Know your customer - and get CREATIVE!
Yesterday, during our last Disney class workshop on Disney’s
creative process, we completed a number of group related activities, the last
one of which involved thinking of creative ways to improve GWU. We ultimately landed
on the idea of increasing opportunities to attend GWU, and exploring the different
ways this could be achieved. At the end of our session, James and Leah our cast
member leaders informed us of Mickey’s 10 commandments. The first of which is Know your audience - Don't bore people,
talk down to them or lose them by assuming that they know what you know. Hearing this and conducting this exercise
reminded me of an article we explored in class, a Forbes article titled “Three
Imperatives for Social Innovation,” which discusses 3 service innovation recommendations
from the perspective of the CEO of Noodles and Co. The first imperative listed is Understanding Future Customer Needs. It
includes choosing the need, create a picture of what is important, and driving
behaviors and motivation towards that vision. When you think about successful companies in
general, they have all figured out ways to identify and address specific needs
of specific customers. During our
project, we were able to identify students who are interested but currently are
unable to attend GWU and identified specific ways to meet their needs. We ran
with this approach prior to hearing Mickey’s 10 commandments and without necessarily
recalling our prior Forbes reading. Overall, I think this exercise revealed
that we can all identify the importance of knowing your customer and figuring
out a way to address their needs. Where the difference lies is how we address
these needs, and the amount of creative thought processes involved. The successful companies appear to be the ones
that discover creative and out of the box solutions to address them.
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