.

The solution, of course, was to redesign the product in a way that overrode their natural behaviors and caused them to use the product effectively.  The answer didn’t come in adding more instructions or shouting at the target to LEARN, DAMMIT…the answer came from the company learning itself.

Next time you are working double-hard to make the consumer learn how to use the product…or learn why they need it in the first place…or learn why it’s better than the competition…ask yourself what your company has to learn from the situation and how you can create solutions that don’t require the consumer to do the hard work of learning. 

It’s our job to solve problems, not theirs.  It’s our job to make life easier.  It’s our job to learn.