Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It

by Adrian J. Slywotzky, Karl Weber, Dave Courvoisier (Reader)

In Demand, Adrian Slywotzky provides a radically new way to think about demand, with a big idea and a host of practical applications—not just for people in business but also for social activists, government leaders, non-profit managers, and other would-be innovators. To succeed in their various missions, all these groups need to master such ground-breaking concepts as the hassle map (and the secrets of fixing it); the curse of the incomplete product (and how to avoid it); why “very good” does not equal “magnetic”; how what you don’t see can make or break a product; the art of transforming fence sitters into customers; why there’s no such thing as an average customer; and why real demand comes from a 45-degree angle of improvement (rather than the five degrees most organizations manage).

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Entrepreneurship, Management

750 pages, Audio CD

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Adrian J. Slywotzky (born in 1951) is a consultant and author of several books on economic theory and management. Slywotzky graduated from Harvard College and holds a JD from Harvard Law School and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He has worked as a consultant since 1979 and is currently a partner at Oliver Wyman.
Slywotzky wrote several books on profitability and growth, namely the bestselling The Profit Zone'.' He is one of the most renowned consultants of the United States and was elected as one of the 25 best consultants in 2000 and 2008. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Erwin · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you like reading stories by 3rd parties about successful businesses, you'll enjoy this. If you're expecting useful information to make your business better, look elsewhere. I picked this up because I enjoyed The Art of Profitability and The Profit Zone by the same author, Adrian Slywotzky. I've been fortunate to personally know two of the world's great demand creators and was curious to see what Slywotzky has to add.

Unfortunately, very little. You might be better off with a short story like Obvious Adams, one that Slywotzky himself referred to in The Art of Profitability.

This vain of business books seem to be the modern equivalent of Tony Robbins "Self Help". Backward looking reconstructions like Jim Collins's Built To Last and Good To Great fill some need of the audience. You can definitely add Slywotzky's latest "Demand" to that list.

Slywotzky is selling two new "tools":
* Hassle Map (set of things that frustrate customers/block adoption)
* Magnetism (emotional attraction in the eyes of customers)

I'm hesitant to use the word "Case Studies" because there was so little analysis, so little discussion of failures when the model wasn't followed, and zero studies to determine the predictive nature of this formula. That said, companies "featured" (I certainly wouldn't say analysed) include:
* Caremore (Case Study published in The Atlantic Nov 2012)
* Netflix
* Zip Car
* Nespresso
* Amazon's Kindle
* Tetra Pack
* Pret a Manger
* Honda Prius
* Teach for America
* League of American Orchestras

If you want to read a great story about building a business, I think it's far better to see it from the first person prospective of the founder, rather than the snakeoil salesman [consultant] on the sidelines that has never created demand. I would recommend books like:
* Sam Walton's Made in America
* Ray Kroc's Grinding It Out
* Howard Schultz's Pour Your Heart Into It
* Richard Branson's Business Stripped Bare

Slywotzky admits that his team set out to find the key to creating demand, but during their research they realised that demand was so different, so varied in each case, that they weren't able to create one set of generalisations. Instead of focusing on the importance of this realization, he tried to ignore it, and hide it behind his unproven demand creation model. (Hassle Mapping and Magnetism)

In light of Taleb's analysis in The Black Swan this backward looking reconstruction isn't persuasive. Once you do get tactical in your demand creation, I think a scienticific "BUILD - LEARN - MEASURE" cycle like The Lean Startup is infinitely more useful than anything offered in this book.

If you want to learn more about creating demand, I think you'll get a lot more out of marketing oriented and entrepreneur oriented tactical guides like:
* Guy Kawasaki's The Art Of The Start or Reality Check
* Seth Godin's All Marketers Are Liars or Purple Cow
* Simon Sinek's Start with Why

Slywotzky wraps up by pointing out that the American economy is living off of inventions from the 50s and 60s, but we've long ago stopped funding research, but neglects the structural problems with American Industry and the American Economy. Chalmers Johnson eloquently describes these obstacnes in MITI and the Japanese Miracle. Eamonn Fingleton also covers them in In Praise of Hard Industries.

[Jason Ubay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never thought I'd get into business books, but after working at a business magazine and thinking about journalism from an entrepreneurs standpoint, I've really begun to take a look at different strategies and theories out there. I'm glad I picked this book up because it tries to find the secret about demand. Basically, what makes one product more successful than a very similar product? An easy chapter would've been advertising and brand awareness, but I'm glad Slywotzky steered away from that topic.

One of the first chapters explored "magnetism." What makes a great product great? One example was Zipcar. Its creator thought everyone would jump onto the idea of car sharing because it would lessen everyone's carbon footprint and it would be good for the planet. Success, however, was not reached until its founder was ejected by the board and a new CEO took an analytical approach, trying to understand why some people were die-hard enthusiasts while others could care less. (In short, they found density in clusters was the key, and now Zipcar is expanding.) In another chapter, the author looks at the case of the e-reader war. The Sony Libre was like Amazon's Kindle (low weight, E-ink technology) and it came out a year before the Kindle, but it turned out to be a failed product. Why? WiFi and a deep library that Sony just could not match. Amazon, a Internet retail website, had no business getting into the handheld electronic business, but it did and succeeded.

An alarming chapter came at the end, where the author discusses that many of the great innovations start with scientific breakthroughs. Either a school or a business has an research and development outfit that works on creating new projects, without the pressure of deadlines or immediate commercial application. (Xerox's PARC lab is one such example.) Today, those departments are either gone or severely shrunk, as many companies need to figure out how to make money now for mere survival. The future looks bleak for breakthrough achievements.

Of course, the book ends with a call to action: Don't look up for the next demand creator, look in the mirror.

[Duane G]

Decent read. Gems are hidden throughout. If you enjoy entrepreneur.com articles you may want to consider giving this a miss.

[Vikash Anand · Rating 4 out of 5]

Demand: Creating what people love, before they know they want it by Adrian Slywotzky is a decent book regarding creation of demand of a product. The book gives good account of the demand creation strategies of products like Amazon-kindle, Netflix, through vivid and insightful background stories.

A magnetic product is the first essential ingredient for the creation of demand of a product. Strengthening the magnetism of a product is key to difference between hearing about a product and actually buying a product. The essential elements associated with magnetic products will vary from product to product. The density of cars turned out to be the trigger factor for Zipcar, the instant access of books differentiated Amazon Kindle from Sony reader, the delivery time of Netflix triggered its business. The trigger factor of businesses will differ. At some critical magnetic trigger point, the demand of the product will start and it will become a mass product loved by people.

The rate at which a product gets better after its first release is its trajectory. This rate of innovation is also crucial to generate and sustain demand. Not so long ago, Facebook was the second ranked social networking site, while MySpace was the first. But MySpace failed to get better and better while Facebook charged ahead. By 2008, Facebook had overtaken MySpace, and now it's way ahead of any second ranked social networking site. Demand creation doesn't happen once and for all. It happens day after day, in a prolonged and complex process after multiple iterations.

[S S · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Magnetic Products that resolve a customer's hassle map via scrutinising the backstory and researching the demand triggers intensely while mapping out a clear trajectory for constant improvement and addressing variation in demand (eschewing the mean), and dodging launch bullets, building a consistent portfolio that all begins with the important spark of curiosity. Data driven decisions, yes yet beyond spreadsheets. To understand demand, is demanding.

[Shivam Sharma · Rating 3 out of 5]

This books talks about how the demand emerged for an object and the way entrepreneurs solved the problem. Some great examples are the rise of bloomberg for finance, Zipcar in USA (zoomcar in India). Some other great example are of how sony launched the e-book in the market but with technological advancement, amazon became the market leader.

[Kalle Wescott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read /Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It/, by Adrian Slywotzky With Karl Weber:

https://www.businesstoday.in/magazine...

Slywotzky discusses how entrepreneurs create demand by optimizing their products and services.

[Elita Lahm · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is what it says it is. Very informative describing how businesses became successful and created a demand that no other did. If you expect a direct advice you will not get it, learn from the experiences and read between the lines. It was a great read :)

[Jeremy Hung · Rating 4 out of 5]

"[J]ust as the hassles that complicate life are endlessly varied, so is the artistry of hassle-fixing that underlies demand creation, making our topic not only vitally important to economic and social progress but also uniquely fascinating."

[Azeem Lakdawalla · Rating 2 out of 5]

Misleading title. Was expecting information and insight on actual demand creation. This is just a series of stories about companies. Didn't even bother finishing.

[Jill Brennan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best marketing book I’ve read in a long time

Great examples together with a compelling focus on customers made this a great book. Perfect for small business owners and anyone wanting to create a unique customer focused business.

[Xi Cheng · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's not a cogently argued book. Most of the stories are fun but there's a lot of repetition.

[Mary Ronan Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was enticed to read this book by an article in the November issue of Atlantic magazine, The Quiet Health-Care Revolution. The article describes an HMO-like medical practice in southern California, now spreading to Arizona and elsewhere in the southwest, called Caremore. It enrolls only people on Medicare and it practices preventive medicine.

For example, if a person has congestive heart failure, Caremore provides them with a scale that transmits their weight to the clinic every morning. A sudden weight gain alerts them to a possible problem and then call the client and send a car to take them to the clinic. A diabetic with a small cut on a toe calls them and a car comes to take him to a diabetes care clinic where the cut is carefully cleaned and bandaged. He returns to the clinic every other day until the cut is healed.

With these preventive measures Caremore cut the number of amputations for people with diabetes by 60%. They have sharply cut the number of hospitalizations for congestive heart disease and the follow-on stay in a nursing facility to regain strength. They visit clients' homes to help make it safer to get around and they counsel people about diet and exercise.

Caremore has cut costs dramatically and Adrian Slywotzky, the author of Demand, predicts it's the future of medical care for the elderly in America. This small practice has provided services that have created a demand.

Demand masquerades as a business/economics book, and it does talk about Netflix and Kindle and Pret a Manger and Tetra Pak. But it also relates how symphony orchestras in the US are dramatically increasing the number of their core subscribers and how Teach for America is training Ivy League graduates to teach successfully in some of the worst schools in the US.

Slywotzky's last chapter is the heart of the book. Where, he asks, are the new products, the entire new industries going to come from? Who is going to create the demand for things we don't even know we are going to need? We used to have Bell Labs where a trio of engineers created a gizmo they called a transistor which went on to change our entire world. He talks about ARPA where the scientists did strange but sometimes successful experiments and developed something they called the Internet and invited everybody to join.

Bell Labs and the RCA lab and XEROX lab are much smaller than they used to be and ARPA sticks pretty much to military research, most of which is classified. He does see good things, specifically a very clever robot, coming out of the MIT lab and SRI is still doing "pure" research, with scientists working on inventions they see no immediate use for. Nobody saw the use for that transistor either until they got to putting a lot of them on a little chip. The MIT lab is results oriented. Their motto is Demo or Die, so if you develop an idea for interactive wallpaper you need to produce some of this lively wallpaper. I got the impression someone has done so.

But the problem remains, where are the scientists of tomorrow going to come from? China, the author tells us, has more honor students than the US has students. (And no grade inflation.) They could not keep these labs going without foreign students and other immigrants. Our best students in the US are going into business and finance. How are we going to steer them into science which provides the fuel for the business without which those financiers would have little to do.

[Jon Cardwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is truly an innovator's book. If you are looking for bullet point directives or the ABC's of sales, marketing or invention, this book may disappoint. The very nature of its subject prevents such a simplistic "how to" as a method to harvest results. It is very positive in its expression of ideas, providing a very enthusiastic motivation for one who is innovative (that is, for someone who innovates from the truest and fullest sense of the word: one who makes, provides, or implements changes, novelties, or something new). If you just have many great ideas that would make life convenient, and you are looking for a way to get those ideas out there, this book isn't for you either.

Although a book like this is not my typical read, the title intrigued me. As a Baptist pastor whose perspective is rather that of the Reformed/Calvinistic/Puritanical perspective, I was interested in what a secular marketing guru had to say of "meeting a demand" before there is one, in hopes that it might give me some insights into what many churches are trying to do these days by implementing sales and marketing techniques. I read this out of pure research on my part, but had enjoyed the read. I liked it, but wouldn't have put it on my list as a "must have" book were I not given a copy.

I've rated it with four stars on its own merits and for the field it attempts to penetrate, and it actually should be 4.5 from me but we can't cut stars in half. It may have been a full five star but there were a few areas that, in my humble opinion, could have been explored and expanded a little further.

[Nicholas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was amazing, I was expecting it to be dry and dull but the author has a good sense of style and improved my cognition in many fields by helping me realize the value of over-confidence (cognitive bias) and the importance of data, among other things.

This book helps explain why the Sony E-reader didn't excite people the way the Kindle did or why Honda engineered a great Hybrid which lacked spark compared to the Prius. It explains why Nokia made Smartphones for years but how it was the Iphone that actually engaged people.

The author's honesty in explaining that there is no formula to demand also helped me. (After all he spent years investing in something he hoped would answer a formula only to find there wasn't one)

The book has several elements to improve your cognition:

Magneticism,
Hassle Maps,
Backstory,
Triggers,
Trajectory,
Variation,
Launch,
Portfolio

And it expresses the strengths of several products and innovations. While it was insightful there were portions in the book that were just full of fluff.

"It might be The Hero's Flute: A Hero's Quest adapted by Lorenzo and Tony Curry from the Mozart classic; Theft of the Gold, adapted from Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung by.."

It would've been better to cut the book down in page numbers, other then that the book was good and had a really warm-hearted ending

[Romael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Demanda real vem do entendimento real da necessidade das pessoas.
1 torne magnético
2 ajuste o mapa de necessidade
3 desenvolva uma retaguarda completa
4 encontre os gatilhos
5 construa uma trajetória ascendente íngreme
6 diferencie.

Cada melhoria ou avanço tecnológico/emocional abre uma nova camada de demanda reprimida.

Magnetismo = grande funcionalidade x apelo emocional M=FxE

Supermercado wegmans eua

O mapa de dificuldades se concentra em buscar inovações centradas nos problemas dos clientes.
A criação de demanda nunca acontece de uma forma triunfal e única e sim dia após dia em um processo de melhoria.
Retrospectiva prospectiva, criar um cenário futuro de um lançamento para prever possíveis falhas.
7 hábitos dos lançamentos magnéticos
1 uma busca da falha fatal do projeto
2 competir dentro da organização pelo melhor projeto
3 imitar para ser único(copiar variáveis menos importantes do projeto e focar toda energia no aspecto genial da idéia.
4 transmitir emoção na oferta
5 equação organizacional única( n usar estruturas e idéias velhas para projetos revolucionários.
6 equilíbrio entre confiança e medo
7 pensar em série e não em evento, raramente o primeiro lançamento é magnético(precisa evoluir)

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've had Adrian Slywotsky's book "Art of Profitability" on my "to read" list, but I was recommended his later work, "Demand." In Demand, he looks at a variety of companies and examines how they have been successful in creating products and businesses. From Amazon/Kindle, Nestle/Nespresso, Pret a Manager/Lunch, Pixar/Animated Movies, Eurostar/Rail transport, Zipcar/Car sharing, Bloomberg/Financial Information, Seattle Opera/Live Performances to several other examples, Slywotsky demonstrates how these companies/products shared some key attributes in the ideation, design, building, marketing, selling and servicing of their products. For anyone trying to understand why some new products are successful when most are not, this is a must read.

[John Stone · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not badly written but failed to meet my expectations. In trying to define "demand", the author degenerates into countless examples of companies that have succeeded. Some of the companies and their approach are relevant to fostering demand but many are obscure, unknown and quite frankly uninspiring. At the end it attempts to quantify the zeitgeist of raw research and development and even claims future R&D should be a quasi-government business partnership. Since this book misses the demand definition but is and interesting recap of successful companies, I suggest it should be titled, "Companies that succeeded but show no repeat pattern that I can explain."

[Sarsij Nayanam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Its a book which will make you realise that how badly you needed it, after you have read it. I strongly suggest that all those guys working in smaller firms and startups should read it while they are struggling to gain more customers. And people who want to start something of their own just can't ignore this book any longer.

[Akshay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book starts off well enough with some introductory case studies, switches to learnings from these case studies, but then suddenly has only case studies.

In the last chapters the authors switch to a 'if only we had retained our labs' monologue, closing with an admonishment that "CHANGE STARTS WITH YOU".

It is an interesting read but I found it hard to really take away anything from it.

[Markiyan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is basically a couple of stories of successful products/companies with a bit of decomposition on how they happened to succeed. Clearly nice stories, gives important points on building product people need, but not much new from product management/marketing standard practices. Still, worth a read.

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a unique idea - providing a product or service that people actually want (i.e.: demand). The way you do that is to remove the "hassle factor." Steve Jobs had it figured out. Why can't the airlines?

[Erietta Sapounakis · Rating 5 out of 5]

for a business book this is an entertaining read. stories of some well known and not so well known brands overcoming barriers by customer centered thinking. interesting too to read how long a strategy takes to develop, be realized and be sustained in the right company culture.

[Edgar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book. Basically it says that you should put yourself in your customers' shoes. Once you get in their head and understand the hassles they face, they will be loyal to you. Learn from them so that they will demand your product to make their lives better. When they win, you win.

[Andy C.]

A great book and compelling business stories about companies that created demand for new products by listening to customers intently then implementing ideas that were often counter intuitive. Great for anyone looking at a new product or idea.

[David Beronja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really liked it. Some good insight into market creation.

[Dhimant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looking forward to some great insights on market creation and Product Value Creation. Cheers.

[Nicquay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome! A book with great depth of creating the demand that people needs by really solving what needs to be solved: The Hassle Map

[Vikram Narayan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book. Lots of good info about launching products effectively.

[Borislav · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good pool of stories from renowned companies and how they transformed their business by creating demand.