Market Orientation and Google Glass

It came as a pleasant surprise that this week’s reading included excerpts from Creating a Marketing Plan: An Overview (Marketer’s Toolkit: The 10 Strategies You Need to Succeed). I came across this book when I was tasked with designing a communication strategy for a job I had accepted and sought assistance from this book to aid my analysis. The most important finding of this book was the lesson on market orientation. It makes you question your assumptions about your target market and your product which is extremely important to "acquire, retain and develop" your customer.

Recently I read an article on Google Glass and how the product’s design ignored the consumers experience with them. http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/532691/google-glass-is-dead-long-live-smart-glasses/ The article outlines how the glasses were designed to help learning and increase productivity instead it has had a social backlash as people who put them on seem to disturb others around. This article highlighted Google Glass ineffectiveness at understanding its market orientation as their consumers came to be known as “glassholes” because people around them “could not understand why you’d want to have that thing on your face, in the way of normal social interaction. Glass does a handful of things—it can take videos, give you turn-by-turn directions, make phone calls, or search the Web.” Similarly, as discussed in class a social innovation has to be extremely prudent in its assumption of how stakeholders will be affected by the intervention as often it may affects a large number of people who may not be direct consumers.

This book cautions against assumptions and emphasizes heavily on understanding particular needs of your target market and provides strategies to acquire, retain and develop your customer. The “Calculate the value of a customer” section of the book was especially helpful because it helps you understand and document your potential user’s needs. This book also raises interesting questions about the difference between communication and marketing. It’s a great read and enables a company or an individual to evaluate and sell their product/ service.