New Gig

This past weekend I accepted an offer to join Monitor Group's Marketspace unit as Global Practice Leader for the Marketspace Advisory practice. 

Here's the big idea,  based on a new book called Best Face Forward by Jeffrey Rayport and Bernie Jaworski.  Consumer products and services industry executives sometimes say, "We should outsource/ offshore marketing, or customer service."  Or, "We can make more money by pushing sales or service out of the store and through the web to pc's, pda's, and kiosks."  So they change those interfaces. Sometimes they do a good job.  But often the operational and financial results don't reflect that.   

What's missing?  Rayport and Jaworski advocate taking a global view of what *combination* of in-person, remote, and automated interfaces make sense for different kinds of customers.  They present a framework for understanding these interface *systems*, case studies that illustrate when they're working well and when they aren't, and a set of practical tools for diagnosing the overall health of your own organization's  interfaces.  Marketspace Advisory then applies these ideas for specific clients to help realize the gains in customer retention, referrals, and service costs everyone expected.  Jeffrey helpfully boils it down to three  words:  "Improving Corporate Usability".

Is this description useful to you?  It's pretty interesting to me. For the last six years, I've been living at the intersection of firms and organizations like ArsDigita that developed world-changing software,  and firms like Razorfish that help clients make the most of it.  Home truths for me have been that "online" can't be viewed in isolation, but rather extends "offline" and that organizations need to look at how to blend both in their operations.  Also, I've observed that successful efforts (business and otherwise) on the Web and elsewhere are built on community-oriented "structured collaboration" concepts, which depend not just on value to be exchanged, but on trust and affinity among the exchangers, and ease of use too.  And, I've had the opportunity to build sales and marketing organizations to help grow businesses based on these ideas, and to work with terrific clients to realize their promise. I'm excited now to join a first-class team with shared passions, to do great work and further build a great business.   

I  hope to hear from you if your interests run to these issues as well.