by: Chris Lawer
Over at Experience Curve, Karl Long is further deepening the analysis of customer experience elements that enable and promote co-creation.
Using the example of Second Life, the online multi-player gaming environment, Karl is doing a good job dissecting the components and catalysts of successful co-creation. These include:
- Developing a foundation of Trust
- Motivating and Educating the Customer to become more active participants
- Extending the emphasis on lean consumption-style, functional usability
- Providing access to peer group knowledge and skill
- Facilitating Individual freedom and control – or autonomy as Karl describes
- … leading to emotional / aspirational co-creativity and participation
What is interesting is Karl's use of "De-Motivators" and "Motivators" to identify both tablestake elements – those critical foundations upon which co-creative interaction can build – and motivators – those which speed the rate, frequency and learning intensity of customer co-creation.
I think it is fair to say that my past emphasis on understanding the dynamics of co-creation has had a distinct firm-centric or managerial slant. That is to say that I have been concerned about how firms can evolve from largely closed systems to open, co-creating learning systems. In effect, I have been exploring how old market learning capabilities (e.g. CRM style customer data gathering and profiling, traditional market research, segmentation etc.. ) can be usurped by new co-creative market learning mechanisms that emphasise much greater customer involvement and knowledge.
I can see now that many of the elements for successful co-creation exist outside the corporate or market mechanism of exchange, no matter how advanced a firm is in enacting new capabilities to learn from customers.
Rather, successful co-creation requires firms to find an appropriate locus of learning between both market and non-market sources of ideas and knowledge. Of course, the latter, founded on self-organising attention and engagement are mostly independent of market mechanisms and industrial age capitalisation altogether (Second Life being a good example). The problem is that many established firms still feel able to enter into these non-market, autonomous idea pools using industrial age logic and rational economic arguments, as well as in some cases tired and outmoded marketing efforts where the emphasis is on surface-level tinkering of the customer engagement model, not its wholesale and holistic realignment and reorientation.
I find that Karl's thinking and summary of co-creation experience elements can help such firms to discover the true meaning and enablers of co-creation through advanced forms of engagement driven by holistic experience elements. I suggest you take a look too…
Original Post: http://chrislawer.blogs.com/chris_lawer/2006/06/experience_hier.html
