By Jim McCarthy Jan 5, 2010 0 comments

Audience-Oriented, It’s What’s For Dinner

A couple weeks ago, Trevor O’Donnell passed along an interesting tidbit from The Artful Manager blog.  The tidbit that caught my eye was this:


“Arts and cultural experiences are among the most personal and complex goods on offer. It might be time to embrace an upside-down view of the marketplace that begins with the person primed for action rather than our separate (though desperate) organizational needs to fill our spaces.”

Read the whole piece.  The idea is that it’s possible for all of a consumer’s purchases (including nights out and arts) to happen the way they do on Lending Tree, where you say, “I need a loan” and then companies compete for it.

The problem with this is…well, there really isn’t a problem with this.  It’s a smart thought with some merit, but for me, it’s far less compelling than what’s underlying the Lending Tree model:

Being customer (or audience) oriented.jackie-chan-rumble-in-the-bronx

You don’t have to create a literal bidding competition for every expressed customer whim to “ embrace an upside-down view of the marketplace that begins with the person primed for action.”

All you have to do is think of the audience before you think of product, systems, logistics and the rest of it.

Remember: it’s FOR the audience.  Like Jackie Chan says.

It’s FOR the audience.

It’s FOR the audience.

Now build the rest of the organization around that.

Unlike Jackie, you probably won’t have to dive across a table covered with running circular saws or jump from the roof of one building to the balcony one floor down on the building across the street.

But you never know…

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