Investir para entrar na mente dos clientes-alvo

"Each area within the circles is strategically important, but A, B, and C are critical to building competitive advantage. The team should ask questions about each. For A: How big and sustainable are our advantages? Are they based on distinctive capabilities? For B: Are we delivering effectively in the area of parity? For C: How can we counter our competitors’ advantages?

The team should form hypotheses about the company’s competitive advantages and test them by asking customers. The process can yield surprising insights, such as how much opportunity for growth exists in the white space (E). Another insight might be what value the company or its competitors create that customers don’t need (D, F, or G).

...

But the biggest surprise is often that area A, envisioned as huge by the company, turns out to be minuscule in the eyes of the customer."

Acredito que muitas empresas apostam em propostas de valor que caem sobretudo na área B porque se focam nos outputs e não nos inputs. Assim, não investem tempo para entrar na mente dos clientes-alvo e perceber como é que o output é usado como input no processo de criação de valor do cliente.

Trechos retirados de "Strategic Insight in Three Circles".  

Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs (parte IX)

Há dias visitei este armazém de uma empresa de calçado:

Estão a ver tudo arrumado, tudo em caixas identificadas, tudo localizado...

Quando se perguntava onde tinham arranjado a estrutura metálica X a resposta foi: na empresa G.

Quando se perguntava onde tinham arranjado a estrutura metálica Y a resposta foi: na empresa G.

Quando se perguntava onde tinham arranjado as prateleiras para caixas Z a resposta foi: na empresa G.

Quando se perguntava onde tinham arranjado os carros metálicos W a resposta foi: na empresa G.

A empresa G é uma serralharia industrial que fornece uma outra empresa do ramo da metalomecânica com que trabalho. Por acaso estacionei o carro perto da G. E ao olhar para o edifício da G. descobri um cartaz metálico na fachada onde listavam o que faziam:

• montras industriais
• estruturas metálicas
• ...

E pensei... tão século XX, tão concentrado no que se faz.

É o velho conceito deste blogue: Think input not output:

"servicification. This means that the emphasis, when we look at offerings, is no longer on the production process that historically created them as outputs, but in their property as inputs in the value creating process of the customers system."

É o que Alan Klement quer dizer quando mostra isto:

Outro exemplo.

A minha mulher resolveu começar a frequentar um ginásio. Como moramos próximo de um centro comercial, ontem à tarde metemo-nos ao caminho a pé e fomos a uma loja da Sport Zone. Que desilusão!!!

A minha mulher foi lá de propósito à procura de um saco ou de uma mochila para levar as coisas para o ginásio. Entretanto, no caminho começamos a visualizar o seu primeiro dia e demos connosco a enumerar outras coisas que lhe faltavam: um par de toalhas, um aloquete (bem à Puorto), ...

Percebi que a Sport Zone é um expositor de coisas relacionadas com desporto ou com um look desportivo, mas não pensa nas pessoas e no seu contexto. A cerca de 1 km daqui de casa há uma loja da Aldi, há tempos ao olhar para um expositor daquelas tralhas que mudam todas as semanas, reparei num artigo qualquer que parecia ser interessante para a limpeza de um carro. Ao mesmo tempo que classificava o artigo como interessante surgiu um outro pensamento: se calhar seria mais interessante se tivesse um outro a complementar, porque muitas pessoas vão gostar do 1º artigo, mas não comprar por falta do complemento. Desvio o olhar um bocado e ... reparo no tal complemento. Espertos.

Um dia a Sport Zone há-de descobrir que também ela vende inputs e não outputs: em que contexto é que se encontra alguém que vai:

• começar a frequentar um ginásio pela primeira vez? O que precisa?;
• começar a praticar campismo pela primeira vez? O que precisa?
• começar a praticar ciclismo de recreio para abater banhas, ou para melhorar a relação com os filhos, ou para aproveitar o Verão e ... O que precisa?

"you have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology"

"As Steve Jobs said: you have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. Jobs understood that when you try to reverse-engineer the need statement from the product, it's too easy to lose touch with reality.
...
Dedicating one or two sentences to the problem statement is often a false economy. For startups, the need is all that really matters. It's the foundation of your entire business. It's how you position your product. It's the 'why'. And it can trigger powerful human emotions like empathy and disgust on command.
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Every need is contextual. It's felt by a particular person at a particular time in pursuit of a particular end-goal. It has a functional side e.g. 'I need to make this picture looks beautiful' and an emotional side e.g. 'I need attention from my friend'. And needs find a way of getting themselves met... with your product or without it.
...
Target audience: Who are your target customers? For B2B startups, who actually uses your product?
General problem: What's a problem that every target customer can agree with? e.g. not enough time or money
Key activity: What are customers doing while they use your product? e.g. booking flights or collecting receipts.
Primary goal: What's the end-goal of performing this activity? e.g. travel abroad or prepare a VAT return.
Niche: Which sub-group of potential customers is most like to be an early-adopter?
Primary functional problem: What's the hardest part about doing the activity today?
Negative outcomes and emotions: What happens if the activity goes wrong? For B2B startups, what is the negative business impact?
Substitutes: What's the next-best-option or workaround?
Most common complaints: Why do customers hate these substitutes?
Key trend: What will make this problem worse in the future?
Quantifiable impact: How can you measure the impact of solving the problem?
Positive outcomes and emotions: What good things happen as a result? For B2B startups, what is the positive business impact?
Number of potential customers: How many people can you target?"

Trechos retirados de "Why You Need to Follow the Steve Jobs Method and 'Work Backwards'"

Acerca do valor

"Generally, the concept of value is associated with the usefulness and merit of something, be it an activity or its output. Thus, value is about what is important, whether in life in general, in human action or in the operations of an organization, and as such it can be associated with judgement. Consequently, value attains a universalist and a relativist meaning.
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The most common universal meaning of value is benefit or worth. Yet, benefit always suggests a perspective, a direction, a beneficiary – someone, be it an actor, a party, an individual or a group of individuals of a sort, and as such value becomes relative, being dependent on the nature, resources and assets, bargaining power, interactions and interdependencies of that actor with others. This makes value actor-dependent and context-specific.
...
More recently, it has been widely recognized that an actor, who finds a product or service valuable, may also participate in creating and enhancing its value and consequently, co-create value in a value producing continuous and iterative process based on relational exchanges.
...
the value configuration perspective has emerged focusing on the way in which internal company activities are structured and organized to fit external relational attachments."

Trechos retirados de "Value Creation in the Internationalization of SMEs" de Svetla Marinova , Niina Nummela e Jorma Larimo

"choice is contingent"

"The notions of both rationality and limited processing capacity are consistent with the rowing belief among decision researchers that preferences for options of any complexity or novelty are often constructed, not merely revealed, in making a decision. People often do not have well defined preferences; instead, they may construct them on the spot when needed, such as when they must make a choice. Thus, consumer preference formation may be more like architecture, building some defensible set of values, rather than like archaeology, uncovering values that are already there.
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The idea of constructive preferences denies that individuals simply refer to a master list of preferences in memory when making a choice and also asserts that preferences are not necessarily generated by applying some invariant algorithm such as a weighted adding model. Rather than one invariant approach to solving choice problems, consumers appear to utilize a wide variety of approaches, often developed on the spot. Consumers may also develop problem representations on the spot by structuring or restruchuing the available information. One important property of this constructive viewpoint is that preferences will often be highly context dependent. In addition. because decision approaches are developed on the fly, processing will be highly sensitive to the local problem structure. This implies that processing approaches may change as consumers learn more about problem structure during the course of making a decision.
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Why are preferences constructive? One reason individuals may construct preferences is that they lack the cognitive resources to generate well-defined preferences for many situations. A second important reason is that consumers often bring multiple goals to a given decision problem. Preferences are not always constructed; people do have firm and stable preferences for some objects.
...
choice is contingent"

Trechos retirados de "Constructive Consumer Choice Processes" de James R. Bettman, Mary Frances Luce, e John W. Payne, publicado por Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 25, No. 3 (December 1998), pp. 187-217

Valor potencial

Ontem escrevia aqui sobre o valor potencial:

"Value is potential - intangible assets, like employees trained in statistical quality control and root cause analysis, have potential value but not market value. Internal processes such as design, production, delivery, and customer service are required to transform the potential value of intangible assets into tangible value."

A propósito deste artigo "Oito finalistas recebem 200 ofertas de emprego" lembrei-me logo do último relatório do IEFP sobre o desemprego:

"Nos níveis de escolaridade, na comparação homóloga verifica-se que o decréscimo percentual mais acentuado foi assinalado no 1º ciclo do ensino básico (-8,8%). Os detentores do ensino secundário e do ensino superior registaram subidas no desemprego, +2,6% e +0,4% respetivamente."

Depois, lembrei-me de quantos detentores do ensino superior tiram cursos que podem ir ao encontro directo da procura industrial que continua a crescer?

"Apesar de tudo parece que continua o regresso à indústria, o que explicará os números dos homens, dos jovens  e do sector secundário."

Depois, lembrei-me de Neil Rackham ... salvo erro licenciado em Sociologia mas não achou que trabalhar para a indústria fosse um "negócio" na pior accepção da palavra. E, em vez de estar à espera que lhe chegasse o emprego a que "tinha direito" criou uma oferta que seduziu os clientes, as empresas.
.
BTW, como não recordar os designers velhos acabados de sair da escola.

Acerca do Valor

Ao ler "The strategy map: guide to aligning intangible assets" de Kaplan e Norton e publicado na Strategy & Leadership, 2004, Vol. 32 Iss: 5 pp. 10 - 17.
.
Fiquei a matutar nestes trechos:

"Creating value from intangible assets follows four principles
.
(1) Value creation is indirect - improvements in intangible assets affect financial outcomes through chains of cause-and-effect relationships.
...
(2) Value is contextual - the value of an intangible asset depends on its alignment with the strategy. For example, training employees in TQM and six sigma techniques has greater value for organizations following a low total cost strategy than for one following a product leadership and innovation strategy.
.
(3) Value is potential - intangible assets, like employees trained in statistical quality control and root cause analysis, have potential value but not market value. Internal processes such as design, production, delivery, and customer service are required to transform the potential value of intangible assets into tangible value. If the internal processes are not directed at the customer value proposition or financial improvements, then the potential value of employee capabilities, and intangible assets in general, will not be realized.
.
(4) Assets are bundled - the value from intangible assets arises when they are combined effectively with other assets, both tangible and intangible. ... Maximum value is created when all the organization's intangible assets are aligned with each other, with the organization's tangible assets, and with the strategy." 

Há aqui material que a service dominant logic agarraria anos depois. Por exemplo, recordar daqui:

"to adopt the view of not what resources are, but rather what they become. [Moi ici: O mesmo que escrever "Value is potential"] This is the essential nature of resources, and so we define them as anything, tangible or intangible, internal or external, operand or operant, that the actor can draw on for increased viability."

Relacionar "Value is contextual" com:

• "Transactions are replaced by interactions because contextual value creation cannot take place without interaction;" (aqui) 
• "Value is highly contextual." (aqui)

Interessante como Kaplan e Norton andavam à frente de muita gente que já então escrevia sobre valor.

Acerca dos "service ecosystems" (parte II)

Parte I.

"Traditionally, the majority of views on markets in the marketing literature has been grounded in neoclassical economic thought, which views markets as ‘a priori’ realities that emphasise ‘products’ as the foundational ingredients in all business activities
...
Markets viewed from a service ecosystems perspective, on the other hand, are neither seen as predetermined nor static, but as being continually ‘performed’ through the enactment of practices of systemic actors and their direct and indirect connections. [Moi ici: Mercados não como um dado mas como uma variável] In other words, this view highlights the participation of multiple actors, who interactively and interdependently exchange and integrate resources in ways that are much broader than restricted exchanges.
...
Consequently, a service ecosystems view of markets highlights that value co-creation practices are not limited to producer and consumer dyads, but that markets are continually formed and reformed through the activities of broader sets of social and economic actors. Kjellberg and Helgesson (2006, 2007) view markets as the ongoing results of three types of practices: (1) exchange practices, (2) normalizing practices, and (3) representational practices. Exchange practices are routinized activities related to economic exchanges in a market (including restricted exchange); normalizing practices are those that contribute to establishing rules or social norms related to a market; and representational practices are those that depict what a market is and how it works."

Trechos retirados de "Extending actor participation in value creation: an institutional view" de Heiko Wieland, Kaisa Koskela-Huotari & Stephen L. Vargo, publicado por Journal of Strategic Marketing, 2015

Acerca dos "service ecosystems"

Em 2004 um desafio profissional num cliente levou-me a descobrir os ecossistemas da procura quando ainda eram um tema obscuro.
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Quando ano depois descobri a service dominant logic foi amor à primeira vista. Todos os anos procuro apanhar o que se vai escrevendo e sinto que vamos todos esticando a nossa capacidade de desenvolver uma interpretação da realidade. Ainda me lembro de em 2011 escrever esta série "Não é armadilhar, é perceber os clientes dos clientes" para sublinhar que quando se trabalha ao nível do ecossistema a concentração no cliente não é necessariamente a perspectiva mais adequada.

"the division of actors into dichotomies such as ‘producers’ and ‘consumers,’  ‘paying’ and ‘non-paying’ customers, and ‘adopters’ and ‘non-adopters,’ is based on narrow, unidirectional, transactional, and dyadic views on value creation and delivery.
...
this perspective moves away from linear and sequential creation and flow perspectives of value toward the existence of more complex and dynamic exchange systems of actors (i.e. service ecosystems), in which value creation practices are guided by institutions (i.e. rules, norms, meanings, symbols, and similar aides to collaboration) and, more generally, institutional arrangements (i.e. interdependent sets of institutions).
...
define service ecosystems as relatively self-contained, self-adjusting systems of resource-integrating actors connected by shared institutional arrangements and mutual value creation through service exchange. According to the service ecosystems perspective, value co-creation resides in the intersections of all actors and resources that are integrated, including resources and actors that influence value co-creation indirectly. Thus, this view underlines the complex and dynamic nature of social systems, through which service is provided, resources are integrated, and value is co-created. It urges marketing scholars and practitioners to abandon the producer and consumer divide and to see all parties as resource-integrating actors with the common goal of co-creating value for themselves and others. Instead of ‘single-actor’ centricity, such as customer or company centricity, the service ecosystems perspective urges balanced centricity [Moi ici: Como não recordar "Não é armadilhar, é educar" e "Plataforma nos materiais de construção" ] and a more generic actor conceptualization.
The definition of service ecosystems also points to the dynamic and self-adjusting nature of these systems. ‘Each instance of resource integration, service provision, and value creation, changes the nature of the system to some degree and thus the context for the next iteration and determination of value creation’. Consequently, the dynamic and self-adjusting nature of ecosystems broadens and extends the concept of value-in-use to the notion of value-in-context. Value-in-context implies that value is not only always co-created, but also always contingent on the accessibility, evaluation, and integration of other resources and actors and thus contextually specific. Hence, value needs to be understood in the context of the social system in which it is created and evaluated."

Trechos retirados de "Extending actor participation in value creation: an institutional view" de Heiko Wieland, Kaisa Koskela-Huotari & Stephen L. Vargo, publicado por Journal of Strategic Marketing, 2015

Acerca do poder do contexto

Acerca do poder do contexto:

"while we’re ooh’ing and aah’ing, we’re missing the details that really matter: the billions of small moments that happen every day that are revolutionizing the way consumers behave and choose and live and, with it, the way we need to reach them.
...
But then there are those moments that really matter—the I want-to-know moments, I want-to-go moments, I want-to-do moments, and I want-to-buy moments. They matter to consumers and they matter to brands. These moments, or “micro-moments,” are when we act on a need—to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something or buy something. They are intentrich moments where decisions are being made and preferences being shaped. We see them constantly, across billions of monthly searches, billions of hours of videos watched every month, billions of interactions with various sites and apps. These aren’t just people inattentively tapping things into their phone; they rather are the new battleground for hearts, minds and, with them, the dollars their attention brings along.
...
In these micro-moments, consumer expectations are higher than ever. The powerful computers we carry in our pockets have trained us to expect brands to deliver exactly what we are looking for – the moment we are looking. We want things right, and we want things right away. In fact, 69% of online consumers agree that the quality, timing, or relevance of a company’s message influence their perception of a brand."

Trechos retirados de "Outside Voices: Why Mobile Advertising May Be All About Micro-Targeting Moments"