MarketingProfs

Remember how green you felt interviewing for your current job? All the grand ideas you had for the company and your role? Remember how you were excited, yet intimidated by what was to come?
You were a newbie.

Now you can’t get your product out of your head. You eat, shower, live-and-breathe your product. In fact, you can’t remember a time when you didn’t know all the intimate details, individual components, and the way it is made.
This holds true if you’re an editor, PR expert, or product manager for the line of Old Spice products.
You are an expert.
A problem with being an expert is that you’re now vexed with the hex called, The Curse of Knowledge. You probably don’t even know you have it – which is the worst part.
The Curse Of Knowledge was defined by Chip and Dan Heath in their best selling book Made To Stick, as:
“Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like to not know it.”
As experts, we forget what it was like to be ignorant of our own products… To have basic information and raw impressions – like our customers do.

The Cure: Think Related Experience

Find a product that poses a challenge similar to what you’re trying to solve. I don’t mean think about your competitor… rather, find another situation where people face a similar challenge.
For example, when I was working at Starbucks Coffee Company, we spent lots of time coming up with ways to help customers better understand whole bean coffee. (You know, the un-ground stuff you’d make to grind and brew at home). Starbucks offers coffees from growing regions all over the world.
Forget the fact that many don’t understand how to grind and prepare coffee properly – that’s a challenge for another day… But, when it comes to picking out a type of coffee… How could we help them better understand it so they would buy more. Right?
As a coffee expert, I could taste the spice flavors in Guatemala Antigua versus the citrus and floral notes in coffee from Colombia.
Huh? Yep, that was our curse of knowledge.
Ask customers about the taste of these two coffees and 99% of them would taste… coffee. Coffee-ish coffeeness.
Rarely do customers sip two different brewed coffees side-by-side… Let alone, enough to train their taste buds to be able to detect subtle flavors.
So, trying to get customers to think about their preferred coffee flavor and direct them to select the appropriate coffee growing origin, was out of the question.
The Related Experience
While coffee wasn’t confusing for Starbucks partners – buying wine was. The same way you can detect subtleties of flavor in coffee you pick out in wine.
So, instead we focused on the related experience of selecting a bottle of wine. How do you pick a wine?

• By flavor?

• By the pretty label? Oh, cute… a frog with a tophat!
• By a wine type you recognize?
• By brand name?
• By price?
• What if I buy something my guests think is bad?
• Is boxed wine still cheesy or trendy now?

Unless you “know” wine – those are the thoughts that rush through our head when gazing at bottle after bottle – shelf after shelf of wine. Buying wine terrifies me.
While this discussion helped, wine was still too close in complexity to the purchase of coffee – the curse wasn’t broken…
I found an even “simpler” topic: bread.
I worked with the team… If you were sent to Whole Foods Market to pick out a loaf of fresh-baked bread for dinner tonight, how would you choose? What questions would you have?

• Can you serve French bread with an Italian meal?

• Is pre-sliced as fresh as sliced?
• When do you serve sourdough?
• What the heck is the difference between a baguette and a batard?

I just want bread for dinner that is: fresh, delicious, soft on the inside, and goes with the food!
At the heart of buying bread, wine, and coffee are the common themes:

• Help me match it to my meal.

• I don’t want to look stupid in front of my guests.
• I don’t want to have to learn industry jargon to buy the right item.
• I just want something that I’ll like the taste of.

We then took these needs and applied them back to coffee – we had broken our curse of knowledge.
Customers don’t buy for flavor, they buy for meal occasion… Tell them what coffee goes with what kind of meal or dessert.
They can’t detect spice or floral flavors in brewed coffee – they just want something fresh, hot and delicious to serve. (That mixes with sugar and milk!)

Break The Curse

Related experiences can be applied to any service or product from fabric softener, to computer systems, or time share purchase.
Our customers don’t know as much as we do – and shouldn’t have to. (Next time you suggest and ‘education campaign’ for your customers – that’s a warning sign).
Break yourself of the curse by finding a similar challenge with another product, industry, or life experience – then apply those findings back to your own challenge.