What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [31]
Bruzzo said it is vital for the company to “close that loop in an authentic way and show the commitment on the part of Starbucks to respond to what we’ve heard, which is about putting those ideas in action or building those ideas together with customers.” In short: “We’re truly going to adopt it into our business process, into product development, experience development, and store design.” To do that, he assigned 48 “idea partners” from all over the company to enter the discussion with customers, using the forum as a laboratory. They were to become champions for ideas back in their departments “so that literally customers would have a seat at the table when product decisions are made.” Starbucks, like Dell, has a parallel version of the platform running behind its wall for employees to share and discuss their own suggestions.
Marc Benioff, the outspoken CEO of Salesforce.com, used the Ideas platform first for his own customers and employees and then opened it up to other companies. “It’s like a live focus group that never closes,” he said in an email. “I believe that these days, the rapid communication that is enabled by wikis, blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and you name it ensures that no matter what kind of company you are, your customers are having a conversation about your products and practices. The question that every company has to ask is, ‘Do I want to be part of this conversation? Do I want to learn from it? Am I willing to innovate on the basis of it?’ If you harness the power of this community, you will benefit. If you turn your back on it, you get farther and farther out of touch while competitors flourish. The dead-end suggestion box and auto reply are symbols of corporate indifference and are no longer tolerated.” (If Benioff sounds like Michael Dell on the topic, there’s a reason: He was the one who suggested that Dell needed IdeaStorm.)
Any company or institution could use a platform like this. Governments should use it to gather citizens’ suggestions. Editors should use it to solicit and discuss story ideas from readers. Retailers should use it to help decide what goes on shelves. The question is how much companies and institutions are willing to open up to the gift economy and let their constituents take part in their decisions. The gift economy is about more than just listening to customers out of courtesy or respect (now that companies can no longer get away with hiding phone numbers and email addresses and sentencing customers to phone-mail jail). It is about understanding that customers and constituents want to have a voice and gain control. It is a better way to do business. Can customers help design products? Can citizens help write legislation? Can they assign journalists? We will ask those questions in the next section of the book.
Are you willing to have your customers sit at the next desk to work with you? They’re willing. Try them.
The mass market is dead—long live the mass of niches
“Masses are other people,” sociologist Raymond Williams said in his 1938 book Culture and Society. “There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.”
Advertisers, manufacturers, retailers, media companies, and politicians find it convenient to see us as masses. It’s the essence of their business, their efficiency, their reach, their economy of scale. We are their critical mass. So for them, our newfound power to stand out and act as individuals, to coalesce into networks of our own, and to rise above them in Google searches—whether we are competing with them or complaining about them—is a supreme irritant, even a threat.
Mass-based industries and institutions worry now about “fragmentation”—a term used by those who control the mass market.