People commonly agree that Joseph Pine and James Gilmore's 1999 book, The Experience Economy (Harvard Business School Press), foreshadowed today's customer environment. Yankelovich's J. Walker Smith, in a speech at the 13th Annual CRMC conference in June 2007, called today's consumers the "choice generation," with the customer in control and value (to the customer) existing in the experience.
This new Web 2.0, choice-generation world creates a number of difficult issues for traditional companies (and for those of us who were not early adopters of the ideas in The Experience Economy), including:
- Desires: what the customer wants
- Power issues: who decides what we do and offer
- Budget constraints: who decides priorities (for most, funds are not limitless)
This means, as a business leader, I need to clearly understand the wants, needs and desires of my current (and future) customers and, at...
