"Successful businesses have always endeavored to satisfy customers. But the customer was traditionally treated as a separate entity whose needs were knowable only partially and episodically. Since physical and informational limitations made it infeasible to address each customer - or each usage episode - individually, companies typically aggregated customers into market segments according to features such as age, social status, gender, and geography. The tastes and interests of each group were averaged:
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Companies are not competing for theoretical market segments anymore but rather for the attention and expendable cash of the individual consumers or organizations that they target. Doing so means emphasizing personalized and tailored offerings.
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Business strategy has been predicated on the individual firm as the unit of competition, within relatively stable industry boundaries. Companies made strategies and developed products and services internally, only occasionally and selectively partnering with specific customers and suppliers.
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But in a more dynamic and uncertain era of competition, owning a proprietary asset can easily turn into a liability; there’s a higher risk of obsolescence, and companies have less flexibility. Therefore, the ability to build or leverage digital platforms and ecosystems is key to achieving high optionality. Firms can multiply their options by complementing their capabilities with those of other ecosystem participants, which means that they can avoid being locked into a specific offering.
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In a stable context, it is efficient to strive for standardized offerings in order to achieve economies of scale and experience. However, creating optionality for an uncertain future means turning variation from an expensive inconvenience into a valuable source of information, leading to greater optionality and differentiation.
Companies need to treat the execution of routine tasks and customer interactions as opportunities for learning. Standardizing tasks or offerings becomes counterproductive since it suppresses variance, which is the grist for new ideas. [Moi ici: Vejo esta confusão muitas vezes. Escrevem variância (variabilidade) quando deveriam escrever variedade. Variabilidade não é o contrário de variedade] Instead, firms need to leverage their digital presence and use learning algorithms to capture and process lessons from each interaction.
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Most firms focus on satisfying the immediate and explicit needs of customers. Some go further and try to predict future needs using the techniques detailed above. But few companies interact directly with the customer’s own process of exploration. Serving the exploration needs of customers offers various avenues toward value creation. By facilitating the customer’s search for products or services, companies can learn more about the customer’s needs, which can serve as crucial input for their own search process (akin to Google’s approach). Helping customers find the best solutions to their explicit needs has become the core business for some firms."
Trechos retirados de "Radical Optionality" publicado na HBR de Maio-Junho de 2923.
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