Comments on: three thoughts on customer engagement…

By: hugh macleod

hugh macleod — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 05:37:21 +0000

Clever for clever’s sake, Milan

By: Milan Davidovic

Milan Davidovic — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 01:39:55 +0000

“It’s not about how much your product engages with the customer. It’s about how much your product allows your customer to engage with other people“
If you make, say, peritoneal dialysis machines, I’d think the latter depends on the former.
Or am I misreading this?

By: nabila

nabila — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 06:15:45 +0000

Hi Hugh,
just launched an e-commerce business,so client engagement is a real concern. Your post helped me today, very inspiring!
products as social objects, I totally agree especially today, and hopefully more and more…
Nabila

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 06:07:15 +0000

Don’t know if the aim necessarily has to be a “loveocracy”, although that would be great.
A “respectocracy” seems pretty worthy goal — and I think that might have been what Johnnie was getting at. Instead of getting snarky, he went in to the screening with an idea of the work and care going into the product. 2-way respect. We can live with that in our shop.

By: Eric Strauss

Eric Strauss — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 06:03:01 +0000

Coincidental, but my first guess for social objectification scalability would be in groups of 300. In Freakonomics, The Long Tail, or Blink (I can’t remember which one) a businessman comments on the appropriate time to open a new office. He answers, “I put 300 spaces in the parking lot, when they are full, I know it’s time to build a new office.“
The closer we are to each other, the better. And therefore lots of little groups are probably better than a few big ones. When we are all still people, not numbers, recommendations mean something.
In the same way that MBNA and others used affinity marketing to sell credit cards, we (bloggers) use common interests and trusted opinions to sell products (whether we are paid or not).
Because when two things are basically the same, like credit cards are, it’s really tough to choose one over the other. That’s why subjective opinions, like what your friends think, become more important than the objective tech specs.

By: Nick Smith

Nick Smith — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 02:07:31 +0000

Re: 2. Me thinks if you can crack this you’ve cracked universal appeal.
If your product or service helps me to let go of the idea of separate interests then it must also acknowledge that part of me that needs to feel the connection that exists between us, the part that seeks for the confirmation and safety of knowing that we are not separate.