This book was amazing, I was expecting it to be dry and dull but the author has a good sense of style and improved my cognition in many fields by helping me realize the value of over-confidence (cognitive bias) and the importance of data, among other things.
This book helps explain why the Sony E-reader didn't excite people the way the Kindle did or why Honda engineered a great Hybrid which lacked spark compared to the Prius. It explains why Nokia made Smartphones for years but how it was the Iphone that actually engaged people.
The author's honesty in explaining that there is no formula to demand also helped me. (After all he spent years investing in something he hoped would answer a formula only to find there wasn't one)
The book has several elements to improve your cognition:
Magneticism,
Hassle Maps,
Backstory,
Triggers,
Trajectory,
Variation,
Launch,
Portfolio
And it expresses the strengths of several products and innovations. While it was insightful there were portions in the book that were just full of fluff.
It might be The Hero's Flute: A Hero's Quest adapted by Lorenzo and Tony Curry from the Mozart classic; Theft of the Gold, adapted from Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung by..
It would've been better to cut the book down in page numbers, other then that the book was good and had a really warm-hearted ending Kindle Edition I was enticed to read this book by an article in the November issue of Atlantic magazine, The Quiet Health-Care Revolution. The article describes an HMO-like medical practice in southern California, now spreading to Arizona and elsewhere in the southwest, called Caremore. It enrolls only people on Medicare and it practices preventive medicine.
For example, if a person has congestive heart failure, Caremore provides them with a scale that transmits their weight to the clinic every morning. A sudden weight gain alerts them to a possible problem and then call the client and send a car to take them to the clinic. A diabetic with a small cut on a toe calls them and a car comes to take him to a diabetes care clinic where the cut is carefully cleaned and bandaged. He returns to the clinic every other day until the cut is healed.
With these preventive measures Caremore cut the number of amputations for people with diabetes by 60%. They have sharply cut the number of hospitalizations for congestive heart disease and the follow-on stay in a nursing facility to regain strength. They visit clients' homes to help make it safer to get around and they counsel people about diet and exercise.
Caremore has cut costs dramatically and Adrian Slywotzky, the author of Demand, predicts it's the future of medical care for the elderly in America. This small practice has provided services that have created a demand.
Demand masquerades as a business/economics book, and it does talk about Netflix and Kindle and Pret a Manger and Tetra Pak. But it also relates how symphony orchestras in the US are dramatically increasing the number of their core subscribers and how Teach for America is training Ivy League graduates to teach successfully in some of the worst schools in the US.
Slywotzky's last chapter is the heart of the book. Where, he asks, are the new products, the entire new industries going to come from? Who is going to create the demand for things we don't even know we are going to need? We used to have Bell Labs where a trio of engineers created a gizmo they called a transistor which went on to change our entire world. He talks about ARPA where the scientists did strange but sometimes successful experiments and developed something they called the Internet and invited everybody to join.
Bell Labs and the RCA lab and XEROX lab are much smaller than they used to be and ARPA sticks pretty much to military research, most of which is classified. He does see good things, specifically a very clever robot, coming out of the MIT lab and SRI is still doing pure research, with scientists working on inventions they see no immediate use for. Nobody saw the use for that transistor either until they got to putting a lot of them on a little chip. The MIT lab is results oriented. Their motto is Demo or Die, so if you develop an idea for interactive wallpaper you need to produce some of this lively wallpaper. I got the impression someone has done so.
But the problem remains, where are the scientists of tomorrow going to come from? China, the author tells us, has more honor students than the US has students. (And no grade inflation.) They could not keep these labs going without foreign students and other immigrants. Our best students in the US are going into business and finance. How are we going to steer them into science which provides the fuel for the business without which those financiers would have little to do.
Kindle Edition This is truly an innovator's book. If you are looking for bullet point directives or the ABC's of sales, marketing or invention, this book may disappoint. The very nature of its subject prevents such a simplistic how to as a method to harvest results. It is very positive in its expression of ideas, providing a very enthusiastic motivation for one who is innovative (that is, for someone who innovates from the truest and fullest sense of the word: one who makes, provides, or implements changes, novelties, or something new). If you just have many great ideas that would make life convenient, and you are looking for a way to get those ideas out there, this book isn't for you either.
Although a book like this is not my typical read, the title intrigued me. As a Baptist pastor whose perspective is rather that of the Reformed/Calvinistic/Puritanical perspective, I was interested in what a secular marketing guru had to say of meeting a demand before there is one, in hopes that it might give me some insights into what many churches are trying to do these days by implementing sales and marketing techniques. I read this out of pure research on my part, but had enjoyed the read. I liked it, but wouldn't have put it on my list as a must have book were I not given a copy.
I've rated it with four stars on its own merits and for the field it attempts to penetrate, and it actually should be 4.5 from me but we can't cut stars in half. It may have been a full five star but there were a few areas that, in my humble opinion, could have been explored and expanded a little further. Kindle Edition This is basically a couple of stories of successful products/companies with a bit of decomposition on how they happened to succeed. Clearly nice stories, gives important points on building product people need, but not much new from product management/marketing standard practices. Still, worth a read. Kindle Edition This book starts off well enough with some introductory case studies, switches to learnings from these case studies, but then suddenly has only case studies.
In the last chapters the authors switch to a 'if only we had retained our labs' monologue, closing with an admonishment that CHANGE STARTS WITH YOU.
It is an interesting read but I found it hard to really take away anything from it. Kindle Edition
In DEMAND: Giving People What They Love Before They Know They Want It (Crown Business; October 2011), Adrian Slywotzky, named by Industry Week one of the world’s six most influential management thinkers, provides a radically new way to think about demand, with a big idea and a host of practical applications—not just for people in business but also for social activists, governments leaders, non-profit managers, and other would-be innovators.
They all need to master such ground-breaking concepts as the hassle map (and the secrets of fixing it); the curse of the incomplete product (and how to avoid it); why very good ≠ magnetic; how what you don’t see can make or break a product; the art of transforming fence sitters into customers; why there’s no such thing as an average customer; and why real demand comes from a 45-degree angle of improvement (rather than the five degrees most organizations manage).
From the Hardcover edition. Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It
[J]ust as the hassles that complicate life are endlessly varied, so is the artistry of hassle-fixing that underlies demand creation, making our topic not only vitally important to economic and social progress but also uniquely fascinating. Kindle Edition I never thought I'd get into business books, but after working at a business magazine and thinking about journalism from an entrepreneurs standpoint, I've really begun to take a look at different strategies and theories out there. I'm glad I picked this book up because it tries to find the secret about demand. Basically, what makes one product more successful than a very similar product? An easy chapter would've been advertising and brand awareness, but I'm glad Slywotzky steered away from that topic.
One of the first chapters explored magnetism. What makes a great product great? One example was Zipcar. Its creator thought everyone would jump onto the idea of car sharing because it would lessen everyone's carbon footprint and it would be good for the planet. Success, however, was not reached until its founder was ejected by the board and a new CEO took an analytical approach, trying to understand why some people were die-hard enthusiasts while others could care less. (In short, they found density in clusters was the key, and now Zipcar is expanding.) In another chapter, the author looks at the case of the e-reader war. The Sony Libre was like Amazon's Kindle (low weight, E-ink technology) and it came out a year before the Kindle, but it turned out to be a failed product. Why? WiFi and a deep library that Sony just could not match. Amazon, a Internet retail website, had no business getting into the handheld electronic business, but it did and succeeded.
An alarming chapter came at the end, where the author discusses that many of the great innovations start with scientific breakthroughs. Either a school or a business has an research and development outfit that works on creating new projects, without the pressure of deadlines or immediate commercial application. (Xerox's PARC lab is one such example.) Today, those departments are either gone or severely shrunk, as many companies need to figure out how to make money now for mere survival. The future looks bleak for breakthrough achievements.
Of course, the book ends with a call to action: Don't look up for the next demand creator, look in the mirror. Kindle Edition The book is what it says it is. Very informative describing how businesses became successful and created a demand that no other did. If you expect a direct advice you will not get it, learn from the experiences and read between the lines. It was a great read :) Kindle Edition Best marketing book I’ve read in a long time
Great examples together with a compelling focus on customers made this a great book. Perfect for small business owners and anyone wanting to create a unique customer focused business. Kindle Edition Misleading title. Was expecting information and insight on actual demand creation. This is just a series of stories about companies. Didn't even bother finishing. Kindle Edition
