Customers Don't "Buy" From You, They "Hire" You

Legendary marketing guru Harvard professor Theodore Levit once quipped that consumers "don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole." The common-sense truth behind this observation is obvious, yet it's often overlooked by marketers and advertisers in most industries including carwashing. Instead of looking at the reasons behind the customer’s decision to make a purchase, market research has traditionally focused on two narrower questions:

1. Who is buying a product or service?
2. What features do these buyers seem to prefer?

Following this strategy, a marketer looking at portable music players (boom boxes) in the 1980s would have answered "young people" and "loud amplification" respectively. These answers would have been useful if one were interested in tweaking product design or fine-tuning a marketing campaign, but they also would have missed the bigger picture of what customers were really seeking when they bought boom boxes.

Sony's founder, Akio Morita, viewed boom boxes from a different perspective. Looking at why consumers were buying these products, rather than who was buying them, Sony researchers came to the conclusion that the driving force behind the success of the boom box was the desire on the part of consumers to take their music with them wherever they went. This realization led to the development of the compact and convenient Sony Walkman, a product that revolutionized the music industry and paved the way for today's generation of iPods.

At Chrysler, Lee Iacocca and his team followed a similar strategy to develop the minivan. They introduced their breakthrough vehicle after looking at the number of women who were buying Jeeps and station wagons to transport children and run errands.

Your Carwash Is Hired!

Author and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen maintains that consumers don't purchase a product or service, they hire it to do a specific job, such as transport their favorite music, or take their children to school and soccer practice. Businesses that operate from this perspective tend to develop products and services that are more in step with the needs and aspirations of their customers, says Christensen. For example, a Walkman is a more convenient way to carry music than a big boom box, and minivans are better for hauling family members on daily errands than a pickup truck or station wagon.

According to Christensen's theory, carwash operators who view customers as people who are hiring their carwashes to do a job are likely to develop a new perspective on marketing. Rather than focusing on what extra services and off-line packages they're selling, these operators are more likely to look at why customers are visiting their carwashes.

Operators who apply this line of thinking to their carwashes, may well be surprised at what they discover. As management expert Peter Drucker once observed, businesses often have only an incomplete idea of why people are buying their products and services.

Filling out this picture opens a new world of opportunities. More than a century ago, a young man named William Wrigley thought he was selling soap until customers told him they were buying his product to get the stick of gum he was including as a premium. Wrigley scrapped his soap business, and went on to build one of history's great fortunes on the strength of his chewing gum empire.

Starbucks' founders focused on selling coffee-making equipment and beans. Their marketing man, Howard Schultz, realized that customers were more interested in sharing their coffee drinking experience, so he purchased the company, de-emphasized sales, and focused on creating a European-style coffee house where customers could sit and enjoy their favorite beverages. Later, when Schultz noticed that customers were "hiring" Starbucks to serve as a "remote office," he became one of the first retailers to offer WiFi access in his locations.

Discovering why customers are hiring your business often leads to changes in what you emphasize in your marketing message. Pierre Omidyar wasn't focused on creating an online auction phenomenon when he founded eBay. His original plan was to provide people with a convenient means of selling personal items. When eBay discovered that most visitors to its website got caught up in the excitement of participating in an auction, the company created a new and significantly different corporate identity.

What Do Your Customers Really Want?

So, why are customers hiring your carwash? Certainly the main reason is to clean their vehicles, but is this the complete answer? Perhaps customers are not only hiring you to get their cars spic and span, but also to do so in a way that accommodates their busy schedules.

In a recent Gartner G2 Survey 81% of Internet shoppers said they bought things online because it was faster and more convenient, compared to 33% that listed price as a contributing factor to their point and click shopping. Why do busy customers like those surveyed by the Gartner group hire their neighborhood tunnel carwash? It may be natural to assume that they're doing so because they value the quality of the wash they receive. However, even though this is undoubtedly true, there may also be an equally important factor – convenience.

Although these customers want to get their cars clean and dry, they're also interested in balancing quality with speed of service. Perhaps they're going to your carwash because it's close to their home or place of work. The fact that you spend extra time prepping vehicles may be of secondary importance to these customers – or it may even be a disadvantage. Since they're primarily interested in saving time; they may be willing to buy "more wash" than they want, simply because your location is convenient.

As long as there isn't a faster alternative nearby, these customers will continue to patronize your carwash, even though it isn't the “ideal candidate” for the job they want to fill. However, if an almost-as-good, but much faster wash opens down the street, these customers might "fire" your business, and hire your competitor.

Carwash operators who focus on why customers are hiring them, as opposed to looking only at the services they're selling, are better able to make the adjustments necessary to protect themselves from possible competition in the future. For example, the operator who recognizes that a large share of his customers are hiring his wash because they're looking for a simple, fast and uncomplicated way to clean their vehicles, can make his site more attractive to these visitors by converting to a self-pay concept. Click here to read about the SiteWatch Xpress Pay Terminal self-pay system with FastPass.

On the other hand, perhaps customers are hiring your carwash not to save them time, but to make themselves feel pampered and special. (Women do not "hire" a Gucci bag just to carry keys, money and makeup -- the purses sold at discount stores do this just as well. They purchase the pricey pocketbook because it makes them feel good about themselves.)

If customers are hiring your carwash for similar emotional, status-building reasons, you are going to want to invest more heavily in personalized service, greeting them by name, making informed selling suggestions and providing perks like gourmet coffee or shoe shines. Click here to read about the SiteWatch Portable Touchscreen Terminal can help you call up customer histories to deliver enhanced service.

A Lesson From The Geeks

Focusing on the customer's wants is especially important in helping a company refine the extra services that go beyond its core business. In the case of a multi-profit center carwash, this might mean implementing new services in a detail shop or quick lube. In the case of the world's largest electronics retailer, it meant coming up with a way to help customers use the gadgets they purchased.

After studying its market, Best Buy realized that customers weren't hiring it to provide them with products, but to help them bring the benefits of technology into their homes. To fulfill this mission, Best Buy knew that it would have to take steps to help customers install and maintain home computers and digital entertainment systems. This led the giant retailer to acquire a small tech services company called Geek Squad in 2003.

In the ensuing years, Geek Squad has grown from 60 to 12,000 employees. Geek Squads now operate throughout the 960 store chain, and have been largely credited with helping Best Buy achieve an almost 10% increase in profits last year, while rivals Circuit City and CompUSA struggle. Best Buy's successful Geek Squad venture might never have happened had the company looked only at what it was selling, and ignored the issue of why customers were buying.

A New Look At The Competition

When businesses see themselves as being hired by customers, it also leads them to take a new, more complete, view of their competition. A business that focuses only on what consumers are buying, sees its competition as being limited to other companies that are selling the same product or service. However, if that business looked instead at the "job" customers are hiring it to do, it would discover that its competitors also include companies in different industries. On the surface, these companies may seem unalike, but in reality all are doing the same job for customers, albeit with different products or services.

Consider the case of video rental stores like Blockbuster and Hollywood. Certainly, the two chains have been competing with one another, but their main competition is from Netflix, video on-demand services and satellite movie networks, all of which are vying to be "hired" by customers for the same job: to bring entertainment into the home.

Sometimes the connection between competitors is even less direct. Take, for example, the quick serve chain that discovered its selling milk shakes to morning commuters. Its competition isn't only from other chains selling milk shakes, but also from anyone selling bagels, donuts, breakfast burritos and other convenient foods that appeal to morning commuters.

Few people in the wristwatch industry regarded cell phones as a competitive threat when they first appeared, but the fact that people realized they could "hire" their phones for the secondary job of checking the time has cut into watch sales. People buy a book at the airport, because they want to hire it to keep them amused while they travel. The airport bookstore that looks at its market from this perspective understands that it isn't just competing with other booksellers, but with Blackberries, iPods, hand-held digital games, laptops and other devices that travelers use to pass the time.

As a carwash operator, you're probably very familiar with indirect competition. For years, the biggest competitor to most operators wasn't other carwashes, but the do-it-yourself driveway wash. Instead of hiring a carwash to clean their vehicles, these consumers were hiring themselves or a youngster in the neighborhood to do the job at home.

Successful businesses not only recognize indirect competition, they also develop strategies for dealing with it. More often than not, these strategies differ from the plans employed to counter competition from within a company's own industry. When businesses compete with companies like themselves, they typically focus on the features that make their product or service, different, better or cheaper.

However, these arguments don't work against indirect competition. For example, saying your milk shakes are thicker and creamier than the other quick serve restaurant's, isn't going to win over customers who don’t view milk shakes as breakfast food. On the other hand, saying that your milk shakes are longer lasting than a bagel with cream cheese, less sticky than a donut and neater than a breakfast burrito is going to help you pull customers away from these indirect competitors.

Strategies for dealing with indirect competitors focus less on features and more on the job that a product or service is being hired to accomplish. The carwash that wins over driveway washers does so by emphasizing the time-saving convenience, energy savings and environmental benefits of using a professional carwash, not by touting its competitive prices or special packages.

Focusing on indirect competition gives a carwash a better understanding of where it fits in the overall marketplace by leading it to look more at what the customer wants and expects, and less on what it’s selling. By taking this big picture view, a carwash will develop a better understanding of its customers – and that will make them more likely to "hire" it for a long and mutually beneficial relationship.