The process of convincing someone to buy and use your product needs to respect the customer, needs to understand their needs at different points of the user experience. You can’t just shout your top ten features at people in a billboard and a website and packaging just like you can’t simply hand someone your résumé at an interview, then lunch, then on a date. Sure, you’re giving them important information, but different moments in the journey

require different approaches.

Your message needs to fit the customer’s context. You can’t say everything everywhere.

Our shorts also create a deeper value in two key areas. Externally, they help us forge a bond with moviegoers, who have come to regard them as a kind of bonus - something added solely for their enjoyment. Internally, because everyone knows the shorts have no commercial value, the fact that we continue to make them sends a message that we care about artistry at Pixar; it reinforces and affirms our values. And that creates a feeling of goodwill that we draw on, consciously and unconsciously, all the time.

This finding suggests that it may be the tangibility, rather than the magnitude, of the benefits that makes people care. You don’t have to promise riches and sex appeal and magnetic personalities. It may be enough to promise reasonable benefits that people can easily imagine themselves enjoying.

The good news (figure 1-9) here is that you have an advantage, but you're getting no return on it. We call it a waste wedge. You're investing in service features that your customers don't truly value, and it's not translating into profitability or market share. Your decision point: shift resources to attributes your customers value more, or get customers to care more about the things in which you excel. For example, our tap water was fine until bottled water made us want to drink from an obscure Swiss spring.

The good news (figure 1-9) here is that you have an advantage, but you're getting no return on it. We call it a waste wedge. You're investing in service features that your customers don't truly value, and it's not translating into profitability or market share. Your decision point: shift resources to attributes your customers value more, or get customers to care more about the things in which you excel. For example, our tap water was fine until bottled water made us want to drink from an obscure Swiss spring.