Your customers do not care about your industry’s next big thing

Spend enough time in your own industry and you start assuming everyone else finds the same things exciting. An ingredient becomes the topic of every panel. Competitors launch something new. Before long, you are wondering whether your business needs to follow.

Meanwhile, your customer is wondering whether the thing they bought was worth the money.

I recently spoke at The Grocer Health Summit about functionality in food and what makes something genuinely functional. For me, it comes down to offering proven support for an aspect of health. But the discussion raised a question that applies well beyond food: are we building something people need, or something our industry likes talking about?

I think every founder should revisit that question. Particularly when the business is doing well.

Your starting point is only the beginning

My route into business began with a problem I desperately wanted to solve. Serious knee injuries as a young footballer left me living with pain and questioning whether I would ever have the career I had worked towards.

My father and I began exploring nutrition as part of that search for answers. Those kitchen experiments eventually became the starting point for The Turmeric Co.

I was not looking for a gap in the drinks market. I wanted to get back on a football pitch. Even getting out of bed had become difficult.

That experience gave me a strong reason to start. It did not mean I understood everyone else’s reasons for buying.

This is where founders can get caught out. Your own experience gives you conviction, but it can also become the lens through which you interpret everything customers tell you. You hear the bits that fit your story.

As the business grows, you have to keep making room for what you have not understood yet.

Research should challenge your assumptions

I recently read The Invisible Burden, a new whitepaper on how pain affects everyday life. Drawing on research by 3GEM involving 2,000 UK adults, commissioned by The Turmeric Co., it found that 52% of those who had experienced pain in the previous year often tell someone they are “fine” when they are actually in pain.

That finding stayed with me. If people play down what they are experiencing in everyday conversation, how much will a business miss by accepting the first answer it gets?

The report also found that 17% of respondents experiencing pain cited lack of time as a barrier to taking action. Another 16% pointed to work or caring responsibilities.

Those findings describe people’s circumstances; they do not prove what a product can deliver. But they remind us that a customer’s decisions happen within a life that is already full.

For any business, that matters. You might have identified a real need and still made your solution too complicated, expensive or inconvenient to use.

Let understanding change the decisions

Customer research earns its place when it influences where you spend money.

It might tell you to improve an existing product before launching another. It might reveal that your explanation makes perfect sense internally but leaves shoppers confused. It might stop you investing in a fashionable idea that solves very little.

As autumn planning turns towards next year’s budgets, that is a useful test: which decisions are grounded in something we have learnt about our customers?

In functional food, understanding the need must sit alongside evidence for the benefit. Customer enthusiasm helps identify questions worth investigating; research helps establish what you can substantiate.

The same discipline applies elsewhere. Before investing in the next feature or service, be clear about whose problem it addresses and how you will know it has helped.

I enjoy the ambition of an industry looking for its next breakthrough. But the question I want to keep asking is simpler: what would make this worth someone’s money? If I cannot answer without using industry jargon, there is still work to do.

Key takeaways

• Founders often mistake their own conviction for universal customer need – the experience that drove you to start a business is not the same as understanding why others buy.
• Research from The Invisible Burden whitepaper found that 51% of people experiencing pain downplay it in everyday conversation, illustrating how much customer experience goes unseen.
• Identifying a real need is not enough – you can still make your solution too complicated, explain it poorly, or price it in a way that makes it feel inaccessible.
• Customer research earns its place only when it influences actual decisions: which products to improve, which explanations to simplify, which audiences to prioritise.
• Before investing in the next feature or service, ask clearly whose problem it solves and whether there is evidence that those people want it solved in that way.

The post Your customers do not care about your industry’s next big thing appeared first on Elite Business Magazine.