End-user refers to the guest, patron, shopper, customer, and/or buyer, of a particular service, product, or project. A continuous focus on end-user wants, desires, fantasies, and needs, yields a customer-based view of the marketplace, and a particular place or product, that in itself is a competitive advantage.
In today's highly competitive "consumer society" nothing is more important than the product concept as it is viewed in a customer (guests)'s mind. When Nike was in its prime and still somewhat true today, as young kids laced up a new pair of Nikes they weren't putting on new shoes - they were buying into an entire aspirational lifestyle as embodied by the Nike product - Michael Jordan, athletic excellence, etc. And all of this was communicated ? e.g. brand messaged by Nike as - "Just Do It."
As strategic marketers, we begin with the "end user" and work backwards. We evaluate how people will use a product, or a space, then determine the best means of inter-relating various activities. In the built environment - planning ofteb begins with land use plans, proceeding to individual parcel planning, then vertical structure design, and finally ... a focus on the end-user's space. Reversing that process brings the promise of "next-generation" thinking in product design.
Focusing on the end user first seems obvious. But many enterprises - hospitals, manufacturers, banks, developers - are organized around, and for the convenience of, the "production function: "The hospital is organized to support doctors, surgery and lab work; manufacturers are fashioned to maximize factory efficiency; the bank's scbeme is largely the byproduct of "best backroom (operations) practice." With this approach we'd not argue that there?s no customer benefit - the patient generally gets well, and the car or zipper usually works.
But how many enterprises build the entire logic of the firm around the flow of the customer through the A to Z process of experiencing the organization? Answer: not many! Disney, historically, has been one of the notable exceptions. Its business concept is the creation of superb customer episodes, starting in the parking lot or sooner.
Embracing the primacy of the End User, planning begins down a new strategic path, which necessarily means "zero basing" an entire enterprise, by focusing on customers, tagging around after them, developing a sense for the myriad ways they "get a handle" on your company or projects, how they form first impressions of you (from ads, landscaping, angry ex-customers, vendors, etc.). That is, what "vibes" -- exactly the right word -- you give off from up close and from afar. From there, how the customer engages his or her world is both a logical and illogical extension. This map, if you will, must always put the purchaser (or End User) at the center of the universe. That is where you and I as customers always do put ourselves, as we create a script with idiosyncratic "us" or "me" starring in "me and Marriott? or whatever the product may be.
Such an approach to planning requires discipline, playfulness, and an obsession for clean- sheet- of- paper reconception of every iota of your business and your projects. According to this model, the factory, the operating room or the kitchen sets come last not first. The production function, regardless of the type of enterprise, is simply the consequence of the fantasy you hope customers will weave. And, above all, a no-nonsense dramaturgical strategy requires clinging to words such as myth, fantasy, and illusion.
For better or worse, your organization is not real. It is no more and no less than the sum total of fictionalized, elliptical images created by your customers, employees, vendors, distributors, and communities as they experience you on a day-to-day basis. In the end, to the customer, ?it is all about me.?
- We thank Norm Elder, for his collaboration and origination of much of the above thinking concerning end-user primacy.
