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Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become? by [Michael Schrage]

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Michael Schrage

Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become? Kindle Edition

by Michael Schrage (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Who do you want your customers to become?

According to MIT innovation expert and thought leader Michael Schrage, if you aren’t asking this question, your strategic marketing and innovation efforts will fail.

In this latest HBR Single, Schrage provides a powerful new lens for getting more value out of innovation investment. He argues that asking customers to do something different doesn’t go far enough—serious marketers and innovators must ask them to become something different instead. Even more, you must invest in their capabilities and competencies to help them become better customers.

Schrage’s primary insight is that innovation is an investment in your client, not just a transaction with them. To truly innovate today, designing new products or features or services won’t get you there. Only by designing new customers—thinking of their future state, being the conduit to their evolution—will you transform your business.

Schrage explains how the above question (what he calls “The Ask”) will incite you and your team to imagine and design ideal customer outcomes as the way to drive your business’s future. The Single is organized around six key insights and includes practical exercises to help you apply the question to your current situation. Schrage also includes examples from well-known companies—Google, Facebook, Disney, Starbucks, Apple, IKEA, Dyson, Ryanair, and others—to illustrate just what is possible when you apply “The Ask.”

Marketing executives, brand managers, strategic innovators, and entrepreneurs alike should understand how successful innovation rebrands the client and not the product. A requisite question for its time, Who Do You Want Your Customers To Become will liberate you and your team from ‘innovation myopia’—and turn your innovation efforts on their head.

HBR Singles provide brief yet potent business ideas, in digital form, for today's thinking professional.

Print length

87 pages
Language

English
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Publisher

Harvard Business Review Press
Publication date

July 17, 2012
File size

221 KB
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

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Erik Synnestvedt has recorded nearly two hundred audiobooks for trade publishers as well as for the Library of Congress Talking Books for the Blind program. They include The Day We Found the Universe by Marcia Bartusiak, A Game as Old as Empire edited by Steven Hiatt, and Twitter Power by Joel Comm.

--This text refers to the audioCD edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B008HRM9X4
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harvard Business Review Press (July 17, 2012)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 17, 2012
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 221 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 87 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #876,333 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,748 in Two-Hour Business & Money Short Reads
- #1,875 in Business Management (Kindle Store)
- #6,832 in Business & Investing (Kindle Store)

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4.3 145 ratings

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4.3 out of 5

145 global ratings

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Pablo Fernandez

Brilliantly insightful

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 2, 2022

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Finally, an insightful and fresh perspective on customer centricity. This book really makes you ask the right questions about your business, and makes you see it from a completely different perspective.

Helpful

John Gibbs

Why many businesses are headed in the wrong direction

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 26, 2012

Verified Purchase

Most businesses spend their time and efforts trying to find out what it is that customers want, and then supply those wants. However, such customer-focused businesses are heading in the wrong direction, according to Michael Schrage in this book. Instead, as the title of the book suggests, they should be focusing on the question of what they want their customers to become. Innovation necessarily transforms customers into something else.

Under Steve Jobs, Apple had no time for consumer research, saying that it was not the consumer's job to know what they want. Google's search system was developed before the ultimate users knew that they needed it. Ryanair succeeds by cutting costs to provide low-cost air travel, regardless of what customers think. Real innovators are too busy inventing the future to listen to customers. They know what innovation their customers need even before customers know they need it.

The book prescribes six key insights:
* Innovation is an investment in the capabilities and competencies of your customers
* Innovation is about designing customers
* Customer vision is as important as corporate vision
* Customer vision should be aligned with user experience
* Be your own best beta-tester
* Anticipate and manage the dark side of innovations

The author's perspective on innovation and customer focus is an interesting one which undoubtedly will be of use to some businesses, but will it become one of those classic ideas which revolutionises business thinking? Only time will tell. In the meantime, those who are prepared to invest a few dollars and a couple of hours in reading this short book will benefit by having their views of customer-centricity challenged.

15 people found this helpful

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Tim Kastelle

An invaluable insight

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 24, 2012

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The central idea in this book forces a very useful rethink about how we approach business. Schrage contends that any time we offer something new to people (a product, service or idea) - we are asking them to change. Inevitably, people change as they interact with ideas and things - they learn, grow and adapt. Consequently, thinking about how you are asking them to change is a critical step in getting your ideas to spread.

Schrage lays out how and why these changes occur, with plenty of great examples. He outlines how this can be both good and bad, and makes a case for asking people to grow and improve in order to build sustainable success. And he has some good ideas for how to do this.

The primary goal of the book is to change how we think and act when we have great new ideas. Schrage says that his Ask is this: "I want my readers to become innovators and entrepreneurs who always recognize and empathize with the aspirations and constraints of their customers. That means they should see their customers and clients as people who are looking to expand the boundaries of who they are and what they can do but respect the limitations on their time and their talents."

If that's what you would like to become, then this is a must-read book.

4 people found this helpful

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Tim O'Reilly

A powerful notion

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 30, 2012

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Great innovators, Schrage argues, don't just conceive new products, they reconceive the customers for those products. Think for a moment about how Henry Ford didn't just create cars - he had to create a whole new vision of society in order to create customers for those cars. Edison didn't just invent the lightbulb and the phonograph, he invented people who came to rely on those things, and everything else that electricity now lets us take for granted.

We're in the middle of one of these great transitions in who we are, and what society will become, driven first by the internet, and now the smartphone. Our always-on culture turns us into a different kind of people. Google, Apple, Amazon all are great companies because they change our expectations about what is possible and how we live.

It's easy to see what Schrage calls "the Ask" in big technological transformations like these. But he makes a convincing case that this is a question that every business needs to be asking. If you aren't asking your customer to be someone different, it's likely that your business and your products aren't very differentiated either.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

ಗ್ರಾಹಕ

Excellent read for seeing customer centric innovations in another light

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 19, 2017

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I usually dont provide five stars to any books unless they impress and impact me so well. This is one such rare books. I should remind about the proverb "when the student is ready, teacher will arrive" to somewhat justify why I feel so. I would say I have spent some time trying to read about marketing, sales, operations and execution as I come from pure technical background. This book opens up those knowledge in a different light altogether. This book is not just for business savvy. It is useful even to everyday life. Everyday interactions with spouses, kids, friends, colleagues etc. In my perspective, everyone is your customer for something or the other. When you know what you want your customers to become, you will communicate your intentions in the right way.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Useless information

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 12, 2022

Verified Purchase

I had to stop reading after first 12 pages. It’s full of mumbo jumbo.

If you want to make money as a small business then this book won’t help you.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 14, 2020

Verified Purchase

Many organisation work on customer experience as a one size fits all. The Ask positions customer experience in a different way.

Helpful

Ansis

A practice of continuous improvement

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 17, 2021

Verified Purchase

A great eye opener for innovation. It roots change in a clear behavior theory with tangible outcomes.

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Top reviews from other countries

Michael Allen

Essential reading for Innovators

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 13, 2015

Verified Purchase

Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?

"Who do you want your customers to become" by Michael Schrage is essential reading for all Innovators.

This is a short and succinct book - you can read it in one sitting (my favourite type ;-) ) and has a very powerful concept which he calls the 'innovation ask'.

Every innovation 'asks' its users and customers to be something different and a key insight of the book which is that Innovation is as much about designing customers as it is designing products and services.

I blogged about the book here, http://wp.me/p48MiY-Wm

Aalok Yashwant Shukla

excellent book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 10, 2013

Verified Purchase

Thought provoking question & abundant examples. Important for entrepreneurs that are looking to lead their marketplace.
With this question you can formulate the solution.

Abhilash

Great read, Absolute gem of a book and thinking

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on January 2, 2021

Verified Purchase

As a curious person interested in inventing and kind of maker myself, I have been always curious about the new age innovation. Having read and followed Michael Schrage, I could realise this book could hold an answer. I had always felt UX meant a lot of psychological aspects, but this book summarizes it as transforming the customer and the innovation ask! Thank you for this wisdom shared as a book. I start more applying and move to your next book Innovators hypotheses!

Ian Berry

A brilliant question short on answers

Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on April 1, 2018

Verified Purchase

I admit to the fact that the authors constant use of the term "human capital", which I hate with a passion because it sells all human beings short, put me off and made reading this book a struggle.

There's excellent case studies and great insights into the dark side of innovation.

I think the best value of this book is the premise that investing in customer transformation is how we create breakthrough experiences for them

Don E.

Combined with design thinking, an important tool for finding value

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on July 15, 2015

Verified Purchase

A relatively short, concise, and important read. Its implications for transforming society for the better and producing value where it is most necessary (in contrast to the triviality of many modern so-called innovations) is only countered by difficult The Ask can be for entrepreneurs and leaders out there who lack ideals and meaning behind their endeavours. Combined with design thinking, this is a potent thought starter!

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