Case:

When McDonald's wanted to improve sales of its milkshakes, it hired researchers to figure out what characteristics its customers cared about. Should the shakes be thicker? Sweeter? Colder? Almost all of the researchers focused on the product. But one of them, John Black, chose to ignore the shakes themselves and study the customers instead. He sat in a McDonald's for eighteen hours one day, observing who bought milkshakes and at what time. One surprising discovery was that many milkshakes were purchased early in the day - odd, as consuming a shake at eight A.M. plainly doesn't fit the bacon-and-eggs model of breakfast. Black also garnered three other behavioral clues from the morning milkshake crowd: the buyers were always alone, they rarely bought anything besides a shake, and the never consumed the shakes in the store.

The key to understanding what was going was to stop viewing the product in isolation and to give up traditional notions of the morning meal. Black instead focused on a single, simple question: "What job is a customer hiring that milkshake to do at eight A.M.?"
If you want to eat while driving, you need something you can eat with one hand. It shouldn't be too hot, too messy, or too greasy. It should also be moderately tasty, and take a while to finish. Not one conventional breakfast item fits that bill, and so without regard for the sacred traditions of the morning meal, those customers were hiring the milkshake to do the job they needed done.

All the researchers except Black missed this fact, because they made two kinds of mistakes... The first was to concentrate mainly on the product and assume that everything important about it was somehow implicit in its attributes, without regard to what role the customers wanted it to play - the job they were hiring the milkshake for.

The second mistake was to adopt a narrow view of the type of food people have always eaten in the morning, as if all habits were deeply rooted traditions instead of accumulated accidents.

Instructions:

Based on our course reading to date, this case offers an opportunity to apply the exploration of assumptions in the decision-making process. Please offer a 1000 word review of this brief case by identifying the assumptions at work on the part of the customer and inherent in the case, what are the impact of these assumptions and influence on decision-making and where are the gaps in the decision making process. Please be sure to pull together the reading and work we have completed to date in the course in your analysis.

This is a leadeship and decision-making course