Beyond product versus service

A few days ago I was asked if ISO had definitions for what a product is and what a service is.
I researched ISO 9000: 2015 and found:

• Product - output of an organization that can be produced without any transaction taking place between the organization and the customer
• Service - output of an organization with at least one activity necessarily performed between the organization and the customer

It is at these times that you can see how slow a giant organization that works on the basis of consensus is.

ISO 9001 was created in the 1980s when everyone believed there was only one way to compete, based on price, based on efficiency, betting on perfect competition. I remember this feeling of discomfort with a message that does not suit small and medium-sized companies in a small country open to the international market. In March 2008 I wrote "The danger of crystallization" to express this decoupling between the ISO quality movement and the real world.

Who, like me, was trained in the 1980s and saw Japanese industrial superiority, was educated to choose variability as the great enemy. That is why my company started to be called Redsigma (reduce sigma, reduce standard deviation, reduce variability). However, somewhere along the way, I had my moment on the Road to Damascus and realized that the biggest concern should not be with variability, but with increasing variety. Only through variety can the suckiness of sameness be beat.

In 2011 I read Dave Gray and kept his phrase "Everything is Service!" and also "In the same way, a product can be considered as a physical manifestation of a service or set of services: a service avatar."

Those who are still competing with the mental frame of the 1980s seek to automate everything, seek to standardize everything, seek to increase efficiency at all costs, seek to reduce variability. Therefore, they bet on products that can be produced without interaction with the customer. For them, interacting with customers is a friction to be removed.

Those who believe that there is an alternative to pure and hard competition based on efficiency, value variety, value interaction with customers that promote personalization, create tailor made products, bet on co-development, bet on co-production, value co-creation.

So, what is the point of those definitions above? I see big machines being developed and delivered as a service to a specific customers.

Fazer o perfil dos clientes-alvo (parte II)

Continuado da Parte I.
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No livro "Gamestorming" de Dave Gray, Sunni Brown e James Macanufo é apresentado o "Empathy Map":

Uma ferramenta que pode ser usada para documentar a experiência que os clientes-alvo vivem com o produto ou serviço de uma empresa.

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O livro "Unmarketing - Stop Marketing. Start Engaging" de Scott Stratten começa com uma verdade fundamental:

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"If you believe business is built on relationships, make building them your business." 

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É o desenvolver a relação de há dias.

Fazer o perfil dos clientes-alvo

Nas acções de formação sobre o balanced scorecard um dos temas que abordo é a necessidade imperiosa de responder à questão "Quem são os clientes-alvo?"
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Apresento um desenvolvimento que leva a este acetato final:

E conto a história do estudo estatístico relativo a um mercado que concluiu que os clientes preferem a cor laranja, que o alvo é o laranja.
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A empresa lança o laranja e é um fracasso!
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Porquê?
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Porque o cliente médio não existe, é uma estatística... é um fantasma estatístico.
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Metade do mercado gosta do vermelho e outra metade gosta do amarelo, na média gostam do laranja!!!
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Vem isto a propósito do artigo "Before Creating the Car, Ford Designs the Driver":
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"Antonella was the guiding personality for the Ford Verve, ... A character invented by Ford designers to help them imagine cars better tailored to their intended customers, she embodies a philosophy that guides the company’s design studios these days: to design the car, first design the driver.
Antonella is the personification of a profile created from demographic research about the Fiesta’s target customer, said Moray Callum, executive director of Ford Americas design.
Ford is using characters like Antonella to bring a human element to the dry statistical research drawn from polls and interviews. Based on psychological profiles, these characters are a more modern version of the “theme boards” that designers once covered with snapshots and swatches of material to inspire a design. They are also like avatars, those invented characters used in online games and forums to symbolize a participant’s personality.
“Invented characters get everyone on the same page,” Mr. Callum said. “Personalizing gives context to the information we have. Sometimes the target demographics are difficult to relate to by, say, a 35-year-old male designer.
“We found in the past that if they didn’t understand the buyer, designers would just go off and design something for themselves,” he added."

Seth Godin também escreveu recentemente acerca deste tema "Everyone and no one"