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After hav­ing it on back order for what seems for­ever, I’ve recently got Adap­tive Path’s new book, Sub­ject to Change. And so far, so good.

Broadly speak­ing the thrust of it is that you can’t stop things chang­ing but if you start from the per­spec­tive of deliv­er­ing a great cus­tomer expe­ri­ence you will stand a bet­ter chance over time. Of course, work­ing out what ‘great’ means for your cus­tomers is not always sim­ple. And then the real trick is actu­ally doing it. The focus of the book is pri­mar­ily on prod­uct design but the prin­ci­ples go further.

When you con­sider that in many mar­kets any real dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between prod­ucts is close to non-existent and then fac­tor in the speed of change and the lim­ited atten­tion of cus­tomers, a shift in focus could be wise. Tra­di­tion­ally this means focus­ing on brand but with ever grow­ing dis­en­chant­ment with brands as all spin, lit­tle sub­stance another approach may be better.

Focus­ing more explic­itly on cus­tomers’ expe­ri­ences of mar­ket­ing leads to think­ing about some­thing more immer­sive that has value in its own right. It tends to strip out gim­micks (never a bad thing). And it high­lights the tru­ism that com­mu­ni­ca­tion is about what the audi­ence takes out not what we put in.

The authors have thought­fully put up a pre­sen­ta­tion cov­er­ing the core themes of the book – it’s half an hour well spent.

Sub­ject To Change: cre­at­ing great prod­ucts and ser­vices for an uncer­tain world

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