Reading Responses to Chapters 9 and 10

Chapters 9 and 10 use various case studies in order to show the reader how important it is to embrace the Groundswell in order to see best results happen. The Snausages Breakfast Bites case study shows that setting up a private community in order to ameliorate one's product can be an extremely helpful tool. With the Groundswell, you can have your customers play an active role in the improvement of your product. Through online reviews, quick feedback can help companies to constantly be improving their products, while beforehand, product improvement was mostly done internally. Quick improvement of the product is necessary however, in order to be challenging for competitors. Not only looking at online reviews, but even purposely setting up online forums like Credit Mutuel did, in order to improve product developments are all new features of the Groundswell.

The reading specifically reminded me of one situation that I have found myself in, it being my internship at the European Headquarters of iTunes in Luxembourg. One day, I was allowed to sit in at a product development meeting. Members of the iTunes team were thinking of new things that could be launched in the iTunes store, back then they were thinking of selling ebooks and evaluating the pros and cons of it. They were also trying to find out, whatever was working well and whatever needed improvement in the iTunes store. For this, an overview of a moderate amount customer reviews was projected on the conference room's big screen. These reviews criticized already existent

features of the iTunes store but also suggested new ones. Books were a controversial topic, but at the end of the day the meeting decided to plan on launching them eventually. It was fascinating for me to see how much iTunes focused on customer input and how many ways there were for them to understand their customers. Back then there were iTunes summer concerts all over Europe and the staff had exact profiles as to what type of people went to the concerts, what type of music they mostly listened to and what type of products they would like to see in the iTunes store. All this was possible due to a short questionnaire that came with a purchase of a concert ticket. At the end of the meeting, all that iTunes had done was research on their customers, most of it being very direct and very much paying attention to the Goundswell. I think iTunes is a good example of a company that really tries to develop its' products based on its' customers' demands. It has various

online tools that help it find out what its' customers' think - that iTunes actually takes great use of these tools.