Co-creation is not about getting customer feedback and acting upon them, which the traditional marketing has been practising for long now. It goes much beyond and goes to the realm of experience where customers co-create the product and thus value for themselves. For instance, even when companies engage their customers by soliciting inputs before pushing the products, it does not actually engage them in the way they want it, as such interactions don’t explore the kind of relationship that customers want. One doesn’t want a relationship with a firm by buying a product, but wants to improve the quality of life with that product.

Time has changed a lot now; and marketing is no more a one-way communication but a two-way street, where customers are getting increasingly interactive with the product. The whole concept of traditional marketing meant only from marketers’ perspective, as it helped them in communicating only what they wanted to say.

Going back to traditional marketing, concepts like target marketing looked at customers as prey. But today customers refuse to be so, they hit back saying they are individuals; individual human beings with separate demands, aspirations and product usages. Today they’re trying to take more control of their experience both from marketers and products. As individuals become more informed, they put the burden on the firm to essentially engage them in the way they want and co-create value.

What’s happening today is that when a customer goes to buy a product he carries with him some notions about the product, well before a sales person could tell what product the customer should go for. This is a double-edged sword: this information is power for the customer, while for the marketer, this is a burden—a call to deliver customisation.

What I am saying is companies must expand their resource base to accommodate customer needs and must begin to look at them as a resource, as word-of-mouth is a very powerful tool to build trust. To my mind, there’s a huge opportunity in such consumer interaction and co-creation. But, unfortunately the existing marketing practices aren’t suited for this. Companies must recognise the importance of co-creation, where the customer can go and tell what he doesn’t want to hear from a company.

It has to shift its focus from the product to ‘experience.’ When the marketing concept was invented, individual needs were assumed to be very static, but it is no more today. Customer needs are fast becoming very dynamic today. Neither companies nor customers can predict what they would want a few months later. Take for example, a hotel. The kind of service I need for a business trip is entirely different from that of a family trip. So, a hospitality marketer has to offer services according to my changing needs, and not an all-fits-one service.

The abundance of information and awareness. Today customers can share their experiences through various mediums and anybody can have access to others’ experience of a particular product. But this wasn’t so in the past. Somebody would see a commercial of a product and would buy it thinking it’s good. And if the product failed to deliver what has been promised, he did not have any option getting it crosschecked mainly due to lack of information from peers, thinking that he was the only unlucky one to buy flawed product. But today he can find that thousands have had same bad experience. He can even find it well before buying the product.

Coming to the trigger or the central point that’s making a customer active today, is, to my mind, the flow of information between individuals. On a large level, this information flow is far more and overwhelming between customers than and between a firm and customers. In fact, customers are forming their own communities, in effect, giving feedback to companies. Tremendous amount of communication is flowing freely today and this is the trigger, and the challenge for marketers is to act up on this flood of information that’s ever demanding.

Basically, the entire gamut of communication technology does this. Not just the Internet, other mediums like mobile phones are also a major contributor. These two are allowing customers to become more aware of products and services, letting them voice themselves, thus making it a two-way process. Customers want to have their say when they buy a product, and the freedom to suggestion to provide a solution even. They want marketing people to ask them what they want and not impose what they have in the showroom. Marketing has to be done in such a way that the interaction becomes a two-way process where the customer gets the chance to be active and has the freedom to demand what he wants.

The starting point for a company is to get their people out of the selling mode. The key to achieve this is to have a dialogue with customers —to be interactive with customers plus sharing the product knowledge with them. However, the important point is not just interaction. The key is bettering the interaction skills. Improving these skills or what I call internal sharing of customer and product feedback, is one crucial step that a firm must take, for this can tell it how connected or disconnected it is with customers. It’ll tell what customers think about the product, does it have value and does the promise holds or not.

The second step is continuous innovation. What’s pertinent here is that a company may already have what the customer is asking for, but the key differentiator is the way it’s presented. Customers want an environment to interact according to the services for which they are approaching. So, companies must design their process of providing service in a more flexible way, which can help them understand the needs and situations of each customer. Marketers must also create an ‘experience environment’, as experience sticks with the customer for long.

You can see glimpses of it here too. Look at Sony’s Indian Idol show. Millions were asked to vote through SMSes. This was nothing but simple participation of people where they could voice their opinions as to who should win or who they want to see on the dais. Again, sometimes even public could tell the channel how the storyline should evolve. Chennai’s Landmark Bookstore too is a good example. It spends a lot of time in holding events at its stores by engaging readers, and some good speakers as also authors. Its trained employees interact with readers and help them choose books and share their knowledge about books and give them options available on the same topic they are looking for. ITC’s e-Choupal is another good example. It interacts with farmers on a regular basis and find out what they want and what are the problems they face. ITC has even staff only for interacting with farmers, post which the company improvises it accordingly.

Not really. In Kotler’s theory, the company decides to reach out to the customer and it doesn’t involve the customer going to the company. But the call of the hour is allowing customers to go to company when they want. The problem with this model of a company reaching out to its customers is that it limits the ability to understand the customer needs and problems. There are two reasons for this: first, it’s somebody from a company who’s trying to do the understanding part, and secondly, he interprets the customer needs from the lens of the product he wants to make and sell. Whereas, in the customer interaction model, where there are many a forum and discussion, the company will not only rapidly learn what its customers want in a product but also learn to change the mode of interaction, because it depends a lot on how something is being communicated. Though it’s present in the 4Ps of marketing, today the quality of such interaction is a lot richer. A company has to learn to differentiate between concept and practice.

Most of the time, even after a company adopts the traditional marketing model customers come and vent their dissatisfaction. And that’s it. What’s lacking is the participation of the customer, and the role of customers as a community in evolving those elements. So, companies must open up the process of customer participation, because the bases on which customers judge a product are different from that of the company.

Once you open up your marketing process and allow customers to be part of that process, what emerges out will be very different. The key lies in letting customers decide what they want by making them a part of the process as he wants to be. Another important thing is if companies focus on experience and interaction together with the 4Ps, which focus on product, the customer isn’t just interacting with one product of one company but other products as well, which could be complimentary products.

What is needed is, somebody must take the responsibility for an integrated product experience. The challenge for any willing company is to develop an environment that makes the customer community an integral part of its business as a customer community itself is part of the value equation.

There is one more aspect to this whole co-creation process: while in traditional marketing, companies looked at the ‘place’ where they segment their customers and decide the channel through which the product should flow to customers, today customers want to choose their channels and time of delivery. The difference is, earlier marketers decided on the place and time of delivery, but today it’s the other way around.

I won’t say the Kotler model is getting replaced completely, but what I want to say is that in addition to that there should be a marketing model that involves customers actively because they’re more informed and have more access to options today.

It’s not about putting customer at the centre alone. It’s all about putting experience at the centre of it because what we are talking about is not customer being king or queen but about creating value together. In the experience-centric approach, the outcome is not predetermined but comes after the joint collaboration of value by the company and the customer.

What I’d like to underline is, customer experience is also about employee experience. In a customer-employee interaction if the employee is not able to solve the problem of the customer, then the employee is not the one to be blamed but the system, because it has not geared up to fulfil the customer requirement.

Yes. I think it’s possible in every industry. All it needs is interaction like when one goes to the dealer to buy a car the experience he gets there matters. Customising the design of an automobile can really work. See how Harley-Davidson has been doing it.

A firm takes time to build its capability. It’s hard to develop anything and make it acceptable to customers. It took years for Apple to be kosher. It’s too early to say what will happen a few years down the line. But what’s needed is, companies must keep on innovating and develop points of experience in their products over the years. They’ve to understand their customers completely and keep innovating. Customers are very dynamic and to build up to their competence is time consuming. It can’t be done sitting in a room, you’ve to be out there, continuously engaging customers.

Firstly, a company should have the ability to experience the business like customers do and rapidly bring in the knowledge of customer experience inside the company and disseminate it among the employees. The other aspect is facilitating and engaging in a two-way communication with customers. Firms must provide them a platform to interact and not just allow customers to complain, but also give suggestions and solutions.

Doing market research, knowing about the perspectives and taking the learning back is good but not enough if the outcome comes out to be only lip service. When a customer asks for some value in a product and the sales person does not have that, then the motive behind doing the research fails. Customer doesn’t want to be labelled as king or queen but wants the firm to respond the way he wants it. He wants them to understand that he’s well informed and wants the knowledge about the product to be shared with him. Look at airlines: very often flights get cancelled or delayed for hours, forcing passengers to waste their time in the lounge, all because they were not provided with advance information. The point is I’m driving home is transparency. Customers want companies to be more transparent in their process and offering.