WHAT’S PRODUCT 2.0?

Support customers' product lifecycles with Web 2.0 services—that’s Product 2.0! Product 2.0 is the result of applying Web 2.0 approaches to the customer lifecycle surrounding your products and services. Think of it as product-centric “one-stop shopping.” On a single Web page, or from a single portal, customers can access all the information and tools they need to explore, select, buy, use, maintain, upgrade, replenish, and renew a product or service (as well as companion or complementary products and services).

Product 2.0 is the way we are currently designing most of our Web sites and customer experiences. It’s cross-lifecycle. It’s also cross-touchpoint, crosschannel, and cross-interaction point. But it’s product-centric.

WHAT’S BIZ3.0?

When you design your current or nextgeneration business around customers’ outcomes, that’s Biz3.0. Biz3.0 is the result of designing your customer experience and your business offerings around your customers’ needs and goals. You provide experiences that are designed to help particular customer audiences in particular contexts achieve their desired outcomes. Customers can access all the information and tools they need to accomplish their particular outcome from a single Web page, or from a single portal, or starting from a Web search, referral, or phone call. BIZ3.0 is cross-company, crossboundary, multi-vendor, and multi-party. It’s also cross-touchpoint, cross-channel, and cross-interaction point. But it’s customer scenario-centric; not product-centric.

Today’s one-stop-shopping Web sites, portals, and outsourced services are the 1.0 versions of Biz3.0. Today, you might go to Expedia to plan a family vacation (unless you’re using frequent flyer miles, in which case you’re out of luck), or to Yahoo! Finance to rebalance your investment portfolio (except that you also need transactional access to your bank and brokerage accounts). You may rely on a subscription agency to manage your corporate library’s subscriptions. Or, you might rely on a third-party outsourced HR benefits firm (and Web site/call center) to enable employees to manage their retirement plans, vacation days, training resources, healthcare plans, and career goals.

Today, customers have to “go somewhere” to begin to execute a scenario. Tomorrow, customers will “start anywhere” when they execute their scenarios. All the resources, tools, and information customers need will come to them—cross-touchpoint, cross-device, cross-channel and cross-company.

We can see the seeds of Biz3.0 today in the form of full-functioned tools, gadgets, and widgets that can be syndicated to appear, in context, wherever the customer is. So, for example, if I’m on Amazon.com buying a book on investment planning, I may find a Fidelity retirement planning tool. I don’t have to “go” to the Fidelity Web site to use this tool. I can use it in situ.

The good news is that, as you move to BIZ3.0, you can leverage the investments you’re currently making in Product 2.0. You’ll reuse all the relevant components, tools, and services you’ve created to support customers’ cross-lifecycle relationships with your products and services.

PRODUCT 2.0 IS A PRODUCT-CENTRIC APPROACH TO CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

To be honest, we seem to be much better at designing customer experiences around our products than we are at designing experiences around our customers’ personas and scenarios.

Let’s call this the “Product 2.0 approach to marketing.” You envision the complete end-to-end customer lifecycle vis a vis your products and services: from customer exploration and decision making, through buying, to using/consuming products, through troubleshooting, maintaining, replenishing, and renewing products.

Great merchandisers have practiced this art for years. Yet Web 2.0 technologies and trends make it easier than ever to implement product-centric, cross-lifecycle marketing...