Innovation comes from listening AND interpreting what you hear. Traditionally, companies decide internally what to produce and offer it to customers. But there’s a market shift underway led by Dell, Converse, Amazon and others using crowdsourcing to ask customers what they want to buy before they build it.
WIND Mobile launched with an ad campaign that promised to put them in the same league as market driven innovators. On their website, they ask people join the conversation asking about what customers want, how they feel about contracts and their thoughts on fees. We were expectantly waiting for them to launch something DIFFERENT but it seems they’ve delivered a slight twist on a broken monetization model, instead of paying for your handset over the course of your contract, you purchase it up front.
If WIND Mobile was truly having a conversation with their customers, they would have come up with a better solution. It’s clear customers don’t want to pay as much as they currently do, whether it is up front, or over a three year contract. Customers see that mobile users in other countries pay far less than we do here in Canada. If we assume there is a good reason for this, shouldn’t mobile companies being trying to discover innovative profitable solutions that will save customers money as well?
I’m worried about WIND Mobile’s brand strategy for three reasons. First, they seem to be offering the same thing as everyone else, just packaged around “being nice” and listening. Second, they are creating a work-around for the industry, not innovating new solutions. Last, if their strategy doesn’t work, other companies interested in involving their customers in the innovation process will have one more failed example to deter them. It is kind of disappointing when what is possible with crowdsourcing could be so much more.
Seriously.
Had they had a *real* conversation with their potential customers, they might have come up with a game-changer such as incorporating credit card functionality into their phones as an ancillary revenue stream that would in turn allow them to credit back a percentage of sales to the customer’s account to help *minimize* their phone bill.
While we’re at it, they might’ve also incorporated QR tags in the phone software to hardlink information as well as increase credit card functionality. They could’ve worked with vendors and other partners to speed implementation of these open-source tags to become a leader in this market – and force their rivals to play catchup.
But, they didn’t.
Not only their loss, but their customers’ as well.
(FWIW, I’ll be following your SAAS closely. In initially researching your parent company, I came across an old press release (05.18.06) and initially wondered why they weren’t leveraging their underlying IP. In following up past the press release, I quickly and pleasantly discovered that they had/are. Cheers on helping to remake the world a better, more creative and way more interesting place.)