Customer Crossroads

Changes coming to Customer Crossroads and The Idea Studio

This blog started in December 2004, when blogging was still sexy and new. Or newish, anyway.

In early 2012, I was feeling really restless about the content, as my professional interests were shifting more and more towards creativity and innovation. So the blog was renamed The Idea Studio, and took on a new domain, while still keeping the old one.

Well, more changes are coming soon. The Idea Studio is going to have its own home and its own new site, where it will become a marketplace for creativity tools. I'll be telling you lots more about that soon.

And this blog will carry on under its old banner of Customer Crossroads. I'll still post here from time to time about customer experience topics, and the related things that catch my interest. And the existing content, close to 1000 posts, will still be here of course.

Over the next few weeks I'll be cleaning things up here, and working on the new thing. I think it will be fun, and it's been such an honor to have readers. I've always tried to offer real value here, and will keep doing that.

And I will still be publishing the Insights Newsletter about every two months, at least in theory, maybe more in future. That content is always carefully curated and designed to bring you one thought-provoking idea at a time.

Thanks for visiting, and stay tuned for more changes!

Do you really see your customers? Or are stereotypes affecting your judgment?

I started volunteering with a group that hangs art in a hospital. About every 6 weeks we turn over a new show with about 80 paintings from local artists. It's a surprisingly large time commitment, much of it during the workday, so most of the volunteers are retired. (I'm the young blood - scary!)

I took some offense from remarks one of the older fellows made to me -- he was operating on a lot of sexist assumptions. Like ... my husband made the frames for my own paintings. (I paint as a hobby, and I build my own frames. I even have tools!) He assumed I was a lady of leisure, with lots of free time.  (Nope, I still run a business.)  There was something terribly patronizing about his whole attitude that I really took offense to. It was hard to put my finger on it. He was amazed that I took offense, genuinely surprised. I guess he doesn't encounter women like me very often in his world, or if he does, they suffer in silence.

He was operating from stereotypes. But I have to admit, I know almost nothing about this guy myself! I'm also operating on stereotypes based on his age and a few brief exchanges. Which may be why I took offense, instead of just laughing at his foolishness.

A three-part framework for creating breakthrough innovation

People talk about the high rate of new product failures (about 85%) as if there is no way to change it, and no way to understand the market. Like innovation is some kind of hit and miss affair, or magic. It's not.

Nielsen, a well known quant-focused research group, has been deconstructing and quantifying innovation successes for a few years now with the Breakthrough Innovation studies. I recently heard Lauren Galletta present at a professional meeting on this topic, and it was terrific stuff.

They have studied tens of thousands of product launches, and have strict criteria for being a winner -- there has to be something new happening (distinctiveness) not just a reformulation. The sales of the new thing need to be big enough to be relevant. And the sales have to continue at close to the launch levels for at least a second year.

Their framework for how to create these kinds of wins is this: Demand driven insight, demand driven development, and demand driven activation. Let's look at what they mean by this.