My son and I were eating barbecue together recently. The restaurant in question is one of those excrutiatingly cheerful, homogenized theme restaurants. Not my cup of cuisine, to say the least.
My son, however, is (please don’t say this to his face), just a little kid. With taste buds to match. His take on the barbecue sauce?
“This sauce is great! It’s like ketchup–only sweeter!”
I take this as a reminder to all of us in business: Don’t just consider the feedback customers give, but also the criteria on which the feedback is based.
Do the criteria match the criteria of the market your business has targeted? And, if not, does it make more sense to double down in exclusivity, or to broaden or re-focus your target market?
These aren’t questions with easy answers, but they’re questions we can only learn from by asking.
