According to MIT
innovation expert and thought leader Michael Schrage, if you aren’t
asking this question, your strategic marketing and innovation efforts
will fail.
In this latest HBR Single, Schrage
provides a powerful new lens for getting more value out of innovation investment. He argues
that asking customers to do something different doesn’t go far
enough—serious marketers and innovators must ask them to
become
something different instead. Even more, you must invest in their
capabilities and competencies to help them become better customers.
Schrage’s
primary insight is that
innovation is an investment in your client, not
just a transaction with them. To truly innovate today, designing new
products or features or services won’t get you there. Only by designing
new customers—thinking of
their future state, being the conduit to
their evolution—will you transform your business.
Schrage
explains how the above question (what he calls “The Ask”) will incite
you and your team to imagine and design ideal customer outcomes as the
way to drive your business’s future. The Single is organized around six
key insights and includes practical exercises to help you apply the
question to your current situation. Schrage also includes examples from
well-known companies—Google, Facebook, Disney, Starbucks, Apple, IKEA,
Dyson, Ryanair, and others—to illustrate just what is possible when you
apply “The Ask.”
Marketing executives, brand managers, strategic
innovators, and entrepreneurs alike should understand how successful
innovation rebrands the client and not the product. A requisite question
for its time,
Who Do You Want Your Customers To Become will liberate you and your team from ‘innovation myopia’—and turn your innovation efforts on their head.
He argues that asking customers to do something different doesn’t go far
enough—serious marketers and innovators must ask them to
become
something different instead. Even more, you must invest in their
capabilities and competencies to help them become better customers.
As we say here at BPM Towers -
If you can figure what the right thing to do is you will innovate to do it!
A good read for gaining even more Customer Insight.
http://www.amazon.com/Want-Your-Customers-Become-ebook/dp/B008UCBB1C/httpwwwstevet-20
