Outside Innovation: Amazon’s AutoRip: Will It Lure Customers Off iTunes?

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What is Outside Innovation?
It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services. The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes. The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.

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LEAD USERS
Eric von Hippel coined the term "lead users" to describe a group of both customers and non-customers who are passionate about getting certain things accomplished. They may not know or care about the products or services you offer. But they do care about their project or need. Lead users have already explored innovative ways to get things done. They're usually willing to share their approaches with others.
LEAD CUSTOMERS
I use the term "lead customers" to describe the small percentage of your current customers who are truly innovative. These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about.
LEAD CUSTOMERS AND LEAD USERS
We’ve spent the last 25 years identifying, interviewing, selecting, and grouping customers together to participate in our Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions. Over the years, we’ve learned how to identify the people who will contribute the most to a customer co-design session. These are the same kinds of people you should be recruiting when you set out to harness customer-led innovation.
HOW DO YOU WIN IN INNOVATION?
You no longer win by having the smartest engineers and scientists; you win by having the smartest customers!
CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN
In more than 25 years of business strategy consulting, we’ve found that customer co-design is a woefully under-used capability.

January 25, 2013

Amazon’s AutoRip: Will It Lure Customers Off iTunes?

I think that Amazon’s AutoRip is brilliant, including the way the company just quietly started doing it, surprising and delighting most customers who suddenly discovered that they had a whole online music library of music they loved that they didn’t have to create or buy. Watching what happens with AutoRip will be a fascinating case study to examine a number of issues:

When is it OK to do something that “benefits” your customers without asking for their consent?
What are the critical customer experience things you need to get right when you ’re helping customers “manage their stuff?”
Will Amazon’s CD AutoRipping service get customers to add Amazon Cloud Player to their devices? Will customers mind have two (or more) music libraries to “manage”?
A year from now, will AutoRip be seen as a turning point in the music marketshare battle?

Here's a quick intro to my article:

Amazon Takes on Apple in Digital Music
Combined CDs and AutoRip Make Amazon Cloud Player More Enticing
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, January 24, 2013

Do you like surprises? Many Amazon customers were surprised to discover that Amazon had given them a free gift: digital MP3 files of the music from CDs they had purchased directly from Amazon anytime. You can download and/or stream this music using an Amazon Cloud Player app on your device of choice or directly from your browser. We believe that this capability will cause many people to switch their music purchasing from Apple to Amazon.

Read a sample and download the full article in PDF.

Posted by Patty Seybold on January 25, 2013 in Amazon, Music | Permalink

Comments

That's a very thoughtful insight. Thank you!

Posted by: Anton Skornyakov | February 20, 2013 at 06:44 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

Outside Innovation

New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold

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January 25, 2013

Amazon’s AutoRip: Will It Lure Customers Off iTunes?

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