is small – about 7% of U.S. adults according to Pew research.6 We might surmise that this segment might value portability, the ease to carry multiple books without adding weight, or values a lightweight reader (when compared to a new hardcover novel). Beyond weight, perhaps this segment might value searching, or carrying their entire library with them on the road. Our friend and colleague Maeghan Sulham (without whom this book wouldn't exist) reports that her family loves e-readers because they allow for reading in bed with the light off, meaning bed partners can sleep more easily.
Although there may be lots of benefits, this segment remains small, especially when compared to the 37% of readers, who according to Pew, read print books only. These consumers clearly don't care about weight, having a digital, searchable library, or reading with the lights out. Or if they do, they don't sufficiently care to change existing reading habits. Perhaps there are benefits only available in print books that they value above others – like the “feel,” or the ability to have a book signed by an author. This sort of desirability pattern is far more common, with opportunities being relevant to some consumers, but not others.
As markets mature, new entrants find ways to address desirability gaps in smaller and smaller proportions of the population – a typical industry evolution. The initial entrant effectively “creates” the industry with the advent of a new product or service that defines the market (and since they are the only competitor, they are the “average” as well). Then other competitors enter with slightly different features – a higher quality version for a higher price, or a lower quality version for a lower price. Over time, the market fragments with different offers to satisfy the various stages of the market until it is no longer economically feasible to serve these different segments. Typically, this is when we start to see consolidation. We are increasingly seeing this process of innovation, fragmentation, and consolidation happening faster and faster as consumer adoption through widely used channels, like mobile apps, can take place quickly.
In the food delivery space, we initially saw several different players in various markets around the world. In the United States, it started with GrubHub, SeamlessWeb (which became Seamless), and even the now “retro” MenuPages. Looking to capitalize on a growing market, we saw the entry of DoorDash, UberEats, Postmates, Caviar, and others. In Europe we had Takeaway.com based in the Netherlands and Just Eat in the UK, along with a variety of other services. Over time, this intensifying of competition has led to decreasing margins and more consumer choice. The decreasing margins in turn led to consolidation to find economies of scale. We have seen this over the last several years with the merger of Just Eat and Takeaway in Europe, which later purchased GrubHub (which had previously purchased Seamless). In late 2020, UberEats completed a multibillion-dollar deal to acquire Postmates. And DoorDash acquired Caviar, a service that specialized in upscale urban-area restaurants that do not typically deliver. A very fast consolidation indeed!
In Provoke we are going to focus primarily on the kinds of trends that define or redefine industries and secondarily on the trends that segment industries. Why? By definition, the trends that define or redefine industries are the trends with the biggest opportunity to improve lives for customers and society.
If desirability frames the potential opportunity, feasibility and viability are the governors of how fast it can happen. You may be able to identify many opportunities to improve the status quo, but you have to be able to bring them to fruition economically. Several barriers can stand between something that is clearly desirable but not ready for mainstream adoption. There are several categories of these barriers.
Behavioral feasibility sits at the intersection of desirability and feasibility. Probably the most important question of feasibility is whether or not customer behavior can be changed to accommodate the trend being evaluated. It's not enough to have a superior product or experience; that doesn't always win the day. Trying something new often involves breaking longstanding habits – some of the most powerful forces in the world of customer behavior. For example, while organizations have become more comfortable with the concept of remote working, it's not clear if the trend will accelerate or if employees will want to forgo their commutes entirely.
Forming a new habit is easier when it's forced upon you by strong external circumstances like a pandemic. It's an entirely different thing to create a new habit when there are no forces acting in your favor. As a result, it takes real momentum to accomplish the goal of crossing the important inflection point of behavioral feasibility. Customers have to become aware of the trend, try it, repeat it, and often share the experience with others in some meaningful way for consumer feasibility barriers to be overcome.7 And by the way, we know some of you reading now are saying, “Does this really apply to my business, which is B2B?” The answer is 100% yes. You too have human beings making decisions about which products and services they buy, whom they get to bid on those services, and the organizational habits (or systems and processes) that they encourage regarding how they purchase from vendors.
Technical feasibility refers to the degree to which it is physically possible to do the things necessary to create the trend. For instance, Uber broke prior technical feasibility barriers by putting together their code with previously existing navigation capabilities. We know that self-driving cars are technically feasible. And the pandemic response showed that rapid vaccine development is also technically feasible, if other barriers can be lifted.
Regulatory feasibility answers the question of whether it's legal to create the trend. Regulations tend to be reactive to the market rather than proactive. To create a new market, you often must overcome existing regulatory barriers. Uber, for instance, challenged existing regulations around the world. Another example is how SpaceX is engaging with the Indian Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRAI), to help solve an important challenge – high-speed Internet access across India. It is looking to launch a constellation of satellites in lower orbit capable of providing 150Mbps service where the average speed for the country is around 12Mbps. The project is meant to overcome outdated regulations which were designed for different services to solve an important access issue.8Viability asks whether it's profitable to create the trend. The answer to this question is almost always murky. There are rarely any economic guarantees. What matters most is whether someone sees a sufficiently (to them) clear path to make money in the future to bet on taking the necessary steps to bring the trend to fruition. This is by definition a subjective question; two different organizations might look at the same opportunity and draw very different conclusions. But the viability test only requires one to take the bet. To some extent, it doesn't matter whether the venture is truly profitable in the long run because market creation may happen in advance of profitability (again, see Uber). True economic viability can only be determined in hindsight.
So what happened to the market for bidets in the United States? Did it continue to surge over the “if-to-when” phase change, or did it fail to create enough momentum? The latter. Bidets had some interesting short-term spikes in sales, but the spike did not turn into a long-lasting trend toward installing bidets in U.S. homes. Our hypothesis is that, while those who have tried bidets in the past may well be passionate about their superior cleaning experience, an insufficient number of Americans have seen a bidet, let alone tried one. The TP shortage didn't last long enough to get into true required behavior adaptation; it was only a concern about a potential future shortage. Therefore, people responded by hunting down every spare toilet paper roll they could find. The brief spike in bidet buying is more likely than not the result of people who had previously been on the fence now taking the “plunge” and using this push to get off the sidelines.
We similarly saw a spike in the trial of wet toilet paper usage, a market that has been unable to meaningfully grow beyond the niche group who swear by its use. In Steve's household, wet toilet paper was a short-term substitute. The Goldbach household was more than happy to see the Dude Wipes run out and the Charmin return.
While some may say hindsight is 20/20, we believe that understanding patterns of how humans behave and industries evolve is critical to forming
