Published by Portfolio, 2011, softcover, illustrated, index, 243 pages, condition: as new.
Boardroom conversations are adapting to a new and brutal reality; there is no such thing as an offline business. And if you don't embrace digital, you'll be out of business altogether.Blockbuster, AOL, Yahoo and Borders were all unstoppable, but they didn't see the new economic order coming. Google, Facebook, Groupon and Twitter barely existed at the turn of the millennium, but are now rocketing ahead.Aaron Shapiro is CEO of HUGE, the leading digital agency which builds and operates websites that handle 150 million users a month and bring in $1.2 billion annually for their clients. That's the GDP of a small country. He thinks constantly about the most pressing issue in business today: how can businesses can use digital to thriveShapiro has studied what the businesses succeeding today have in common, and in Users, Not Customers, he teaches us to recognise that it's not just customers who interact with the digital version of our organisations.The businesses who are now roaring ahead put the interests and the digital experience of all of their users - employees, business partners, media and anyone else who interacts with you through digital channels - ahead of everything else, including their paying customers.In a world were we are all users you have a choice: you can be sure that people are using your digital ecosystem, or you can be irrelevant.
If you still think "the customer is king," you're probably falling behind. Today's most powerful growth engine is users--people who interact with a company through digital media and technology even if they have never spent a dime. Become indispensable to users and the profits will follow. By next year, the Internet will drive the majority of all consumer purchases in the United States--a figure that will only grow as young people who have never lived without the Internet increase their spending power. The result: there's no longer such a thing as an offline business; every company must have an effective digital strategy to survive. As CEO of the digital marketing agency HUGE, Aaron Shapiro goes inside blue-chip companies to advise them on how to thrive in this new business reality. To explore the subject further, he led an extensive study of the Fortune 1000. He has found that the most successful companies focus on users first, and look at customers as just one subset of this immense and influential group. Look at Facebook and Google. They built their businesses before they even figured out what they were selling, let alone who their customers were. Shapiro argues that every business needs to stop obsessing about customers and start creating powerful user experiences. Rather than just trying to get people to buy stuff, the companies that truly excel home in on the user experience at every level:
- They focus on their users' true needs: Mint.com made the easiest and most effective interface for controlling your personal finances, and once there, you can follow ads that let you improve your financial performance even more.
- They make their technology disposable: Netflix took down Blockbuster by treating its subscribers as users, not customers. It continually changed and improved its technology to create the best possible experience instead of maximizing rental fees and late fees.
- They market themselves in a way that truly inspires their users. Pepsi redirected its Super Bowl advertising budget to the "Pepsi Refresh Project," a nonprofit, grant-giving program that generated massive free publicity and goodwill.
