I was reading about the smile curve yesterday and how it’s changing the rules of the game.
This is the idea that we open our wallets only when we must do something, or if we really want to do something.
Taking buying a house, for example – one of the biggest decisions we’ll make.
The Economist wrote that there are only two reasons to buy a house.
Either it’s cheaper to buy than rent, or the house is perfect and you really want to live in it.
A so-so house, in the middle of a so-so place – you’ll pass on that.
The bottom of the smile is where products and services go to die – the things that are nice to have, but that you can’t really justify right now.
And this means we have to design products and services differently.
A service business like ours uses tested systems and processes to do work that clients have to do because of government rules.
Another business I know massively increases sales for its customers through a platform that quickly matches orders to the cheapest suppliers.
Who wouldn’t want to sign up to that?
Growth, it turns out, is increasingly at the extremes.
As business builders – we need to figure out where we sit on the smile curve and then head in the right direction.
Handcrafted insight 