Key Principle
Every job has three integrated dimensions -- functional, social, and emotional -- and customers evaluate solutions against all three simultaneously. Companies overwhelmingly design for function alone. This asymmetry is where most innovations die.
"Consumers' social and emotional needs can far outweigh any functional desires." (Ch. 2)
Todd Dunn of Intermountain Healthcare coined the term "emotional score" after watching a surgeon reject superior software because turning to a computer broke eye contact with an anxious patient. "We'd designed everything in that room from a functional perspective, but we had completely overlooked the emotional score." (Ch. 4)
The emotional and social layers are also the hardest for competitors to copy. A product can be reverse-engineered; an integrated experience built on deep job understanding across all three dimensions cannot. "That is what's hard for competitors to copy." (Ch. 3)
Why This Matters
Companies default to functional features because they are measurable, spec-able, and comfortable in spreadsheets. But the hiring decision often turns on emotional and social factors that never appear in feature comparisons.
The Four Forces framework (Ch. 5) shows why: "firing" solutions with emotional or social dimensions is far harder than firing purely functional ones. Habits of the present and anxiety of the new are emotional forces that block adoption even when the functional case is overwhelming. Loss aversion means the psychological pain of giving up a current solution is roughly twice as powerful as the allure of gaining a new one (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979).
Purely functional design also explains why conventional market research misleads. Surveys capture functional preferences because those are easy to articulate. The emotional and social dimensions require deep storyboard-style interviews -- "a huge number of data points from a smaller sample size" rather than "a handful of data points from a huge sample of respondents" (Ch. 5).
Good Examples
Moesta's condos (Ch. 4): Demographics could not predict buyers. The real barrier was emotional anxiety about discarding a lifetime of meaning -- the dining room table with its dings and scratches from birthdays and homework. No condo feature could overcome that. The solution was to remove the anxiety: moving services, two years of storage, a sorting room, reducing customization from 30 pages to 3. Result: 25% growth in 2007 while the industry fell 49%.
Pampers in China (Ch. 4): A "ten-cent diaper" positioned on functional containment failed. The breakthrough came from discovering the emotional job -- better baby sleep linked to cognitive development. Pampers became the top-selling brand in China (~$1.6B sales, ~30% market share by 2013) by advertising the emotional benefit, not the functional one.
Depend Silhouette (Ch. 4): One-in-three women over 18 suffer incontinence, yet most waited 2+ years before buying any product. The negative job -- avoiding embarrassment, avoiding an aging identity -- was the barrier. Depend Silhouette addressed the social anxiety directly: $60M year-one sales, 30% growth year two.
Counterpoints
The Segway (Ch. 2): Conceived around the functional need for "more efficient personal transportation" without asking whose need, when, or why. Without circumstance or emotional context, the product answered a question nobody was asking in their actual life.
Intermountain's operating room (Ch. 4): Superior software was rejected by a surgeon who chose pen-and-paper because the functional upgrade destroyed the emotional connection with a frightened patient. A purely functional design process missed what mattered most in the room.
Feature-chasing without a job spec (Ch. 6): "Designed without a clear job spec, even the most advanced products are likely to fail. There are just too many details to nail and tricky tradeoffs to be made in creating customer value for innovators to rely on the luck of just guessing right." Functional feature lists without emotional and social dimensions produce exactly this failure mode.
Key Quotes
"Consumers' social and emotional needs can far outweigh any functional desires." (Ch. 2)
"We'd designed everything in that room from a functional perspective, but we had completely overlooked the emotional score." (Ch. 4, Todd Dunn)
"I went in thinking we were in the business of new home construction. But I realized we were instead in the business of moving lives." (Ch. 4, Bob Moesta)
"The pull of the new has to be much greater than the sum of the inertia of the old and the anxieties about the new." (Ch. 5)
Rules of Thumb
- If your innovation brief contains only functional specs, you have at best one-third of the job defined.
- When a functionally superior product loses to an inferior one, look for the emotional or social dimension you missed.
- Anxiety and habit are emotional forces -- reducing them is often more effective than adding functional pull.
- You cannot discover emotional and social dimensions from a conference room. "You have to get out in the wild and live it." (Ch. 4)
- Negative jobs (avoidance of embarrassment, identity threat, social exposure) signal high-value opportunities hiding in nonconsumption.
Related References
- What Makes a Valid Job - Three dimensions as part of job definition
- Designing Experiences Around the Job - Designing for all dimensions
- The Four Forces of Progress - Anxiety as an emotional force