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

Description

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.

Twitter Accounts

Observations

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 18, 2013

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

Posted by Patty Seybold on January 18, 2013 in Customer Experience, Customer Loyalty, Customer Service, Customer-Centricity, Customer-contributed content, Customer-Facing Technologies, Customization, Ebusiness, Ecommere, Zazzle | Permalink

Comments

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

Description

Twitter Updates

Twitter Accounts

Facebook

Observations

January 18, 2013

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

Comments

Google Search

Customers.com Blogs:

Patricia Seybold Group Web Site

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

Blogs I Read