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Customers are talking

You may have noticed that the title of this blog has changed. After nearly three years, “Shop Talk: Innovation, Marketing and Alliances” has been retired. (Actually, it lives on in the incarnation of this blog that appears at Pennlive.com.)

I’ve begun to focus my professional activities around helping companies listen to, make sense of, and act on customer stories–that is, narratives offered by or involving customers, rather than survey data, eye movements, brain scans, or other measurement approaches. I’m calling this focus “Customers Are Talking”–hence, the new name of the blog.

At the beginning of the year, I set a goal to write one “Customers Are Talking” post per week. That has grown to 2-3 posts, and so now it’s time to make the switch.

While the content may not range as widely as “Shop Talk”’s did, I still retain the right to digress as necessary. Such is the privilege of self-publishing. And the Shop Talk name will live on in our occasional podcast. (New edition to premiere next week.)

Please leave your reactions, dissent, kudos, etc., in the comments.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 9:59 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • ameyer32
    John,

    I think you're hitting on one of the key points that will separate successful companies from unsuccessful companies in the next 10 years. Do the people leading the company know what value their customers are willing to pay for? Do they know why they're willing to pay for it? Do they know whether their customers can find similar value somewhere else for he same or less?

    The companies that will succeed understand this and will offer their customers more value than they can find elsewhere. The last 20 years have offered such an explosion of new products and services along with so much liquidity through leverage that companies just bought and figured it out afterwards.

    The world is changing. If I have $100 per person to eat dinner, I don't really have to consider trade offs. If I have $50 per person to eat for the week, I'm going to think long and hard about trade offs.

    If my company has a virtually unlimited budget, I'll listen to every salesman's fantasy and consider the possibilities. If I have a constrained budget, I'm going to think about my "needs" and not be too concerned about possibilities.

    McDonalds blew their numbers out of the water offering two big Macs for $3, Subway is growing their business offering $5 foot longs. Starbucks is in steep decline trying to sell $4 coffee.

    I have full confidence that Nordstroms will survive, though as a smaller company to service their true customer base. I'm also pretty sure Saks and Barney's will not survive. Which one focuses around their customer?

    I think you're onto something very worthwhile where there's a lot of opportunity. I hope you do well and I look forward to your insightful writing.
  • Thanks, guys, I look forward to your continued participation in the comments section as well. Per-Fredrik, I wonder if you might be willing to share a story of one of the customer suggestions that made it into your product?
  • John,
    I think you are doing a smart move. The source for any company is the customer. It is the source of revenue and your reason to exist in the first place. But product development, marketing ideas etc. can all come from your customers. The prduct develoment on one of our mobile service has for the last 18 monhts been based only on customer feedback. We have strengthened the loyalty immensly over this time.

    I'll keep following what goes on here.
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