Scaling Customer Decision Making Process

In yesterday’s blog post, I made a statement that I find a striking resemblance in the Toyota Supplier hierarchy (on left) depicted by Liker and Meier (The Toyota Way Fieldbook) and the Economic Pyramid model (on right) of Pines and Gilmore (The Experience Economy). It deserves a better description.

If we were to view the stages such as described in the blog post, The 7 step Lean Process of Marketing to Toyota we would see a natural progression through the stages of the supplier. A supplier starts working with Toyota at the stage of developing Mutual Understanding. They base this on the key elements of Trust, Mutual prosperity, Respect for People and Genchi gembutsu (actual part, actual place). It ultimately ends in Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) and Learning through PDCA. I am leaving out a significant portion of development in the five other steps but it suffices to say that there is a continued progression through the stages based on an increase of knowledge and sharing between the two parties.

In the The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage, Pine and Gilmore discussed the Progressions of Economic Value and corresponding to a level of Progression of Value Intelligence which I have combined in the above diagram. They so masterfully compared it with the statements:

If you charge for stuff (noise), then you are in the commodity business.
If you charge for tangible (data) things, then you are in the goods business.
If you charge for the activities (service) you execute, then you are in the service business.
If you charge for the time (experience) customers spend with you, then you are in the experience business.
If you charge for the demonstrated outcome (wisdom) the customer achieves, then and only then are you in the transformation business

When you hear discussion in Lean Marketing about mirroring the Customer Decision process it is sometimes difficult to see how it will scale to larger companies. These examples are the basis for such activity. It is sales and marketing responsibility to define them and to close the knowledge gaps that exist from one stage to the next. These gaps are readily apparent between each stage and typically well-defined. Review the blog posts, The 7 step Lean Process of Marketing to Toyota and Profiling the customer by knowledge gaps.

How to close the gaps is not readily defined in most companies. Sales and Marketing has seldom viewed their efforts from a perspective of knowledge gaps and with the ultimate goal of developing open innovation and co-creation platforms. As the New Economy unfolds whether Economy is prefaced by Experience, Transformation, User-Centric or Customer Centric, sales and marketing’s role will be defined by their ability to learn and share knowledge with the customer.