---
title: "New Distribution Zhao Bo: Customer 'Troubles' Are the Brand's Growth 'Map'"
description: "Customer needs are essentially the troubles users face. The article from the official account 'Liang Jiangjun' raises a question: if you were a furniture manufacturer wanting to develop a wardrobe, how would you do it? You might consult reports and surveys, and big data might tell you trends like Morandi colors or new Chinese style, but the data won't tell you the troubles your users are currently facing."
author: "赵波"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2025-02-02"
language: "en"
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---

# New Distribution Zhao Bo: Customer 'Troubles' Are the Brand's Growth 'Map'

> Customer needs are essentially the troubles users face. The article from the official account 'Liang Jiangjun' raises a question: if you were a furniture manufacturer wanting to develop a wardrobe, how would you do it? You might consult reports and surveys, and big data might tell you trends like Morandi colors or new Chinese style, but the data won't tell you the troubles your users are currently facing.

**Customer Needs**
**Are Essentially the Troubles Users Face** The official account 'Liang Jiangjun' raised a question in an article. Suppose you are a furniture manufacturer and want to develop a wardrobe. What would you do? I estimate you would consult various reports, conduct various surveys, and see what trends consumers have this year. Perhaps big data will tell you: this year, Morandi colors are popular, new Chinese style is well-received, and small apartments now use hanging rail folding doors. What would you do? But have you considered that **the data you have will not tell you what troubles your users are currently facing.** If you rely on big data to develop a wardrobe, then you are merely catering to the current market, not truly helping users solve problems. Let's try to switch perspectives and put ourselves in the user's usage context to see what troubles users might encounter:
> * Winter clothes are hard to store, so it's best to have a layer in the wardrobe designed higher so you can hang coats directly; * Changing clothes between seasons is really troublesome, so it's best if the position of each layer in the wardrobe can be switched with a simple finger movement; * It's best to have a compartment drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe for storing small items like underwear and socks; * Pants are worn all year round, so you could make a circular hook similar to those in shopping malls, hanging a circle of pants, and grab whichever pair you want to wear; * Couples share a wardrobe, and clothes are always hung in a mess, so it's necessary to divide the wardrobe into sections, with the wife's side being several times larger than the husband's; * Clothes worn once in winter can neither be hung back in the wardrobe nor washed too frequently, so it's best to have an open hanging area;
The article lists many problems, and I won't go through them one by one. Looking back at this wardrobe case, you'll find that users will tell you what style of wardrobe they need, but they will never tell you **what troubles they encounter during use.** But what truly makes consumers stay and buy is never a good-looking product, but a product that can 'help them solve the troubles in their lives.' I often use Dayao Soda as an example. Look at Dayao Soda, it doesn't look good, and the ingredient list isn't that healthy either. Why are consumers willing to pay for it? In summary, it's because it **'provides solutions to troubles in the consumption scenario.'**
**Don't Bring New Troubles**
**While Solving Old Ones** There is a long-established medicated oil for treating falls and injuries in Hong Kong: Tiger Oil. It is very effective for treating falls and injuries, but its sales have been stagnant. The manufacturer has never seriously thought about why it's stagnant. Obviously, it can effectively solve the troubles of specific users, but it hasn't realized that while solving the obvious trouble of treating falls and injuries, it also brings new troubles. When applying this liquid medicine, if the injured person doesn't use a cotton ball, it will flow everywhere. The key issue is that the smell of the oil is strong and unpleasant, and if it gets on clothes, it's very hard to wash off. Young women would rather endure pain than apply this medicine because it emits an unpleasant odor wherever they go. As a local specialty of Hong Kong, tourists from other places originally wanted to buy this medicine to take home, but Hong Kong airport prohibits carrying this medicine because it smells too bad. You see, **originally it solved the big trouble of falls and injuries, but it brought a series of small troubles.** However, the manufacturer was unaware of these troubles for a long time, or didn't consider them a problem, and didn't take any measures to solve them. On the contrary, it was precisely these small troubles that greatly limited the product's market. While the original manufacturer was unaware of these troubles, a Japanese company saw a business opportunity. To address these new troubles, this company developed a ointment-type Tiger Oil product. It looks like a lipstick, with the oil changed from liquid to solid. When using it, you just unscrew the cap and apply it to the injured area like lipstick, without worrying about the oil spilling. The volatility of solid oil is much lower than liquid oil. Because its smell is very faint, it is not prohibited on airplanes; as long as you package it well, you can't smell it at all. Once launched, it sold in large quantities, and many women also started using this oil. **Insight into User 'Troubles' Like a Doctor** In the FMCG industry, we often talk about how to understand consumer needs, but rarely delve into how to precisely capture these needs and transform them into irresistible solutions. However, customers won't proactively tell you where their troubles are, and sometimes even customers themselves don't know what the troubles are. At this point, we must possess the ability to insight into troubles. How to gain insight? Let me use an analogy: suppose you are an internal medicine doctor. A patient walks into the clinic, holding their chest, and describes their problem intermittently. As a doctor, how would you think about this problem? First, you would carefully observe their demeanor and movements, noting whether their breathing is rapid and if their complexion is pale. This is 'observation' (望), collecting initial clues through the patient's observable external appearance. Next, you start asking questions: 'When did it start? Are there any accompanying symptoms? Does it get worse after exercise?' Through these questions, you try to find key clues in the patient's narrative. **'Listening' (闻) and 'Asking' (问) are about analyzing the full picture of the problem from communication information with the customer.** Then you begin physical examinations, which might be auscultation, abdominal palpation, or arranging an electrocardiogram. This is 'palpation' (切), verifying hypotheses through actual contact or tools, gradually ruling out other possibilities. Finally, you reach a preliminary conclusion and propose a solution: prescribe medication, adjust lifestyle, or further tests. You tell the patient that if symptoms don't improve after taking the medicine, please return for a follow-up. This step is not only 'treatment' but also continuously optimizing the solution through feedback. Have you noticed that **a doctor uses a systematic diagnostic method to determine what the patient's trouble is.** Doctors use a structured diagnostic framework (observation, listening, asking, palpation), professional knowledge and cognition (experience, data, knowledge base), multi-source information integration and verification (tests, historical cases), and finally through divergent thinking and rigorous inference, to determine the patient's real trouble. In medical scenarios, doctors have systematic diagnostic tools to locate the root cause of the disease, allowing them to quickly grasp the essence of the problem. This way of thinking also applies to the business world, allowing us to more efficiently insight into user pain points. In marketing, although the 'pathogen' is not a physiological disease but behavioral motivation, psychological barriers, or usage difficulties, we can borrow the same logic, **treating consumers' 'pain points' in a specific scenario as similar to symptoms, and use a standardized cognitive system, verification process, and communication framework to find the essence of the problem.**
**Focus on 'Jobs to be Done'**
**to Solve Users' 'Troubles'** In the consumer goods industry, what truly makes users pay for a product is not its features, but the job it helps them accomplish (Job).
**1. What is Jobs to be Done (JTBD)?** The Jobs to be Done (JTBD) theory was proposed by Clayton M. Christensen in the book 'Competing Against Luck'. This theory holds that customers don't buy products to own them, but 'hire' them to complete a task. JTBD emphasizes understanding the real motivation behind customer purchase behavior, not just what features your product has. It is a different way of thinking from the 4P orientation; it is a customer-centric method for understanding why people buy products and services. **JTBD believes that consumers adopt a product to achieve a specific goal. If the product doesn't help well, they may abandon it. This framework requires developers to think about the actual outcomes the product brings to users, not just features.** Jobs to be done are the goals consumers want to achieve in specific scenarios. For example, the job of buying an energy drink might not be simply 'drinking', but to stay energetic while driving or working.
**2. How to Apply the JTBD Framework?** We must clarify what the 'job to be done' is for customers in each scenario and design solutions accordingly. Generally speaking, a customer's job to be done can be divided into three dimensions: Functional Jobs: customers' explicit needs, such as 'cleaning stains' or 'quick satiety'. Emotional Jobs: the emotional state customers hope to achieve, such as 'peace of mind' or 'joy'. Social Jobs: the image customers want to convey to others, such as 'professional' or 'fashionable'.
**3. Building Solutions: From Jobs to Irresistible Value** If you use the JTBD perspective to design a product, then the product must have clear functions, be easy to use, and have strong emotional resonance. In simple terms, you must fully understand **the core tasks of customers in the functional, emotional, and social dimensions, and provide them with irresistible solutions.** Sometimes, some products need to simultaneously fulfill multiple tasks in two or three dimensions. For example, snacks designed for office workers must not only be delicious but also healthy, have a mild smell, not have too many bones or packaging waste, be easy to carry, but the packaging should be easy to tear, and not be too crumbly or oily, making a mess. These are just the functional pain points of users eating snacks in an office scenario. You might also need to consider why customers eat snacks in the office, in what context, with whom, whether they share, and whether it satisfies some emotional appeal. These are all dimensions you must consider from the perspective of user jobs.
**Contextual Methods: How to Understand Users in Scenarios** To insight into consumer jobs, there are three methods:
**1. Contextual Observation: Immersive Insight** The best way is to put yourself in the customer's perspective, act as a customer, and through immersive experience, directly feel the operational difficulties and psychological changes of consumers. If you are a soy milk maker, you can try buying breakfast at a subway station during the morning rush hour to see in what situations customers choose products.
**2. User Journey Slicing: Capturing Key Moments** This method involves slicing the customer's shopping journey into N scenario segments and analyzing them frame by frame. For example, if you sell soda water and want to consider how to embed your product into the consumer's usage journey in a dining scenario, you need to analyze frame by frame: the customer is inviting someone to dinner tonight and drinking baijiu. From buying the baijiu, on the way, entering the restaurant, to opening the bottle at the table, pouring, tasting, on the way home, and finally having a headache the next day. Based on the above user journey, divide the user's consumption process into multiple key nodes (such as information gathering, comparison decision, purchase behavior, usage journey, feedback, etc.) and analyze pain points one by one.
**3. Heavy User Participation: Insight into Extreme Needs** If the previous two methods still leave you uncertain, you can consider having heavy users participate in your product development process. They will directly tell you what users care about most. In the early days of Xiaomi's phone development, Mi fans heavily participated, providing a lot of feedback, which led to rapid iteration and optimization of good phone products.
**Build a User Research Toolkit**
**to Systematically Solve Customer Problems** User research should have a clear toolkit, such as user journey maps, scenario recreation, user personas, and contextual interview scripts, to conduct step-by-step and framework-based deep interpretation of the troubles and problems users encounter at each stage, thereby insighting and solving consumer pain points during use.
**I. User Journey Map** A user journey map is a user-centered analysis tool that visually presents the key nodes of the entire process of a user using a product or service in a timeline or task sequence. It shows users' feelings, needs, problems, and behavioral paths at different touchpoints, helping identify pain points and opportunities at different stages. Core elements and structural framework: Persona: Clarify the user type for the journey map (e.g., novice user, high-frequency user, price-sensitive user). Phases/Stages: Break down the user experience process into several key stages (e.g., 'awareness → comparison → trial → purchase → post-use feedback'). Touchpoints & Actions: List the specific behaviors users interact with the brand, product, or channel at each stage (e.g., visiting the official website, consulting customer service, going to a physical store, browsing user reviews). Emotions & Feelings: Record users' psychological state and emotional fluctuations at each stage (e.g., high expectations, confusion, dissatisfaction, delight, peace of mind). Painpoints & Opportunities: Mark the typical pain points users encounter at each stage, as well as possible optimization directions and strategies.
**II. Scenario Recreation** Scenario recreation involves placing users in a real or simulated usage environment, fully displaying the contextual factors (such as location, time, mood, environmental constraints) and the behavioral decision-making process in specific situations when users interact with the product. The purpose is to capture users' real needs and pain points in natural scenarios, rather than relying solely on users' memories or abstract descriptions. Core framework and steps: Context Setup: Clarify the specific scenario conditions the user is in (time point, spatial environment, device used, accompanying activities). Actor & Task Definition: Specify who the main actor is (the user themselves) and what task or goal the user wants to accomplish (e.g., finding information, completing a purchase, getting feedback). Environmental Variables: Interference factors and constraints in the scenario (e.g., unstable network, noise, time pressure), which affect user behavior decisions. Behavioral Sequence: Record in detail every action and thought process of the user from discovering a need to finally achieving the goal in the scenario.
**III. User Persona Building** A user persona is a tool that abstracts and personifies target user characteristics. By 'giving users a name, age, occupation, interests, goals, and pain points', it helps teams more intuitively remember user characteristics during product design and market decisions, reducing arbitrary decisions. Core elements and structural framework: Demographics: age, gender, education level, income level, family structure. Psychographics: values, life attitudes, interests, personality tendencies. Behavioral Traits: frequency of product use, purchase decision process, brand loyalty, information acquisition channels. Goals & Needs: the core goals and main motivations users hope to achieve when using a product or service. Painpoints: typical difficulties or obstacles users encounter during use or decision-making.
**IV. Product Design: Not Only Focus on Customer Jobs, But Also MOT (Moment of Truth Peak Experience)** At the product design level, while solving customers' big troubles, we must avoid bringing small troubles to customers. Just like the Tiger Oil problem mentioned earlier, although it solved the problem of falls and injuries, the user experience was terrible. Therefore, when designing products, we must not only focus on customers' jobs to be done, but also pay attention to customers' peak experience. MOT was first proposed by Jan Carlzon, former president of Scandinavian Airlines, in 1980. It refers to the moment when a customer comes into contact with various resources of a company, and this moment determines the success or failure of the company in the future. Jan Carlzon took over as president of Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) in 1981, when the airline was facing a crisis of poor service reputation and severe customer loss. Carlzon's insight was that customers' brand experience does not come from grand strategies, but from those small but critical touchpoints. Carlzon defined 'moments of truth' as the brief moments when customers have direct contact with the company, and each moment can shape customers' overall impression of the brand. These moments might be a few seconds of conversation, a simple smile, or even a timely reply email. Carlzon's key viewpoints: 1. All corporate actions are judged at the customer's 'moment of truth'. Every moment of customer contact with service is an opportunity to win trust through excellent experience, or lose customers due to poor performance. 2. Every employee is on the front line of 'moments of truth'. He believed that every employee in the service industry, especially those who directly contact customers, such as front desk, flight attendants, and customer service, play an important role in these moments. 3. A 'customer-centric' corporate culture is key. Carlzon transformed the traditional top-down command and control structure into one centered on employee empowerment. He advocated delegating decision-making power to frontline employees so they can quickly respond to customer needs.
**Characteristics of Customer MOT:** 1. Transience: usually less than 1 minute, sometimes only a few seconds. 2. Decisiveness: these moments have a significant impact on users' overall impression and decisions. 3. Multidimensionality: involving appearance, behavior, communication, and other aspects.
**Optimizing Moments of Truth:** Optimizing MOT (Moment of Truth) requires starting from the entire user experience journey, by deeply insighting user needs, designing key touchpoints, enhancing emotional connection, and continuous feedback iteration to improve user satisfaction and brand loyalty. Here are specific optimization steps: 1. Draw a user journey map. Before optimizing MOT, you need to clarify the key touchpoints where users interact with the brand. This map is different from the previous JTBD map; this map includes variables of interaction between the brand and customers, and all maps are built on touchpoints. Readers should not confuse them. User journey decomposition: Identify MOT from the user's 'Awareness - Consideration - Purchase - Usage - Advocacy'. For example: online search (ZMOT), first contact with the product (FMOT), unboxing experience (SMOT), post-use sharing (TMOT). 2. Design peak experiences. The Peak-End Rule is an important concept in behavioral economics, proposed by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. It refers to the overall evaluation of an experience, which mainly depends on two key points: the moment of strongest emotion during the experience ('peak') and the emotional state at the end ('end'), rather than the average level of the entire experience. According to the 'Peak-End Rule', users remember the 'peak' and 'end' of an experience, so in product design, it is particularly necessary to optimize these nodes. 3. Optimize each MOT. ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth): the moment users look up brand or product information online. FMOT (First Moment of Truth): the moment users first come into contact with a product or service. SMOT (Second Moment of Truth): the process when users actually experience the product or service. TMOT (Third Moment of Truth): users' evaluation and sharing of the product after use.
**MOT Design Principles** 1. Focus on key points: Don't try to be perfect in every aspect, but concentrate on optimizing the most critical moments. 2. Clear goals: Each MOT should have a clear goal, such as conveying brand information or promoting specific behavior. 3. Contextual design: Describe the specific context in which the MOT occurs, including 'who, under what circumstances, and what they feel'. 4. Continuous optimization: Continuously improve MOT design through user feedback and data analysis. By carefully designing and optimizing MOT, companies can significantly improve user experience, enhance brand loyalty, and ultimately drive business growth.
Summary: **Solve Troubles and Become the 'Trusted Doctor' for Consumers** In the FMCG industry, the essence of competition is a deep understanding and satisfaction of user needs. This capability is not limited to product development but should run through every aspect of marketing, sales, and service. To solve users' 'troubles' like a doctor, everyone needs to:
> 1. Listen to and insight into users' symptoms, analyzing the essence of needs;
>
> 2. Build scenario-based solutions centered on jobs to be done;
>
> 3. Immerse yourself in real scenarios to capture key details;
>
> 4. Through cross-departmental collaboration, transform need insights into execution;
>
> 5. Design products that solve troubles and provide consumers with irresistible solutions;
>
> 6. Focus on the user's entire experience journey and create the peak-end effect for customers.
Only in this way can we create truly irresistible solutions, become a brand trusted by consumers, and help them move forward without worry in every scenario.
**【New Order · Symbiosis】**
******The 10th China FMCG Innovation Conference**
**Time: March 17-19, 2025**
**Location: Chengdu, China**


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