> With respect, that goal is far from clear. How do you measure how much they like the product?
Completely agree: focus groups, A/B testing, Net Promoter Score, 5-stars, like/dislike -- all of those systems are notorious for being unreliable in various ways, and optimizing for them is the cause of many sub-optimal decisions and Prisoner's Dilemmas in many industries.
> Customers like a product because it removes their problems. QED.
Your first point was "actually the world is really complicated" (strong agree) and your second was "actually the world is super simple" (strong disagree). Customers like products for wild reasons, unknown even to themselves. I've heard some slot-machine addicts get irritated if they win the jackpot, because it breaks them out of their state of flow. You could argue "well clearly that lack of flow was the problem slot machines are solving" but then you're just using circular reasoning: if a customer likes a product, it must be solving the problem for them that they previously did not have that product. I don't think you could have looked at the slot-machine addict a year before they started gambling and deduced that they had some sort of problem that slot machines needed to fill. There's often no clear link from a-priori diagnosable "problems" that people have to the products that they buy. In the universe populated by logical econs that do act this way, store shelves and advertising look very different.
Completely agree: focus groups, A/B testing, Net Promoter Score, 5-stars, like/dislike -- all of those systems are notorious for being unreliable in various ways, and optimizing for them is the cause of many sub-optimal decisions and Prisoner's Dilemmas in many industries.
> Customers like a product because it removes their problems. QED.
Your first point was "actually the world is really complicated" (strong agree) and your second was "actually the world is super simple" (strong disagree). Customers like products for wild reasons, unknown even to themselves. I've heard some slot-machine addicts get irritated if they win the jackpot, because it breaks them out of their state of flow. You could argue "well clearly that lack of flow was the problem slot machines are solving" but then you're just using circular reasoning: if a customer likes a product, it must be solving the problem for them that they previously did not have that product. I don't think you could have looked at the slot-machine addict a year before they started gambling and deduced that they had some sort of problem that slot machines needed to fill. There's often no clear link from a-priori diagnosable "problems" that people have to the products that they buy. In the universe populated by logical econs that do act this way, store shelves and advertising look very different.