Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?
Value creation transcends sales and exchange. Investments are more than simple transactions; they’re a bet on the future of value.
Michael Schrage • Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?
Innovation generates a new wealth of human capital. Successful innovations are successful investments in the human capital stock of customers.
Michael Schrage • Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?
Successful innovators don’t just ask customers and clients to do something different; they ask them to become someone different.
Michael Schrage • Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?
Disney’s “ask” became a fundamental design principle for the entire line: What does the innovation ask its customer to become? More like the princess she wants to be. That’s powerful. That’s profitable. That’s transformative.
Michael Schrage • Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?
Apple trained its customers to become design connoisseurs.
Michael Schrage • Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?
For Apple’s and Pixar’s innovators, the value of self-awareness trumped any need for customer focus. By designing for themselves, they transformed their most demanding customers.
Michael Schrage • Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?
The “being one’s own best innovator/customer” paradigm enjoys a fantastic business history. Henry Ford, George Eastman, and Edwin Land were all DIFY—do it for yourself—entrepreneurs.
Michael Schrage • Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?
(Even free is too expensive if the user experience is confusing or time consuming.)
Michael Schrage • Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?
Google continuously improves the quality of its search by improving the capabilities of its searchers—and vice versa. As Google’s searchers grow smarter and more sophisticated, so does Google. Win/win.