Disqualify Customers
“We’re not competing with kale salad!”
— Pat Brown, CEO of Impossible Foods
When launching innovative products, it’s incredibly important to know who your customer is NOT. This flies in the face of conventional business-building logic, and the scramble for users and likes and views and retweets. One would think it’s always better to have a bigger target market (“Who’s your product for?” “Everybody!”).
But that’s not the case.
The best entrepreneurs are just as deft at disqualifying customers as they are at attracting new ones. Brown is outspoken about the fact that many vegetarians refuse to try the Impossible Burger because it disgusts them — it just seems too real — and that delights him! “My own sister can’t bring herself to try it, even though she believes me, that there’s really no animal product in the meat.”
When Brown set out to address the climate crisis, he knew he wasn’t going to win by catering to the already-convinced. He had to create a product that hard-core meat-lovers preferred to the meat of a cow. As he described in his fantastic conversation with Guy Raz on How I Built This, “Critics say, ‘But look how much sodium is in it!’ People, we’re not competing with kale salad!”
Granted, most products in the “animal-cruelty free” or “environmentally conscious” space end up comparing themselves to kale salad. But Brown and co had the wherewithal to know that that’s not the basis of comparison that matters. And anyone who was making a purchase decision based upon comparison to kale salad’s nutritional content simply wasn’t a customer.
There’s a reason an environmentally-friendly product hadn’t truly broken through prior to Impossible’s arrival on the scene. You’ve got to be willing to question conventional wisdom to truly break through.
Related: Reframe The Competitive Set
Related: Beware Conventional Wisdom
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One of the defining contributions the d.school is helping teams ask themselves, “What kind of thinking is appropriate, when?” We call such clarity being “Mindful of Process.” And it can seem like semantics until you realize we need to show up in different ways.