The Empty Whitecoat

Visual Value Maps - The Concierge Services Opportunity

I've been experimenting with a new format to present and explain complex customer innovation concepts and opportunities - or VisualValueMaps as I have termed them.

Click here to view or download a .pdf of the above VisualValueMap

The first of these, "The Concierge Services Opportunity", aims to depict the virtuous cycle of value that a concierge service can create by providing customers with several new "smart consumption" benefits such as reducing their time and energy costs, brokering and delivering more relevant and personalised offers and choices, providing greater value-for-money, creating superior knowledge about products and services and facilitating access to hitherto unknown or unplanned experiences. For employees, a concierge service is a great way to help staff maintain work-life balance as well as the other benefits.

The concierge provider benefits too. It is a simple and effective way for a company to maintain a dialogue with valuable customers, learn about their latent needs, gather valuable feedback, link marketing and product offers to important lifestyle events and ultimately achieve deep customer focus.

I am seeking some assistance to improve the design elements as I plan to produce some more of the Maps in the future. If anyone has any suggestions or would like to assist me put these together, drop me a note at chris@theomcgroup.com.

To receive updates about future VisualValueMaps, register here at The OMC Group web site.

Brands in the Boardroom - London Business School event, 20 May

This event looks well worth attending :

From the event website:

Following the extremely successful Media, Women in Business, and Private Equity conferences, London Business School is introducing its inaugural Marketing Conference on May 20th. This year the subject will be Brands in the Boardroom.

Traditionally the domain of the consumer goods firms, brands are becoming ever more ubiquitous. But less clear is the connection between brands and business success. The inaugural London Business School Marketing Conference focuses on how brands drive profits and how branding is becoming a source of strategy for businesses as a whole. Participants will hear from some of the most important names in the industry on making brands drive profits, participate in lively panel discussions, take a master class from world-renowned business professors, and network with marketing peers.

Speakers include Rita Clifton of Interbrand, Don Peppers of Peppers & Rogers Group and Nirmalya Kumar, author of Marketing as Strategy

I can even offer a special discount to readers of Creating Positive Context. Just quote MBXFS during the registration process and get £25 off the fee (just £200). Click here to find out more and to book.

Free Discussion Paper - Personal Knowledge Banks - Putting the power of personal data in the hands of individuals

When it comes to personal information, the dominant trend of the last few decades has been corporate control: companies have gathered and used personal information, treating it as a corporate asset to further the corporation’s purposes.

Yet dominant organisational approaches to the acquisition, ownership and use of personal data are hitting inherent relationship and structural limits and may even now be facing diminishing returns. The problem? Many different organisations collecting many different slices of information about the same individual can never really develop a ‘single view’ of this customer (few are rarely able to develop a single view of their own organisation...)

Ultimately the only entity capable of ensuring ‘a single customer view’ is the customer himself! So while organisations focus all their efforts on extending and deepening their ownership and control of personal data, there is surely a significant opportunity for firms to help individuals collect and manage their own data - in effect, by operating "Personal Knowledge Banks".

A prescient new discussion paper from the UK Buyer-Centric Commerce Forum (disclosure - I am on the Steering Group) argues the case for Personal Knowledge Banks. It defines and develops the opportunity and suggests that over time, the data available within Personal Knowledge Banks will grow richer, deeper and more accurate than the data held within organisations.

I have long been an advocate of the personal infomediary concept, ever since Hagel and Singer articulated the case back in the late 90's (see their book, Net Worth). I was even involved in setting-up the UK's first infomediary solutions provider, Conciera, back in 2000. So I am bound to agree that Personal Knowledge Banks represent a huge new market with the potential to transform the relationship between individuals and organisations and the ways organisations collect, manage and use data. At the same time, they address a wide range of privacy and data protection issues.

As the paper suggests:

Organisations that help place the power of personal data in the hands of individuals will be offering them a great and valued service – while potentially playing the pivotal role of ‘interface manager’ in a fast-changing commercial landscape. Personal Knowledge Banks raise many technical, legal, database management and relationship management issues. These hurdles can and will be addressed. But to facilitate this, we need to encourage the sharing of ideas and emerging ‘best practice’, and to explore new business models.

So to get the ball rolling again, the BCCF is making the paper available to anyone with an interest in the concept and opportunity. If you would like to receive a copy of "Personal Knowledge Banks - Putting the power of personal data in the hands of individuals", please email me at info@theomcgroup.com. If you have any ideas or feedback, I will share them with the BCCF.

The BCCF is also having a networking event on the topic, to be held in London at the end of May/June. Let me know if you are interested in receiving further details.

"One Minute Customer" Innovation Seminar

The OMC Group now offers a customer innovation seminar to help organisations explore new perspectives for innovating unique customer value, for building winning customer experiences and for achieving profitable growth. Illustrated throughout with examples of pioneering customer innovation plus applied thinking in context to a company's own market and plans, the seminar will equip managers with practical insights and approaches for creating innovative customer-based strategies, products, services and value propositions.

Download a seminar brochure (.pdf)

During an OMC Group seminar, attendees will learn about new customer innovation perspectives and their implications:

The Perspectives

- The changing role, skills and knowledge of the customer

- The new drivers and attributes of future customer value: Customer Outcomes, Performance and
Experience (COPE) perspectives

- The changing nature of markets and competition

- The role of advocacy, trust and commitment in building customer loyalty and strong relationships

- The differences between product, solution and customer innovation

- The need and opportunity for customer innovation to achieve sustainable growth: Why now?

- Maintaining a balance between breakthrough and incremental customer innovation

The Implications

- How to develop and apply Customer Think: Adopting a more explicit customer-first mindset and orientation

- How to craft a winning customer innovation strategy: Creating powerful customer value propositions

- How to deliver: New challenges, inputs, processes and capabilities

- The importance of creating a customer experience and knowledge infrastructure

- How to measure and assess return on innovation: Balancing customer and firm perspectives on performance

- Implications for strategy, branding, marketing, analytics and segmentation, customer service and employee alignment

If your organisation needs a seminar designed to your unique needs, we can develop a programme to match. To discuss your requirements, contact us by email or call on +44(0)845 057 4091.