In Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing blog post, he discusses some of the reasons behind why many products fail–inability to view the product from the standpoint of the consumer. From the consumers point of view, a product is hired to get the job done. In his post, he uses the example of the fast food restaurant that was trying to boost its milkshake sales. Initially, the marketing department first started by segmenting the product(milkshake) and the profile of the people buying the milkshake(demographics). After having gotten the statistics and responding to the feedback, the milkshake sales did not increase. Later, Clay Christensen pointed out that just because someone is of certain demographic group does not necessarily indicate the need to purchase a certain product. There was more to the story, and later on the marketing researchers found that many people were purchasing milkshakes because it would keep the buyer consumers entertained on their bus ride to work, which is the reason why consumers “hired” the milkshake to do.

In my opinion, this entire analysis could have also been done using the value proposition canvas we studied in class. To boost its sales, companies should try to identify the “pains” the consumer has, or target the “gains” consumers would gain from purchasing a certain product. To put this into perspective, using the milkshake example, the “pains” here would have been the boredom the consumers had to endure going to work. The milkshake served as the “pain reliever” by giving the commuters something to do while the commuted to work.