Path to Participation

In Lean Marketing, Service Design and Design Thinking, we typically use the Customer Journey Map to describe the journey of a user through a series of touchpoints. Mapping this in detail and defining the resources, people, budget and marketing collateral to match each of these steps is imperative. After an organization does this and is Read More …

Lean Marketing Game from the Inside-Out.

Seldom will you hear me utilize the phrase from the Inside-Out. In fact, after discussing Visioning in most workshops I pass out some (play) guns and ask to be shot if they hear those words at any time the rest of the day. However, there is a time and place to view sales and marketing Read More …

It all starts with a Vision!

In this weeks podcast The Aroma of a Good Vision, I asked Ari Weinzweig, CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, MI to share the “secrets” that have helped take Zingerman’s from a 25-seat, 4-person start up to a nationally known, $40,000,000-organization employing over 500 people. He said it all starts with a Read More …

Standard Work and Customer Focus Together

In next week’s podcast with Steve Bell, the founder of Lean IT Strategies LLC, we discuss more than just Lean IT. We ended up talking (see the excerpt below) through much of the podcast on the context Lean seems to have; the ability to adapt while staying firmly rooted in its principles. Joe:  Does it Read More …

Was Maslow a Lean Marketer?

In my post Lean needs Marketing, more than Marketing needs Lean!, I found a striking resemblance between the Toyota Supplier hierarchy depicted by Liker and Meier (The Toyota Way Fieldbook) and the Economic Pyramid model of Pines and Gilmore (The Experience Economy). I was intrigued how that fit into the discussion that the authors of Read More …

Product to Customer Centric in 4 Steps

Becoming customer centric requires an organization to understand the emotional needs and difficulties of their prospects and customers (only the term “customer” will be used for the balance of the blog post). I have recently done a series of blog posts on empathy (The Role of Empathy in Design), that goes deeper into this subject. Read More …