What did Augustín NOT do beforehand to validate his idea?
- Augustín neglected to test his assumptions, and more generally, connect with Emilia’s customers.
- In order for him to accomplish his goal of leading customers in a new direction, he needed to understand customers, which crucially involves running experiments that could illuminate the current-day opinions of Emilia’s current and potential customer bases.
- Particularly, the quote that shows Augustín’s shortcoming is: “The young, the old—all retail customers— want straight talk: hablar claro. And we’re going to give it to them” (125).
- Here, Augustín speaks for this huge umbrella of “all retail customers” without having any experiments or specific conversations to back up this claim.
- Moreover, the idea of “we’re going to give it to them” while having no customer interviews feels very out of touch, disconnected from customers.
Why is that important?
- You can’t give customers what they want if you don’t know what they want — even if you spend all of the money in the world.
- And they did spend a ton of money on this rebranding of Emilia, even neglecting the existing customers who were already giving them money in order to focus on a younger crowd that didn’t know / trust / have any loyalty to the brand yet.
- Tailoring something to a group of people requires knowing that group and their needs.
What could have gone differently, and why?
- If Augustín had re-evaluated his strategy after the poor performance data in the second quarter, Emilia could have saved the money spent on this “rebranding” with unsuccessful numbers and put it toward a new approach that could have been more successful.
- It seems that his refusal to back down also had to do with his pride, since he thought, “you can’t chicken out in the
middle of a revolution.”
- It seems that his refusal to back down also had to do with his pride, since he thought, “you can’t chicken out in the
- If Augustín had listened seriously to María and all of the concerns she brought up, he may have been able to see the dangerous parts of his execution. This could have led him to plan things out differently, taking into account her concerns and knowledge of the younger generation like their Internet-proneness and potential inability to spend money.
- If Augustín had actually run experiments, interviews, tests with his intended customer base, he would have been able to foresee the shortcomings of his original plan and adjust it around the needs/wants of the customer, possibly allowing Emilia to flourish and gain revenue as intended.
If I had to advise Augustín I would say…
- It’s great that you have data, but data is not a replacement for real conversations. Before even presenting this idea to the board of Emilia, you should have had dozens (maybe even hundreds) of interactions with actual people, actual customers.
- You spoke about people’s wants without ever involving the people themselves, which is why you faced unforeseen failures in this rebranding.
- Similar to the prototyping process, perhaps you might try launching a piece of this at just a few stores first, before investing the time and money into launching this everywhere. See what works and what doesn’t at these “soft launch” locations, then take this into account while you make changes and iterate.
