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Posted on March 9th, 2007 in Uncategorized.

The rise of customer power

Customer power, engagement and influence are rising, driven by the Web. The Giraffe Forum seeks to explore the shift from organization power to customer power.

The name “Giraffe Forum” is taken from the Long Neck principle developed by Gerry McGovern. It is part of a unique approach to identifying what customers really care about called Customer Carewords, which has been used by organizations such as Tetra Pak, Rolls-Royce, IKEA, the BBC, and Pioneer.

Every time Gerry McGovern partners have analyzed customer needs using Customer Carewords, we have found a Long Neck–a small set of things that really matter to customers in making any decision.

We nearly always find that what the organization thinks the Long Neck is very different to the customers think the Long Neck. In other words, what organizations really care about is not of much interest to customers and vice versa.

The Giraffe Forum is about exploring how to evolve better customer-centric thinking within organizations. In an era where customer power is rising, only those organizations that truly understand their customers can succeed.

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3 responses

  1. Ephraim Freed says:

    Added on May 16th, 2008 at 7:35 pm

    As an intranet manager for an organization of about 300 people it would be interesting to read more about how the Long Neck principle flushes out within an organization. How are customers defined for different services, such as expense reporting, intranets, etc? Is it the senior managemers who are guiding the organization, or the individual staff members whose work keeps the organization running?

  2. Gerry McGovern (blog author) says:

    Added on May 19th, 2008 at 9:05 pm

    Ephraim, I think a successful intranet is primarily driven by staff needs. However, it does require a management strategy. I have found that top tasks such as find people, book training and job vacancies are common across large organization (5,000 plus.)

    I’m not so sure the smake set of tasks apply within smaller organizations. For example, we did a task analysis for a smaller organization recenetly (we nearly always deal with large organizations) For the first time ever, find people was not a top task. And maybe that’s because in a smaller organization, it’s easier to find people without having to go to the intranet.

  3. Ephraim Freed says:

    Added on May 19th, 2008 at 9:27 pm

    Thanks for the reply Gerry. We’ll be doing a task and workflow analysis, so I suppose we’ll discover our own internal customer carewords, and we’ll build based on that research.

    I’ve discovered that much of the intranet analysis availalbe is focused on large companies and is not fully relevant for a small company’s intranet (under 500 people).

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