In Strategy from Space this week, a student shared this for Oatly:
The deal: Switch to a plant-based option without sacrifice. A better choice that asks nothing of you.
The need: I feel like I should probably drink less dairy, but I'm not about to become that weird person.
The value: Permission to care that feels effortless and a little fun.
We were going back and forth on it. I kept reaching for something about the need that wouldn't fit in a reply, so I'm writing it out here instead. Field note, not a verdict.
Sitting with the need
Read the need slowly. "I feel like I should probably drink less dairy, but I'm not about to become that weird person."
Who is this? Already not a dairy drinker by conviction, but not a convert either. Somewhere in the middle — curious, maybe slightly guilty, watching the category. If this is the need, the market is already narrow. Not "all of dairy." More like "people already one foot out of dairy, looking for a comfortable exit." The need has done work before you've started strategizing. It has quietly picked a market.
Now try a different need. Same product. Same carton on the same shelf.
The need: I want my coffee to taste better, so I add milk.
Read that one slowly too. Who is this? Someone who drinks coffee and cares about coffee. The market is coffee drinkers who take milk. The competitor is the jug of cow's milk in the fridge. The story is not about guilt, it's about taste. The value proposition shifts from "permission to care" to "this will not ruin your coffee, and might make it better."
Same product. Different need. Different market. Different story.
Which raises a quieter question. If the need can be swapped and the whole downstream picture changes, what is "need" actually doing? And when we use this one word, are we always talking about the same thing?
Different needs at different altitudes
The word stretches. So does strategy — business strategy, marketing strategy, social media strategy, content strategy, cooperation strategy. All strategy. The word scales across every level of a company's work, which is useful, and also means it does almost no work by itself. You always have to ask: strategy at what altitude? (And when someone says "we don't need a strategy," that is also a strategic choice.)
Need is like that. Back to Oatly. Here's what the altitude ladder looks like for a single product:
I want a non-dairy milk. Close to the product. Scopes the market tightly to "non-dairy category." Good altitude for shelf placement and for competing against other plant milks. Not much room to reframe anything.
I want my coffee to taste better. Different altitude entirely. Now the competitive set includes cow's milk itself. Now the product is in the argument about what makes coffee good, not just about being dairy-free. The story gets richer and the fight gets harder.
I want my morning to feel like a small ritual. Higher still. Oatly is now competing with coffee shops, breakfast routines, and whatever else people do to bookend their day. Less about the market and more about the brand story — what Oatly means in someone's life.
I want to feel like I'm eating well. Very high. The competitive set includes gym memberships and organic produce and half of Instagram. You can't run a campaign against that. But this altitude isn't useless — it's where brand purpose and long-term positioning live.
Notice what moves when the altitude moves. Not just the market — the competitor. Other plant milks, then cow's milk, then coffee shops, then Instagram. Same product the whole time.
Every one of these is a need. What changes is what each one is good for. Low altitudes sit close to the product, which is good for feature messaging and performance marketing. High altitudes sit close to human motivation, which is good for brand and meaning. Somewhere in the middle, a need becomes specific enough to scope a real comparison and broad enough to include more than one option. That middle is where a market actually shapes itself.
Three people who replaced the word
A few well-known thinkers have decided "need" isn't pulling its weight, and each of them has tried to replace it — but not with the same thing, which is the interesting part. Each found the word broken in a different way.
Clayton Christensen replaced "need" with "job." People don't hire a milkshake because they need a milkshake. They hire it to fight boredom on a morning commute, keep one hand on the wheel, and last until they get to work. "Need" kept landing too low — on product attributes, on demographics, on the surface. "Job" pushed the question up to where something useful was happening: what is the customer trying to make progress on?
April Dunford replaced "need" with "alternative." Her problem: "need" doesn't tell you who you're fighting. The buyer never compares your product to an abstract need. They compare it to the spreadsheet they're using now, the competitor who pitched them last week, and doing nothing (which wins most of the time). The competitive set is the load-bearing thing, and "need" doesn't produce a sharp one. Alternatives do.
Byron Sharp did something different. He replaced "need" with "situation" — more precisely, with category entry points. The cues in a buyer's day (time, place, mood, company) that make a category come to mind. Sharp's objection wasn't about altitude at all. It was about introspection. Need is internal, unmeasurable, and buyers confabulate about it when asked. Ask instead which brand comes to mind when someone says "something to drink at lunch" and you get data. Sharp's move was to leave the altitude question behind and measure something observable.
So: Christensen says the word sits at the wrong altitude. Dunford says it has the wrong shape — it doesn't produce a competitor you can actually fight. Sharp says it fails a measurement test — you can't ask people about their insides and get reliable data. Altitude, shape, measurability. Three independent ways for a word to be broken, and all three end in the same place — stop using it.
What this leaves me with
I didn't set out to write a theory of need. I was replying to a student. But once I started pulling at the word, it kept opening up.
I still think "need" is a useful word. I just use it at one specific altitude: the working role the product plays in the buyer's moment of use. Not what the buyer believes about themselves. Not what the product means in their life. What the product is doing for them when they actually use it. For Oatly: something to put in my coffee that makes it good. For a CRM: something that keeps track of who owes me a reply. For an IDE: something that gets code from my head to the screen faster.
That altitude is where need does its best work — grounding the market, and naming the competitor while it's at it. The other altitudes are real, and they matter, but they're different jobs and probably want different words.
And then there's this. Every time I've tried to land this post, I keep running into the next word. The deal closes on value. Fine. But — value for whom, at what altitude, measured against which comparison? The same questions all over again.
I'm going to pretend I didn't notice.
My Strategy from Space course is for senior marketers who've grown deep in one area and want to see the whole system — this is the map. Everything else you can look up.