Monthly Archive for April, 2003

customers as co-creators

Published
by
Karl
on April 3, 2003
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

I’ve just read a great HBR article called Co-opting Customer Competence by C.K. Prahalad and Venkatram Ramaswamy. This article provides a novel framework for understanding the customer experience that casts customers as co-creators of value as opposed to passive buyers with a single role of consumption.

If your customers are co-creators of value you will gain competitive advantage that is hard pretty hard to duplicate, if your customers are part of the value then you could also benefit from positive network effects.

I like this business strategy perspective because it helps combine the softer idea that Liz Sanders talks about in her paper Virtuosos of the Experience Domain, that everyone is creative with the hard edge of what critical business function does this support.

brand behavior

Published
by
Karl
on April 1, 2003
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

Branding is generally focused on telling me how good a company/product/service, communicating a promise to me, but no amount of communication can make up for an experience that doesn’t meet my expectations.

At a DMI conference I heard Wally Olins, founder of Wolf-Olins, speak about branding. One of the major points he made was about the different ways a person can interact or experience a brand. The idea being that you can experience a brand via the Product, Environment, Communication, and Behavior.

It is the behavior of a company (systems, products, people) that has the most impact on me as opposed to communication:

The ATT&T voice prompt system may say “We know how important your time is…” and “you are a valued customer” but the thoughtless voice prompt system asking for my phone number twice, keeping me on hold for 20 minutes and then the person picking up the phone and asking for my number again and when we’re done instead of say thanks and bye, keeps me on the line for an extra 10 seconds to read the scripted sign off telling me how much they appreciate me calling them, and how they appreciate my business and is there anything else they can do for me. No, please can’t you just let me hang up and GO…
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