Comments on: Designing a Better Future http://thinkinglikeacustomer.com/differentiation/designing-a-better-future/ Balance your strategy Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:41:49 -0800 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 hourly 1 By: Barry Kirk http://thinkinglikeacustomer.com/differentiation/designing-a-better-future/comment-page-1/#comment-170 Barry Kirk Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:30:50 +0000 http://thinkinglikeacustomer.com/?p=607#comment-170 Bill, I very much appreciate your positioning this as designing a better future *for your customers*. Seems like we more often see the focus solely on designing a more profitable future for the brand, which obviously misses that the former is the best path to the latter. Putting your workshops participants in the customer's position seems like a very smart way to help them adopt that perspective. As I read through your approach it brought to mind a related technique I heard a marketing firm discuss at a conference a few years back -- they advocated using personas to make customer segments more "human" (something I was familiar with from my years in usability and user experience design). But they also recommended taking it one step further by creating "future-selves" for your personas -- basically projecting them 5, 10 and 15 years into the future to imagine how their needs, interests and buying power would evolve over time. It struck me as another potentially powerful technique for determining the future of any business. Bill, I very much appreciate your positioning this as designing a better future *for your customers*. Seems like we more often see the focus solely on designing a more profitable future for the brand, which obviously misses that the former is the best path to the latter. Putting your workshops participants in the customer’s position seems like a very smart way to help them adopt that perspective.

As I read through your approach it brought to mind a related technique I heard a marketing firm discuss at a conference a few years back — they advocated using personas to make customer segments more “human” (something I was familiar with from my years in usability and user experience design). But they also recommended taking it one step further by creating “future-selves” for your personas — basically projecting them 5, 10 and 15 years into the future to imagine how their needs, interests and buying power would evolve over time. It struck me as another potentially powerful technique for determining the future of any business.

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