Go for the trigger
When trying to empathise with - and design for - your target audience, be more trigger-happy and start by looking for the moments that lead to action.
This week I was coaching my workout partner on how to develop his health & fitness business idea.
It’s an idea that we had spoken about many times, and as people often do, he had been obsessing over the solution, thinking about all the features he could offer. He’d even taken the plunge and gone and bought himself a domain name. Now he wanted help on what to do next.
This solution-first mindset and approach is a common pitfall I see many people fall into. It’s driven by a bias that we’re all subject to called Narrow Framing.
Problems can often be solved in many ways with many solutions. When we jump straight into using a narrow frame and consider a solution too early, we end up missing out on opportunities that could be addressed with much more creative, innovative and valuable solutions.
Put simply, if we use a narrow frame we don’t see the Big Picture, and this usually leads to bad decisions and wasted efforts.
In these situations, I like to go back to basics and talk about the people involved with the problem, and to help my friend break out of his narrow frame, I helped him look for trigger points — moments that led to his potential customers taking action.
Trigger points
When breaking down a problem, it’s useful to set out what you assume happens right now.
- Who is involved?
- What are they trying to achieve?
- What do they currently see & hear, say & do, think & feel?
People with the solution-first mindset who are stuck in their narrow framing, tend to focus on the parts of their audience’s experience that start and end with their solution. They often fail to consider all the steps that might lead their customer to the solution in the first place, or what might happen afterwards.
Examining these steps and the reasons for them are the key to finding clues and insights that will help you solve your problem and provide the most value possible for your audience, and these steps always start with a Trigger Point.
Working it out
To give an example of a trigger point, let’s look at an idea that’s similar to my workout partner’s idea.
Let’s call it WonderFit.
WonderFit is looking to offer a more simple and effective way for 40–50-year-olds that struggle with several common age-related ailments to maintain their health and fitness levels.
WonderFit provides a guided path to self-improvement and a simple way to test, measure and improve your performance over time that is highly scalable.
When I asked him about it, he had clear answers about how WonderFit would help people with very specific ailments like diabetes, for example, to achieve more health benefits by getting a better WonderFit test score, but he was struggling to articulate how he might find and attract customers. He hadn’t considered the trigger points for his audience.
In my workout partner’s view of what he thought the customer’s experience looked like, he assumed his customer’s journey would start right after they establish the need to take some action and use their solution, but his vision failed to address why they decided that in the first place, and this is what made his next steps difficult to work out.
How could he work out how best to sell the value of what he was doing, how could he know where to find his customers?
Finding Trigger points
I got my workout partner to talk about what he thought caused the initial frustration for his target audience. What was confusing them or making them feel any other feelings that led them to the rational and logical decision to do something about it?
That’s the trigger point we’re looking for because knowing that and tracing the experience from that point will give us clues as to the value that people are not getting and the reasons why,
If we consider someone who has diabetes, it’s likely that their symptoms have developed over a long period of time, and over this time, it’s likely that they will have experienced many trigger points, and this will have meant something different for different people with diabetes.
Anything from concerns over shortened life expectancy, to problems with eyesight, or poor circulation — all caused by high blood sugar — could have triggered an increasing need to take action, and it’s important to understand each of these.
Without this knowledge, we can’t possibly understand the key problem we’re solving for people, or understand what value we can offer people that they don’t currently have.
Also, from the point of view of testing the market, we’ll also miss out on a golden opportunity to understand the best way to identify and connect with them.
Testing trigger points and next steps
So, by helping my friend understand the potential trigger points, it’s given him not only a wider frame to identify more potential opportunities to solve problems for his target audience, but it’s also provided him with a series of experiments that he can go and research and test, to understand if these are indeed the trigger points that matter and the subsequent journey that his potential customers take.
Once he’s conducted these tests, he’ll then have a much more evidence-based view of the world, and be in a better position to understand
- the best opportunities to address — ie. the ones which represent the bulk of the problems that customers have, that aren’t being addressed right now
- the value that people are looking for that they can’t get right now
- how people go about trying to get around the problem now, and therefore where to place signposts to his WonderFit solution so that it appears in the right place at the right time.
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