In this post I highlight key concepts from the first chapter of Josh Kaufman’s book Personal MBA. I’m looking at a job working on Capital One’s Travel Portal, so I tried to apply some of the concepts from the book to the Travel Portal to analyze its strengths and weaknesses. Nothing in this post is private information; rather, my thoughts on the Travel Portal are based exclusively on my experience as a Capital One customer and aspiring business thinker.
Kaufman starts by outlining the core mechanisms of businesses:
“Every successful business (1) creates or provides something of value that (2) other people want or need (3) at a price they’re willing to pay, in a way that (4) satisfies the purchaser’s needs and expectations, and (5) provides the business sufficient revenue to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation.”
The Personal MBA, page 14
What is the fundamental want or need that the Travel Portal solves for people? The fundamental want that the Travel Portal solves for Capital One customers is their desire to maximize the amount of travel rewards the receive on travel purchases. When eligible Capital One customers book travel through the Travel Portal, they receive 5x-10x points on the dollar, which is significantly higher than the rewards they would receive from booking travel anywhere else.
Those 5 core mechanisms of successful businesses that I laid out above then turn into the functions required to sustain a business: 1) Value Creation, (2) Marketing, (3) Sales, (4) Value Delivery, and (5) Finance, which comprise the first 5 chapters of this book.
When it comes to value creation, Kaufman outlines that successful businesses must appeal to at least one of the Basic Human Drives in order to be seen as valuable by consumers (these stem from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and ERG):
- Drive to Acquire
- Drive to Bond
- Drive to Learn
- Drive to Defend
- Drive to Feel
He lists out the exact experiences that business often target to hit these core drives:
“All successful businesses sell the promise of some combination of money, status, power, love, knowledge, protection, pleasure, and excitement. The better you articulate how your offer satisfies one or more of these drives, the more attractive your offer will become.”
The Personal MBA, page 43
What core human drives does the Travel Portal appeal to? The Capital One Travel Portal, in my opinion, is weak when it comes to appealing to any of the core human drives. The closest drive it touches on is money, as customers receive monetary benefits from using the portal. The Capital One app prompts that the Travel Portal is “…the smarter way to book travel,” thus the other drive it less directly touches on is knowledge, as the Portal provides a wide range of competing travel options in one place. Part of this knowledge is leaning into customers wanting to feel savvy with the travel purchases. I could also see an argument for status, as the Portal is only available to certain cardholders; using it might make a customer think about their personal status (this feels like more of a stretch).
How could the Travel Portal appeal to other human drives? The Travel Portal could try to appeal to the human drive for protection by providing more cancellation/change protection. When I booked a flight through the portal recently, I was given the option to purchase a form of travel insurance, though the offerings seemed very comparable to the protections that are offered for purchase through airlines that I’ve booked. The Portal could also appeal to the desire to learn by providing in-depth, unique, and personalized information about potential travel bookings that isn’t available or hard to find elsewhere. Examples include a hotel’s distance from town center, an airport’s average flight cancellation rate during a given time of year, or easy access to a hotel’s reviews. The Travel Portal could also lean into the human desire to feel by making the travel booking experience more emotional (reminding them about all of the memories they’re about to make, how hard they’ve worked to earn these trips, etc.). The last one is my favorite.
The first chapter of the book also focuses heavily on understanding a business’ potential market and how the business can create value for it, which includes considering the following factors about a market (these might sound familiar): market size, urgency of need, cost of delivery, price people are willing to pay, cost of customer acquisition, uniqueness of offer, and ongoing potential for sales. Kaufman notes that if there is already a similar existing solution, that’s a great sign – it means the market for the product exists.
The last key concept from Chapter 1 is an overview of key factors that help people decide whether to use a product: efficacy, speed, reliability, ease of use, flexibility, status, aesthetic appeal, emotion, and cost.
Which of these factors does the Travel Portal offer, and which does it lack? I’ve been eligible to use the Capital One Travel Portal for over a year, and I’ve honestly never used it until I started looking at this job. After clicking around a bit over the last few days, I would score the tool as follows:
- efficacy – 8/10 (didn’t have any major issues)
- speed – 5/10 (took a while to load, though that’s common for search tools like this)
- reliability – 8/10
- ease of use – 7/10
- flexibility – 9/10
- status – 3/10 (did not feel particularly exclusive)
- aesthetic appeal – 7/10 (it was cute!)
- emotion – 2/10 (there was essentially none)
- cost – 8/10 (included with cards)
After clicking around the tool a bit, I like it a lot more than I was expecting. I usually use Google Flights to book travel, and the Capital One Travel Portal seems like a better designed version of it. That said, I’m reminded of product advice I read somewhere, which claimed that a new, competing product has to be around 10x more compelling than the existing solutions in order for users to be motivated enough to switch; in my opinion, that is definitely not the case here.
Overall, I think the Capital One Travel Portal could do a much better job of appealing to core human drives and make that much more evident throughout the user experience.
More to come soon!
Works Cited
Kaufman, Josh. “The Personal MBA.” New York, N.Y. : Portfolio/Penguin, 2012.
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