Let’s start with Henry Ford. If he had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse, because they knew they had a problem that a horse seemed to solve (transportation), and they could only think in terms of what they already knew (a horse, but faster). Did Ford really ignore his customers? Not really. He just understood their underlying need better than they did. He realized that what they really needed was not a horse per se, but convenient, affordable transportation. So he threw out the assumptions, reframed the problem at a deeper level, and found a way to bring an emerging product category to the masses.
It’s not that he didn’t pay attention to the customers, but that he paid more attention to the customers than they paid to themselves.
Peter Lewis, "Looking Past the Horse," Midium.com, 3 Aug 2013,
medium.com/editors-picks/44bda7299a28.
