Biz Tips: The Five Whys and How to Improve Your Marketing
GROWTH:
The Five Whys and How to Improve Your Marketing
Start with why. And then ask it again. And again. And again. And again.
3-year-olds get to ask a lot of why questions.
It’s undoubtedly torturous for their parents, but the 3-year-olds can’t be blamed. They’re in a phase of rapid learning, development and discovery.
Do the sense of curiosity and a desire for understanding carry into adulthood, and specifically into business and marketing?
If not, why?
The Power of Why
The power of why in marketing was popularized by Simon Sinek in his TED talk (and subsequent book) “Start with Why”.
People don’t by what you buy, they buy why you do it.
Sinek’s codification may have actually been an expansion on another thought leader — Theodore Levitt — who came decades before.
In 1960, Levitt — a Harvard economist and professor — penned a paper entitled “Marketing Myopia”, in which he criticizes businesses for focusing on selling products and services, rather than seeing (and marketing to) what consumers really want or need.
People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.
Recently, marketing guru and author Seth Godin has taken this concept several steps further. Godin shares part of the premise of his latest book, This is Marketing, in a podcast interview with Tim Ferriss —
You don’t actually need a quarter-inch hole. You need a place to put a screw in the wall. But you don’t actually need that — you need a place to put the shelf on the wall. But you don’t actually need that — you need a place to put the books that are cluttering your bedroom. But you don’t actually need that — what you need is the way you will feel when your spouse thanks you for cleaning things up.
The feeling that you did something important.
That feeling is what marketers should be selling.
The 5 Whys
The 5 Whys is a powerful technique originally developed by Toyota’s Sakichi Toyoda to diagnose and solve for problems as part of the Toyota Production System and lean manufacturing.
It’s proven to be an effective problem-solving tool to get to the root cause of problems and to help individuals and organizations to better create processes.
The technique is simple:
- Identify a problem.
- Ask “why did this happen?” There may be several causes.
- For each cause, ask “why did this happen?” again.
- Repeat steps 2 and 3 several times (the 5 Whys technique may actually take 3–8 whys depending on the situation). By now, you should have identified the root cause of the problem.
- Find counter-measures and build processes to fix or prevent the problem.
A basic example of the 5 Whys technique at play is as follows:
The problem: you did not close the deal in your recent sales presentation.
- Why? Because your presentation did not adequately address the problems of the prospect or how your business could solve them.
- Why? Because you did not know all of the prospect’s problems.
- Why? Because you were not able to uncover all of their problems during the initial meeting.
- Why? Because you did not ask all of the right questions about their problems during the meeting.
- Why? Because you forgot to ask some pertinent questions during the course of the meeting.
Counter-measure: Write a list of questions and print out to bring with you to every initial sales meeting.
People don’t fail, processes do.