“There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible and wrong”
H.L.Mencken

Found in the May 2008 Issue of Harvard Business Review. I think you can easily translate it into something else as well:

“There is always an easy answer to every question about your customers – neat, plausible and wrong”.

If you have ever attended a meeting with managers talking about customers and making “uninformed decisions” without evidence, you know what I am talking about.

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I stumbled across this definition for marketing from the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School and I like it.

Marketers concern themselves with acquiring and retaining customers, who are the lifeblood of an organization. They attract customers by learning about potential needs, helping to develop products that customers want, creating awareness, and communicating benefits; they retain them by ensuring that they get good value, appropriate service, and a stream of future products. The marketing function not only communicates to the customer, but also communicates the needs of the customer to the company. In addition, it arranges and monitors the distribution of products and/or services from company to customer.

… so are you a marketer?

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Adam Greenfield, author of “Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing”, talks about the increasing trend to see products and services being combined in a way that focuses on the customer’s experience when using the product/service bundle. In his article titled “On the ground running: Lessons from experience design” he explains some of the underlying design principles of some well-known products.

Starting with the positive example of the iPod/iTunes bundle he dives into the challenges of designing end-to-end experiences when one company is not in control of the whole experience. IDEO’s approach to redesigning Amtrak’s Acela Express not just by looking at the train interior but by designing the overall travel experience is mentioned but also the challenges of keeping the experience “alive” are portrayed.

He concludes with:

If absolutely top-shelf design organizations like IDEO and Apple are unable to fully encompass the challenges of everyday life in the real world, how will the rest of us fair? Isn’t it better, then, to open these systems up—to provide the APIs and other hooks that would allow people to configure them to their own liking?

This goes beyond William Gibson’s oft-quoted and unimpeachably correct observation that “the street finds its own uses for things,” toward the recognition that designers cannot, even in principle, encompass at design time the full range of uses to which their work will be put. In some respects, too, this is what human-computer interaction guru Don Norman is alluding to, when he argues that the person formerly known to experience design as the “user,” “customer,” or “consumer”; needs to be understood as a human being before designers can do their work properly. Any other approach, he reasons, risks treating this person as an instrumental component, not as someone capable of fully participatory co-creation.

You can read the full article here.

Why do I blog this? Reading articles like this shows me that I am right on track with my research activities to develop a method to understand and model consumers and to use this information for the development of new services.

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Michael Jones, the CTO of Google Earth, was one of the Key note speakers at the Swiss Innovation Forum which took place on October 17th in Basel. His keynote and the Keynotes from Heinrich von Pierer (Formed CEO of Siemens) and Mario Moretti Polegato (Founder & CEO of Geox) can be found on www.ch-innovation.ch/video.

I remember two statements from his talk that still make think today when I think about innovation:

Would you have learned to ride a bicycle if your parents didn’t allow you to fall?

Could you fail but still get promoted in your company?

How about your company? How many times could you fail but still get promoted? And if you want to get promoted would you dare to risk more (and maybe fail) or would it be better to become more risk-averse?

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“Blogging is intellectual prototyping.”
Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

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