Co-Create

The whole face of marketing today is changing rapidly, as our technologies and devices empower us all to stay connected, all the time, with everyone.

As customers in today’s world—the world of Google and Facebook and Instagram, of smartphones and Wi-Fi and Uber and ApplePay—we no longer limit ourselves to learning about products and brands by encountering their ads in printed magazines or newspapers, or while sitting passively in front of one-way television commercials. Instead, whenever and wherever we want to learn about a product, we seek it out online, and pretty much instantaneously we get not just product specs and prices, but delivery dates and payment options, along with reputational information such as review opinions.

The Old Marketing of one-way advertisements pushed out by marketers to consumers has already been supplanted by the New Marketing of two-way interactions between consumers and marketers.

The Old Marketer would do research to find out what the most desired product attributes or qualities were for the planned product, and then the company would create that product and push it out for sale. Let’s see how many customers we can get with this?

But the New Marketer operates entirely differently, interacting with each individual customer to learn what features or attributes are important to that customer and then, with the participation of the customer, the product is co-created.

In addition to getting a customer to Co-Create your product or service, however, the savviest New Marketers will also enlist the customer’s help in evangelizing the product to others. Social media technologies make this kind of activity increasingly efficient, and in essence what it means is that the customer is not just co-creating the product or service itself but the entire marketing, promotional, and branding program.

In today’s world, Co-Creation has become central to nearly all marketing.

As David Nour carefully and persuasively explains, to master the tasks in Co-Create, one must start with the individual customer, not the market. We have to think about the ant, not the anthill. And because customers are all different, this requires a great deal of insight into the nature of customer differences.

Now most companies comb through their customer data primarily to identify those high-value customers who buy the most products, or who have the most potential for buying more products. And knowing who your most valuable customers are is certainly beneficial to the company, because every company needs to know where the real money is. But if we stop with this, then we’re looking at the issue through the wrong end of the telescope—the company’s end.

Because for the most part customers couldn’t care less about their value to our brand or company. What they’re interested in is what value our brand holds for them. What problems can the brand solve for the customer? What can the brand do to improve the customer’s life? So a far more useful insight for the marketer when it comes to Co-Creation is information about what different customers need. Needs-based differentiation is critical to the process, as Nour says, because the only way you can entice a customer into an act of Co-Creation is if the customer is motivated to participate in the process, in order to meet some need the customer has.

Co-Create might look like an easy-to-read business book with common-sense advice, tools, and metrics to engage in this new kind of marketing activity with your customers. And it is.

But I think it’s also something else. I think reading this book might just provide an entirely different frame of reference for you when it comes to thinking about all business, and perhaps even about life in general.

Over and above the very useful lessons Co-Create holds for how to do better marketing, give this book a thorough read and you’ll see that the stories, guidelines, tools, and cases within it are sewn together by an organizing theme that we might call “bottom-up” thinking.

Most of us think about marketing (and business management in general) in terms of top-down actions. The marketing manager decides on a program, he or she delegates authority downward, instructions are distributed throughout the organization, and then some semblance of the specified plan materializes from all the actions being coordinated.

But co-creation has to do with harnessing the effectiveness of people working as individuals according to their own motivations—customers, employees, partners, and others, collaborating with us and with each other, from the bottom up. Ants are a perfect example. No single ant knows how to make an anthill, but when ants get together and do the things they individually want to do, the anthill soon takes shape.

Old Marketing is top-down. We (the all-wise, all-seeing marketers) decide what products and services make sense and what kind of marketing will move customers to buy them. We gather facts and research to make smart decisions, but in the end the decisions are entirely ours to make, the messaging is entirely ours, and everything that results from this process will only be as good as we are, no better.

The New Marketing, on the other hand—the kind of marketing defined by Co-Create—is bottom-up in nature. We at the top don’t try to dictate every feature and promotional benefit. Instead, we empower our customers to help us shape the product and its marketing. We enable them to help us meet their own needs, into which they will have far deeper insight than we could ever develop on our own, no matter how much we spend on research. Both the shape of our product and the cast of our marketing campaign are therefore impossible to predict, prior to receiving the inputs of customers.

Moreover, bottom-up thinking like this holds important lessons not just for marketing, but for the discipline of management in general. “Leadership by provocation,” as Nour documents, can provide extremely effective outcomes. These outcomes are not planned and dictated in advance by the organization’s leaders, but created ad hoc by empowered and motivated employees, acting on their own. Rather than detailed rules for a dress code or vacation time, such an organization might trust employees to “dress appropriately” or to “take whatever vacation time you need to come back recharged.” And the benefits that come from such bottom-up policies will far exceed what any single leader could achieve, no matter how much insight went into the rules and policies he or she might have prescribed in advance.

Co-Create is a book that shows us how to harness the power of customers, employees, and other members of our value chain to achieve better results than we could manage on our own.

December 2016

DON PEPPERS AND MARTHA ROGERS, PH.D.

Co-Founders, CX Speakers, LLC www.cxspeakers.com

Co-authors of nine books including their latest, Extreme Trust: Turning Proactive Honesty and Flawless Execution into Long-Term Profits (Penguin), revised paperback 2016