Thinking about customer engagement comes before thinking about our innovation pipeline.
Customer engagement is no longer a way to think about engaging customers with our products and services. Instead it’s really about determining which new products and services to launch in order to engage our customers and target market.
It’s also true that the target markets are changing rapidly, so it’s even more important to constantly think about customer engagement first.
- Did Google start with the vision of one day providing mobile phones and Google Glass?
- Did Amazon begin its journey knowing that it would be the digital media distribution powerhouse it is today?
- Did Facebook start out with aim of being the social powerhouse it is today?
In all these cases the target markets and their characteristics were changing. And the companies evolved to almost transform what they already had in their products portfolio. One could even argue that these firms changed the way the market was used to evolving.
At this point, I’d like to insert a word of caution for the purposes of this book. While examples such as the above – and the many that I’ll refer to throughout the book – serve to illustrate the point being discussed, they also limit our learning if we identify too closely with them. More about that in a different post.
Tell me what you think