Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, and Domino’s Pizza all saw this potential in China. They all eagerly opened up their own stores, bringing their style of American food to the Chinese masses, and the masses wanted more. However, Pizza Hut and Papa John’s restaurants are now packed, while Domino’s storefronts are closing to the point of near extinction. What’s the reason? Domino’s just opened up the same store in a new country, while Pizza Hut and Papa John’s adjusted everything for how people in China live.

Domino’s has a 16″ American Family Size that was works well in other countries, so they kept it the same. Meanwhile, competitors shrunk their slices to suit the Chinese eating style. Pizza Hut investigated what different kinds of toppings people enjoyed eating, while Domino’s just kept the same toppings that worked in Japan and Taiwan. Both of these could be overlooked, if it weren’t for the one-two punch of not thinking about how people will get their food, and how they will eat it.

Papa John’s opened up restaurants, making them large and clean to provide a pleasant experience where people could enjoy a night out. In contrast, Domino’s kept their stores delivery-only, as well as their “Delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free” policy, which is a sure fire way to go bankrupt in the stand-still traffic of any metro area that crowded.

In China, the price of pizza is higher than standard Chinese cuisine, qualifying it as fine dining. When food is delivered to the households of extended families that permeate the country, it is only polite that everyone gets to eat food that shows up on the doorstep, which quickly makes Domino’s an expensive proposition. Everyone flocked to the restaurants where they could enjoy fine American food with loved ones, and avoided the possibility of waiting on a giant, expensive meal that was difficult to eat.

It’s easy to pass this off as a “Goofus and Gallant” story, but the point is strong. Even if you think you are only selling a product, there is an entire service experience for anyone who wants the product. Getting into the mind of who you want to interact with is an important part of making sure you are solving people’s needs. Without this, you are just shilling an expensive luxury, and people will stick to what they know instead of reaching for your cold, expensive pizza.

One of the most common traps people fall into is looking for some new gimmick or angle that will set them apart from the crowd. They focus on this technology and try to squeeze every last drop of “cool” out of it. They end up with a beautiful and clever piece of art that everybody agrees is impressive, yet nobody buys.

At the end of the day, the part of your work that people will remember and tell their friends about is the story. What is the problem that other people aren’t fixing? How does it hurt things in ways nobody has noticed before? Most importantly, how does what you are doing seamlessly fix this problem without causing new ones of its own? If you can’t answer these questions, you need to ask yourself if you should be heading a different direction.

How are you making life better and easier for someone else?

Occasionally this happens with news as well, reading an article in an unrelated but fascinating field, when a section pops up that is incredibly relevant. In the middle of an article about 10 Business Lessons Niel Patel Learned This Year, there is a section called “Customers don’t know what they want” that starts off with a quote from Steve Jobs.

You can’t just ask a customer what they want and try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

This is a great reminder that when you ask people what they want, they will give you what they see as the most direct solution, treating a symptom. It’s always good to step back and look at the complete situation, determining the problem from outside. Address the problem that is causing the symptoms, or you will be caught in an endless game of whack-a-mole trying to solve each symptom as it pops up.

When I first started out, I remember the thrill of seeing something I designed sitting on a store shelf to be bought by anyone, or catching a glimpse of a billboard or magazine spread I designed as I went through my daily life. I spent a lot of time sitting behind a computer, tweaking details that I would probably be the only one to notice. As I worked on more products, my view began to shift to product families and how they all fit and worked together toward common goals. This soon expanded into how these families interacted with other product families, and the unique ecosystems that people created for themselves. Soon I was thinking about the entire experience a person would go through, from what caused them to look for specific products as solutions to their problems to what caused them to move past that solution when they had gotten their value from it.

I’m sure you see where this is going, but it wasn’t long before I realized that products are rarely the best available solution. There was an interesting shift that happened in my head the first time I was able to say out loud that maybe the world didn’t need an alarm clock with a sleeker, more minimalist design with a gorgeous backlit font and options to play world radio through multiple speakers, it just needed a reasonable way to guarantee someone could get up when they wanted.

There it was, and I couldn’t ignore it. I stopped asking questions like “How can I make this more desirable?”, and started asking questions like “What desire do people have unfulfilled?” to coworkers and clients. In the years following, it became amusing to me how often a client came in confidently asking for a very specific solution, only to walk away thinking about what questions they should be answering to determine which problem they should solve is. After that, it’s business as usual, guiding people through the process of figuring out which problems to solve, and what the best ways to solve those problems are.

My work results in designing less products that are sitting on store shelves these days, instead focusing on getting companies to research holistically to determine if they are asking the right questions to answer. I don’t as often get the thrill of seeing someone grab my design off a shelf, but when I do, I like knowing that it will serve them well for all the right reasons.

Then along came Henry Ford and the assembly line. Suddenly you could guarantee that every part looked the same, felt the same, and worked the same. Quality control became easier, and production cheaper. Suddenly people found themselves in a flood of identical items, allowing them to quantitatively judge themselves against others. Keeping up with the Joneses became a national pastime. Appliances, cars, clothes, it didn’t matter. The brand of an item became a cachet, allowing people to quickly judge how someone viewed themselves by which of the assembly line products they chose.

Soon production became so inexpensive that it was cheaper to make a new widget than fix the old one. Objects became single-use items that had no long-lasting value or emotional attachment, and disposable culture was born. If something stopped working, you just threw it out and got a new one. Countless electronics don’t even have batteries that are removable, because they know it just isn’t worth it.

However, there is a backlash brewing. People want to have an emotional attachment to the items they have on them all the time. People want their belongings to have a sense of value to them, to be an extension of themselves. They put stickers over their computers, covering the vast flat expanses. They put a meaningful photo or cartoon as their desktop. They want others to know at a glance that this object belongs to them, that this widget is an extension of themselves and their personality.

Corporations are here to help.

Back in the heady dot com days, I bought a pair of Customatix [2000-2004, RIP]. You could go in and choose what kind of shoe you wanted, what colors, what style of laces, even which logo you wanted. The shoes had tags on the side that said whatever you wanted to have embroidered there. No longer did I have to choose from the oppressive colors and designs that the stores deemed worthy. I was free to create shoes that looked like whatever I wanted, and they would even be made in this country. It was win-win, and soon i had a pair of boots that advertised my website. It was much more subtle than it sounds, I assure you.

Now, more and more companies are going this same direction. Nike has spawned Nike iD, a site that lets you pick from most of their products and choose the colors you want in a clean, simple website that guides you through the process. Nike also owns Converse, which released Converse One, a nearly identical interface that allows you to design your Converse. Puma also lets you build your own shoes at the Mongolian Shoe BBQ, going for a completely different method, but with the same results. Puma used to only offer this directly in their store, digging through piles of fabric to pick the pieces you wanted to build your shoe with, and their website does a good job of approximating this. Getting a pair of shoes that express your personality has never been easier.

The world of customization no longer stops at shoes, however. It has been seeping into other quotidian items, like messenger bags. Timbuk2 offers a website that will let you personalize one of their bags with whatever colors you like. Freitag took it a step further, allowing you to “kill a truck” and rip apart the tarpaulin with stencils, picking exactly the area of fabric you want your bag to be built from. It’s amazing how detailed personalization is becoming.

Walking around wearing shoes and a messenger bag you designed yourself still isn’t enough for you? If you can no longer stand that pre-made watch on your wrist, Swiss watch manufacturer 121 Time will let you futz with the details of your own high-end timepiece. Fossil or Blancier will let you do the same, to varying degrees. Why drink what everyone else drinks when you could be sipping custom wine from Elite Vintners? Wearing all of these personalized items, you obviously can’t drive something that looks like what everyone else has, so Harley-Davidson will let you custom-build your own hog, all the way down to your choice of seat and tailpipe.

While riding around on your custom motorcycle, listening to what some snobby DJ on the radio thinks you should listen to is simply too oppressive. Thankfully, the BBC is launching MyBBCRadio, which will let you pick what kind of music you want to listen to. If you can’t wait, Pandora and MusicLens will let you do the same right now.

Enough about running through the daily rat race, what about personalized playtime with custom toys? There is always the Lego Factory, which will let you build anything you want out of legos. You can make your own Hot Wheels or Barbie if that’s more your speed. In any spare time, you can read a PersonalNOVEL created using the names of you and your loved ones as the main characters (providing you read German). And you can pay for it all with a custom credit card from Flexi, that not only lets you personalize how the card itself looks, but choose exactly what your terms of service are for your intricately individual life.

However, personalization doesn’t stop at physical objects, either. Snakes on a Plane recently launched a campaign that allows you to send a personal phone message from Samuel Jackson to a friend. Before long, on a whim we will be able to instantly personalize a touching and memorable song for those delicate moments in life. Just think of the possibilities.