Building On Customer ideas
Once of the ways we’ve discussed delivering value to your clients in the past is through the practice of brainstorming ways your customer can build their business and sharing those ideas with them — but what if your customer already has a creative concept they want to pursue? In a circumstance like this it’s your opportunity to contribute by building on ideas they share with you.
When you’re building on ideas your goal is to come up with ways to make existing ideas better
When you build on an idea you start with the premise that the base idea is solid and you use it as the foundation to build something stronger and they reaches further and farther in order to improve on the results the original idea would otherwise deliver on its own. If your customer brings you an idea for a cheeseburger, you build on the original idea by adding a second patty and bacon in order to create a bacon double-cheeseburger.
Width
You could choose build out an idea and see what improvements you could add that might help the concept appeal to a broader base of people or solve a wider variety or problems. A store might be a great base idea, but a shopping center would be a way to build out the idea horizontally to add greater appeal to a wider base of people and a greater set of needs.
Height
You might also choose to build your idea higher in order to reach a more select audience group or provide serve a more exclusive niche. The higher you build the idea, the narrower your audience or service would get. If we start again with the base idea of a store, adding height to the concept might result in a store like Tiffany’s which sells only jewelry to a higher-end group of consumers.
Building on ideas is challenging
In some ways building on ideas is more challenging than coming up with the primary idea itself. The best way to come up with one good idea is to come up with a whole bunch of ideas — and then you pick the best one. when you’re building on a idea, the choice of concepts has already been narrowed down. The idea for “a store” has already been chosen, now you have to come up with ways to make that idea bigger (or broader) and better.
