We have become value providers, not product providers.

The Every Day Life / Post Digital culture is presenting us with new marketing concepts and opportunities. Changing our focus from creating customers through products, and better customers through line extensions

. To focusing on direct relations, memberships and extended value.

Two things:

– Products are worthless until they are introduced to the situation where they create value. (link)

– It’s not only the content industries (music, film, media) that will be affected by the changes brought by digital communication
. As both people’s behaviors, and their accessibility change, more and more business categories will find that the fundamentals for how they create customers, are disrupted.

In the words of Peter Drucker:

“The purpose of a business is to create a customer.”
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. ”
– Peter Drucker

This invites companies to think of themselves as value providers, not product providers, to understand that customers are created through members, not features
. And that extending customer value comes from within the situation where we are already creating value, not artificial product line extensions introducing foreign situations to the customers
.

A simple diagram to introduce some suggested changes: