Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World

Old Models and Their Problems

As important as customers are to every business, it's amazing how seldom organizations explicitly consider how they think about the people who keep them in business. What we're talking about here are the frameworks that guide organizations in characterizing what their customers are doing and why. Sometimes an organization may not even be conscious of these processes, but models exist nonetheless. Historically, businesses have seen people as consumers, message receivers, rational actors, and human factors. As we'll see, none of these models are sufficient for developing empathy, understanding experience, or dealing with the unpredictability of the human world.

Consumers, Literally

Perhaps the worst model we've come across is one that views people as nothing more than consumers, i.e., purely as a means to make profit. The authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto give one of the best accounts of this model and its consequences. With the advent of the industrial age, "the customers who once looked you in the eye while hefting your wares in the market were transformed into consumers."^[13] They quote Jerry Michalski, a long-time Internet industry analyst and organizational consultant, who notes that businesses began to see a consumer as really no more than "a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash." If you're reading this book, it's unlikely that you or your company take this view, but we're sure you've come across companies that do. ...