Shaping Business And Customer Wants
Businesses should be aware of how they shape and manage customer wants
Progress always shapes the items we want and, yet, what we want shapes the path of progress for businesses. There’s a sweet spot between these two where the most successful businesses always come to fruition and they do this in two ways.
First, they fulfill a need customers want, then expand upon it. A good example of this is Facebook. It was not the first social network and it won’t be the last, but it is the most popular. This meant, at time of its creation, it had lost a major advantage: being first. But what the company did was maintain a unique focus on longterm goals, ignore short-term financial benefits and execute policies and ideas, then react to user yells.
By doing this, they distinguished themselves from the more static and less innovative networks before them. This is a key way they found success.
Second, businesses note customer wants then massage them into unique wants only they can provide. The best example of this was Apple’s iPod. Of course everyone wanted to listen to music on the go; mobile MP3 players were already around, but hardly popular.
The iPod’s key was streamlining: it made transfers easy, it made the controls easy and it made acquiring new music easy. This created a demand for simplicity that users didn’t know they could have.
This has shaped our wants and desires in terms of tech in numerous ways. A good example is how we consider cars. Right now, BMW, for example, is investing in ’AirTouch’ 3D gesture control. They demonstrated it recently and it’s technology that allows, says Mashable,
“users to adjust volume, access navigation and even answer a phone call without touching a single button — everything was controllable with in-air gestures.”
This might seem like a luxury upgrade but consider the importance of being able to control your car, without having to grab or look too far away from steering. After all, distractions are a key reason accidents occur. By helping reduce distractions, we better help customers - and thus create a want for customers.
In future then when you look for used BMW cars for sale, air gestures will be considered normal. This has happened with many of luxury additions: ABS brakes, airbags and so on. All became mandatory and you find these in second-hand cars today.
Businesses then should consider this when it comes to how they market- as these are ways we shape customer wants and desires.