Anthony W. Ulwick

Why did you choose to go with Strategyn and ODI over other options?

Prior to joining Church & Dwight and taking lead of the Arm & Hammer nutrition business, I led a business that sold anti-microbial actives and formulated products, and I was responsible for developing markets and new products. I first came across the ODI concept while reading The Innovator’s Solution, by Clayton Christensen. That book makes reference to your work and the concept of Jobs-to-be-Done, and that led me to read your book, What Customers Want.

It was natural for me to decide that if I was going to do something to improve innovation, I might as well go to the people who wrote the book on it.

We’re happy that you did. Let’s talk about the results. What surprising insights came out of the Strategyn/ODI research?

The research helped on many fronts. First, it helped clarify in our minds that the customer is the dairy producer, not the nutritionist. Next, understanding that the “job” they were trying to get done had little to do with nutrition and was focused squarely on optimizing herd productivity. Then it was certainly eye opening to see how many desired outcomes the dairy producer is trying to satisfy in a given day, in a given month, in a given year. I think we identified over 165 different desired outcomes (well-constructed need statements). We homed in on optimizing dairy herd productivity, and when we started prioritizing the outcomes through quantitative research, the most surprising thing was how many opportunities there were, and how few of those opportunities were directly related to nutritional ingredients for the dairy producer. Our whole business is focused on supplying nutritional ingredients and supplements, so that was probably the most surprising thing.

Scott, how would you describe the market strategy that Strategyn recommended based on the customer insights?

Clearly the market strategy started with our collective recognition of whom we needed to target for value creation. Even though we don’t sell directly to the dairy producer, we need to make sure that we keep our eye on the dairy producer and the job they are trying to get done. We have relationships with various other components in the supply

chain, but at the end of the day, we need to create value for the dairy producer.

The second major focus was changing our messaging and how we speak about things—moving away from talking about product benefits and features and toward talking about outcomes, and linking our products to the outcomes they satisfied. The third focus was taking a look at the job map, which had 15 steps in it, and saying, “Let’s take a step back and look at where we can position ourselves in the marketplace that impacts the majority of these steps.”

The other part of the market strategy is segmentation: recognizing that the normal demographic methods for segmenting customers, while helpful for sales resource prioritization, are not helpful for opportunity identification, and hence solution identification. One of the things I go back to, one of the surprising things that came out of the research, was that a large dairy or mega dairy can share many of the same unmet needs and outcomes as a small dairy. And geography wasn’t necessarily the determinant either: ultimately there were some key outcomes that decided what kind of segmentation there was. Thinking about that—the segments and how we position the business—has become an important part of our marketing strategy.