Product servitisation: the new frontier

I was going through my old notebook and came across some notes about an interview Sam Lucent (HP’s design chief) gave to Business Week. This interview was published a while ago (November 2005), but the concept is quite contemporary:

As products become much more complex, it’s not about designing the individual product, it’s about orchestrating this complex ecosystem to create a wonderful customer experience. So my job touches on all aspects — all the tangible, visual, real-world aspects of that experience. If you just think of a customer journey, it’s everything from collateral and point-of-sale to packaging to the industrial design, the user interface, and the area where interface and the software and the hardware come together, which we call product interaction. So it’s orchestrating all of those touch points

Sam Lucent had the foresight to understand that in order to achieve competitive advantage, companies need to engage customers in an emotional level by providing delightful experiences. By servitising their products, companies can not only create strategies that are difficult to copy, but also open new market opportunities. In most industrialised countries, the service sector accounts for approximately 70% of the GDP, offering a great potential for product-based companies to expand.

Nike+ is another great example. They’ve managed to migrate from this ‘company/product centric’ campaign - Just do it, to a networked and co-created way of evolving the brand. I just love seeing all these paradigms being broken! Welcome to the service economy!