B2B vs. B2C
I wrote about a concept recently called Subjective Software. This concept represents software where the experiential preferences of consumers in the market has a reasonably clear relationship to success. I've made a few references to digital games across various posts and games are certainly B2C software, although they are at the far end of the subjectivity spectrum, a topic unto themselves. I'll be focusing on non-game B2C software here.
Subjective Software and its opposite are broadly aligned with the concept of B2B and B2C software. For the uninitiated, B2B software is targeted toward businesses and their employees for professional purposes, while B2C software is more focused on individuals (consumers in the acronym). The alignment is that most B2C software is Subjective Software, and most B2B software is not.
In a B2B context the user is not the same person who is billed for usage of the software as B2B users are performing paid work for an employer. The user might be annoyed when things don't work as effectively as they would hope, but incentives exist for them to persist with the Perceived Experience. The business continues to pay subscription fees as long as the consumption of the software continues to deliver value (e.g. indirectly return as much as it costs) and in the absence of clearly superior alternatives. Searching the market and evaluating alternatives are activities that must be weighed against an opportunity cost.
In B2C the situation is different, generally the user is the same person as the one paying for their usage. The Perceived Experience therefore has a clearer relationship to revenue. The experience should be relatively free of things that can annoy users. The experience should allow users to achieve their goals in an efficient manner. These points are straightforward, however if we reflect on these goals for a moment and consider that software may become broader in its offerings over time, we may start to see how there is an inverse relationship between broad appeal and satisfaction.
If an app offers a solution for 3 distinct problems, it stands to reason that it may appeal to 3 distinct groups of people. Most apps have a landing page or a 'home' page, the first one that you see when you open it and you're logged in. Those 3 groups of people will probably have different ideas about which one should be first and how the other two should be prioritised. There's a history to how the decision making behind questions of this nature has evolved. There have been nominated subject matter experts in experience, there have been focus groups to understand the customer, and there has been a data-driven approach made possible by "the cloud" and large technology companies where actual usage is measured at scale. All of these can shape a universal experience or to put it another way, a single Idealised Product, but the data-driven approach begins to make something else possible - personalisation.
When you know what a particular user actually cares about, that enables you to design a myriad of Idealised Products. You no longer have to choose which page is the first page for everyone. Let's link this back to the factory and what we discussed about subjective software for a moment. We know that one Idealised Product maps to a field of Realised Products and a field of Perceived Experiences, and we are now talking about having a field of Idealised Products. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to piece that together. Now one of two things follows from this: either quality assurance resource dramatically increases to meet this burden, or the ability to make the same assurances about quality will decrease.
Personalised experiences have clear value to users and to businesses, and they also have clear implications for the factory. The field of truth explodes in volume and issues become more difficult to confidently identify and resolve than ever before.
Until next time.