Why the Question “Is Your Product a Vitamin or a Painkiller?” is a False Choice

I recently read an article posing the well-known sales question, Is Your Product a Vitamin or a Painkiller? by George Deeb. It’s a good reminder that it’s better to be selling a “painkiller” technology product that relieves acutely-felt, pervasive business problems, rather than a “vitamin” product that offers some lesser, more specialized value.

I agree with Deeb that it’s much harder to build a large, scalable business around vitamin products than painkiller products, but a product-as-painkiller is not the ultimate or best product offering either.

In other words, the question “Is your product a vitamin or a painkiller?” is a false dichotomy.

The issues of trying to sell a vitamin product are described quite well in Deeb’s article. But painkiller products have their own issues. For example, one of the most frequent and frustrating “competitors” to a painkiller product sale is “none of the above”: To the sales manager’s chagrin, the prospect decides that while the business pain is real, alleviating the pain simply isn’t worth the effort. And the prospect just slogs along with things as they are, somewhat like Norm of Cheers:

In a real world example, business intelligence thought leader Neil Raden once recounted how the BI system he had implemented revealed acute “pains” in multiple business areas of the company. He proposed a prescriptive plan to resolve those issues, only to get brushed off by corporate executives. It seemed a lot like a frustrated doctor trying in vain to persuade a chain-smoking patient indifferent to his own health.

Meanwhile, new enabling technologies march on: painkiller products that once justified a huge capex in on-premises software, servers and services (CRM, marketing automation, legacy BI) are now offered inexpensively on a SaaS basis (SFDC, Marketo, GoodData) with more to come. In other words, more and more painkiller products are becoming available at lower “vitamin-level” cost and simplicity!

Another issue I have with painkiller products is they implicitly assume a business status quo. Consider Polaroid in the mid 90’s: like scores of other large companies then, Polaroid jumped in with both feet into ERP, the ultimate painkiller technology of its time. Polaroid even won major awards for its top-tier ERP implementation. While Polaroid’s ERP no doubt lightened many business pains by optimizing inventory, purchasing, quality control and such, meanwhile the company was failing miserably with new products and not addressing the deterioration of its instant photography market to fast-growing digital cameras. By focusing inward on business efficiencies, management probably became even more insular. I recall reading a Polaroid executive praising the company’s new efficiency of its instant photography “core business.” Not long after, in 2001, Polaroid filed for bankruptcy, with most of that “core business” long gone.

Clearly, while the cessation of business “pain” is important, such efforts are no substitute for the ultimate purpose of a business, as memorably described by Peter Drucker:

There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.

Drucker further elaborated:

Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs…

To Drucker’s point, I believe that we are still quite early in the use of technology to enable highly effective, personalized, creative marketing that engages prospects and leads them into becoming customers. And the use of technology to help inform innovation efforts is even further behind. Again, quoting Drucker (this from his 1998 essay The Next Information Revolution):

Half a century ago, no one could have imagined the software that enables a major equipment manufacturer… to organize its operations worldwide, around the anticipated service and replacement needs of its customers… But [information technology has] had… no impact on the decision of the equipment manufacturer concerning which markets to enter and with which products…

For top management, information technology has been a producer of data [for operational tasks]… Business success is based on something totally different: the creation of value and wealth.

This requires risk-taking decisions… on business strategy, on abandoning the old and innovating the new… the balance between the short term and the long term… between immediate profitability and market share. These decisions are the true top management tasks.

The technology products that will reap the greatest financial rewards will be those that address those “true top management tasks” that Drucker noted – which I suggest comprise a third category of products that go beyond both “vitamins” and “painkillers.”

To this key point, there is exciting potential in new big data technologies, for example, that enable a whole new level of insights into markets, products, customers and competitors by leveraging all forms and sources of information. (Please check out this article for further reading, including how Peter Drucker foresaw today’s big data revolution back in 1998!)

So the question “Is your product a vitamin or a painkiller?” is indeed a false choice, and businesses that rely on painkiller product revenue are at more risk than they might realize. It is critical for technology vendors to develop a superior third category of products that go beyond helping customers simply perform today’s operations in a “pain-free” manner, to also help leaders wisely grow revenues in new markets with new products (innovation) – and also spread the word among buyers of these new innovative products in the most targeted, engaging manner possible (marketing) – in ways that far outperform your competition.