Customer Centricity

One of the ideas that was only mentioned in passing during our discussion about the Asus Eee was Customer Centricity. This is an interesting concept that can lead to some interesting innovations. I have added a link to Strativity, a consulting firm headed by Lior Arussy (a Customer Centricity guru from the US) that works with firms to understand how they can apply customer-centric thinking to differentiate their products and services.

The process often involves thinking fo your product or service from the customer outward (often severally from the perspectives of many different customer segments), with a specific focus on understanding the emotional underpinnings of each group's decision criteria.

For example, if we took the Asus Eee and the lifestyle user customer segment, we would start to think about what the lifestyle user wants: they want to feel that they have a "cool" or "hot" product, they want a blend of association with / emulation of a trend and individual expression / customization, they want a "wow-factor" that will attract admirers and they want esteem from peers. Thinking of the Asus Eee from this perspective, designers can start to think about design elements that will satisfy these needs; they build a product that has a "cult following" or credibility within the technical community credibility which is then extended to the lifestyle user), they build models with common basic design but many colour options, they add speakers and a very functional media suite to attract attention and they make the whole thing eminently portable so that the lifestyle user can easily display their symbol of esteem.

Coupled with the previous post that focused on constraint-focused design leading to the evaluation of trade-offs, Customer Centricity establishes a framework that designers can use to weigh those trade-offs against customer priorities.