V8’s disastrous decision is relevant to whether AI makes or breaks your business. Here’s why:
Before I touch AI with any client, I ask one question first: what problem do you solve, and for who?
Most founders answer with what they make, not the problem it solves.
The V8 example is the one I use to help it click.
V8 makes vegetable juice. For years the company described itself as a juice company, so it kept making more juice, and that pushed the product off the end of the vegetable aisle and into the juice aisle.
Problem is, nobody who actually cares about their health walks into the juice aisle looking for V8. It’s nothing like juice, and everyone drinking it knows it.
What V8 really sells is convenient nutrition. Once you see that, you’re not competing with Ocean Spray anymore, you’re competing with protein powder and AG1.
The exercise: before a single AI tool touches your business, get clear on the problem you actually solve.
If you can’t describe your business in one sentence, in terms of the problem it solves for a specific person, don’t automate anything yet.
Speeding up an unclear offer just gets you to the wrong place faster.
Here’s the actual prompt we use with clients to get there in minutes instead of months:
“You are a management consultant helping a company figure out their winning value proposition. You know the hard lesson V8 learned: V8 does not sell juice, it sells convenient nutrition. It made a mistake by thinking it was a juice company, competing with companies like Ocean Spray, instead of understanding its customer and realizing the problem it solves is convenient nutrition for health-conscious people. Looking at [your company name/website] serving [your market], what problem do we solve, for who?”
Run it twice for two versions, then pressure test both with your leadership team.
I got into a lot more of this on the Ross Simmonds Show recently, including how the same thinking fixes a stalled sales process and where AI actually belongs in an org chart.
Worth a watch if this was useful.
Full episode here:
Youtube: https://hubs.li/Q04qzTJ_0
Apple podcast: https://hubs.li/Q04qB8fV0
Spotify: https://hubs.li/Q04qB1hP0
