Related information, articles and discussions

Here is a list of articles that talk about customer satisfaction, co-creation of your brand and how customer loyalty can be gained. All these articles go on to show that ValueJini indeed provides you with a powerful way to not just retain customers, but also attract new customers.

Customer communication and interaction

• Listen, or pay up - Business Standard
  "...consumers are not only talking back to companies, but also with each other. The result is that businesses no longer completely control their own brands..."
• What's being said about you - Financial Times
  "Getting feedback in the consumer market is very important...We are trying to co-ordinate it on a global basis...With feedback, we can find out what the customer is really looking for."
• Emerging Business Units As A Means to Develop Innovation with Customer Involvement
  "...To create truly innovative products or services that are discontinuous (ideas that are not simply incremental improvements of existing products and services) you need to get outside your world. New perspectives directly from customers and processing the ideas outside of stove-piped business units that tend to dampen creativity..."

Customer loyalty

• Why are loyal customers are harder to find today?
  "...you might also be loyal to a company because they've customized more things for you gradually and eventually it has just become too inconvenient for you to leave..."

Crowdsourcing and Co-create

• Product Co-Creation
  "Increasingly, the old methods of measuring a moment in time of customer or member need, expectation or desired outcome via surveys, focus groups, etc are not capable on their own to develop essential product and service experiences. Such intelligence gathering is too slow, too removed, too often misinterpreted, and too old to be useful in the design and delivery of products and services in a "real time", customized world."
  "We are witnessing the evolution of a new means of production from the previous century's command and control structure to a more networked system where people outside the organization can contribute valuable intellectual capacity with internal employees. They collaborate together to create essential value that becomes customized products or services which in turn they buy and evangelize with unprecedented vigor."
  * Cambrian House - an exciting new company from Canada where the entire product development process from Ideation, Business Case, Design & Production, Distribution, and Marketing is driven by "crowdsourcing"
  * CrowdSpirit - use crowds to develop and bring to market tangible, inexpensive, electronic devices such as CD players, joysticks for video games, and Web cams
  Gannett - YES That Gannett the news organization - has plans to change its newsroom to take advantage of peer production, putting readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers, and investigators

In practise...

• Nokia Wants Your Product Ideas
  "..."The ability to include large numbers of users into the development cycle means you can have a much more collaborative approach to development and you can try ideas out, refine them and move forward-or fail fast and get out," said Nokia's Iannucci. Blogger Oliver Thylmann (http://blog.thylmann.net/), who took part in a Nokia product development workshop this month, believes many European companies are set to follow the more open model, leveraging customer input to grow. "Working with your customer is something where the world is going to," said Thylmann, who has been writing about technology since 2001. "As a company you cannot close yourself off from the world anymore. If you're locked in your ivory tower and there is discussion about you going on, it makes sense to get out there and take part in that conversation."..."
• Girls4Sport a finalist in international competition
  "...our product ideas come from the field and people telling us what they want...."