Outside Innovation

Our Review of Zazzle.com: How Easy Is It to Create and Sell Customized Products?

Zazzle.com is amazing. You should know about it, if you don’t. It’s a privately-held business, headquartered in California that was founded and is still run by a father and his two sons. Their secret sauce: print brilliant multi-color images on just about any surface quickly and professionally and ship that personalized, customized product overnight. Zazzle.com is a true customer ecosystem. It attracts 8 million visitors per day; 3.5 million/day to its US site and the rest to 17 country or region-localized websites. The site features 80 million unique product designs in 50 product categories, with 150,000 new products added daily. These products are produced and shipped, usually within 24 hours, to over 224 countries. There are over 1 million sellers on Zazzle. These are people who are making a business by selling their own creations.

This week, Ronni Marshak takes us on a tour of how easy (or not) it is to create your own custom products and create a store in which to sell them on Zazzle.com.

Being Creative on Zazzle.com
How Easy Is It to Create (and Sell) Your Own Customized Products?
By Ronni T. Marshak, EVP & Sr. Consultant/Analyst, Patricia Seybold Group, January 17, 2013

Learn from Alaska Airlines’ Director of Customer Innovation

By Ronni Marshak

In her interview with Curtis Kopf, Managing Director, AlaskaAir.com and Customer Innovation, Patty Seybold learned how the commitment to providing an exceptional customer experience resulted in the airline’s pioneering work in customer-facing innovation. It surprised me to learn that Alaska Air Group (Alaska and Horizon Airlines) is the seventh largest airline in the U.S. (Here, on the East Coast, Alaska Air seems very niche and exotic). Further, the airline was the first to book flights and sell tickets via the Internet, the first to offer Web check-in, the first to use onboard POS devices to accept debit and credit cards in the air, among other innovations! Who knew?

Curtis Kopf heads up Alaska Airlines’ digital, mobile, and ecommerce team. Patty is a fan of his combination of responsibilities: “It’s hard to separate e-commerce and online self-service from mobile tools and your mobile-friendly web site. So it also makes sense to combine mobile and e-commerce/online under one role. But what’s different and particularly interesting to me about Curtis Kopf’s role at Alaska Airlines is his involvement in the company’s initiatives to use technology to make it easy for customers to get things done when they’re interacting with Alaska Airlines and its personnel at the airport and/or on the plane.”

How could your organization benefit from an explicit executive focus on customer innovation? Maybe it’s time to hire or promote a Director/VP of Customer Innovation in your company.

~ Ronni

Managing Customer Innovation at Alaska Airlines
Alaska Airlines Combines Customer Innovation with E-Commerce & Mobile
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, May 31, 2012

Manage My Stuff, Our Stuff, and Our Collaboration Around Our Stuff

By Ronni Marshak

In this article, Patty Seybold dives into the value proposition of managing your customers’ “stuff” and how it leads to brand loyalty. She points out that customers want to have a place to manage:

- Transactions
- Assets
- Projects
- Resources
- Relationships with you

And they want you to help them get things done.

In, what she calls, this new battleground for consumer brands—“managing my stuff” in the cloud—she believes that “the brand(s) that win our hearts and minds by becoming our preferred place(s) to manage and consume our digital media are highly likely to be the ones from which we buy the most.” She also believes that this is a big differentiator for B2B providers—“Customers are much more likely to remain loyal to the supplier(s) that provide them with easy ways to keep track of, monitor, manage, get alerts about, and take actions to preserve and enhance the investments they’ve made in these vital systems.”

Manage My Stuff and Coordinate Around Our Stuff
What Tools and Information Do Customers Need and Value for Personal and Professional Use?
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, October 20, 2011

Staples Misses an Opportunity to Retain Customers

One of the ways I tell that the jobless rate in an area has increased is by looking at the Staples parking lot. People without jobs often set up or improve their home offices—either to help them look for jobs and/or to build their own small business. It makes you feel better. It puts you in control of your destiny. And there are lots of helpful, upbeat Staples associates who will lend a helping hand.

We've been fans of a lot of things that Staples has done right. Its stores are well-marked and easy to navigate. Its main web site is also easy to use and has some "firsts" for office supply stores, like customers' ratings and reviews. (Who would have thought that these mattered for office supplies? But they do!) And Staples’ world-class re-invention of rebates — EasyRebates — was one of the case studies in Outside Innovation.

But we've discovered one area in which Staples (and many other businesses) could do a much better job. It's an investment that would pay off big time in customer loyalty as measured by actual repeat business. Staples needs to make it easier for its customers to "manage their stuff." In particular, Staples should make it easy for people to categorize their purchases by project or client. They should let you track the purchases of multiple people on a single, linked account. Staples should make it much easier to get a picture of everything you've spent in a given time period, and to sort and organize it. They should make it easier to repurchase something from a previous order. And they should make it easier to replenish things you purchase frequently. These all seem like missed opportunities for Staples (and for any company catering to business customers).

For more insight about what Staples does well and not and where you might improve the experience for your business customers, read Ronni Marshak’s Customer Experience Audit.

How How Well Does Staples Help a Small Company “Manage My Stuff?”
Customer Experience Audit of Staple’s Capabilities to Let Small B2B Customers Manage Their Relationship
By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, July 21, 2011

What’s the Future for Build-A-Bear?

This week, I took a new look at Build-A-Bear Workshop, the retailer that specializes in letting kids create their own stuffed animals. I’ve been a big fan since I discovered Build-A-Bear and wrote about it in BRANDchild. But I was discomfited to discover that this mid-size retailer’s stock has been in a downward slide for a number of months, despite a stronger Q1 performance in 2010. Build-A-Bear makes an interesting case study. It’s also a great brand that could use your help and insights! What’s your prescription for Build-A-Bear? How could this amazing brand continue to grow, increase its sales and profits and attract more young customers? Please give us your ideas. We’ll pass them along to Build-A-Bear’s execs and reward the best ideas with a Build-A-Bear gift certificate!

Build-a-Bear Workshop’s Challenge
Can an Early Innovator in Personalized Retail Experience Recapture Its Momentum?
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, July 8, 2010

Addressing a Customer Pain Point as the Basis for a New Business

What’s at the heart of a good customer-centric business model? We believe that it has four significant components:

1. Ensure that the model is designed to address or mitigate customers’ moments of truth.

2. Ensure that you address those moments of truth with innovative approaches that take full advantage of available technology.

3. Hone an efficient execution engine that: a) lets you make money while you’re meeting customers’ moments of truth, and b) builds barriers to entry through experience, scale, and distance traveled on the learning curve.

4. Entice customers into contributing value to your business as they reap the benefits from the products and services you provide

Back in 2003, we described Netflix as a good example of a company that built its very successful business by addressing moments of truth in the “I want to watch a movie at my convenience” scenario. Netflix’s innovation was to eliminate the guilt and inconvenience associated with returning rental movies and the affront of being charged late fees. The new Netflix customer scenario was a big hit: Pay a monthly fee. Rent as many movies as you want each month. Return them when you’re done with them and get a new one in the mail within 2 days. No pain. No fuss. No bother. And a great database of movies to choose from.

Now that digital downloads are easy, NetFlix still continues to thrive, having built customer loyalty by addressing the rental movie convenience issue and by embracing digital downloads aggressively. Although I have lots of other choices for digital downloads (on demand from my cable supplier, Amazon, etc.), I still think of Netflix first when I want to watch a movie or a television re-run.

Most NetFlix customers now enjoy both forms of movies—the ones they receive in their physical mailboxes each week and the ones they download on impulse. (The fact that Netflix is still thriving is reinforced every time I go to my local U.S. Post Office, which has three mail slots: Our Town, Out of Town, Netflix.)