“The winner with consumers will always be whoever has the best strategy for managing the cultural, ethical and political factors of their innovation,” says Markus Giesler—one of the 40 Best Business Professors Under 40 and an incredibly influential consumer sociologist and ethnographer.
Markus Giesler teaches the world’s first MBA course on Customer Design Experience and is director of the Big Design Lab, a think tank that examines market-level design questions with public and private organizations. He encourages audiences to approach innovation, particularly consumer innovation, as though it were a social system. “Culture is probably the most underestimated success factor in business,” he says. The way that a product, like ride-sharing for example, is received, viewed, absorbed; the way that it affects other players within the the space it’s entering, is as important as the product itself.
In talks, Giesler shows how our choices, preferences and goals as consumers are never natural, but rather embedded in systems of people and things, carefully constructed to support a particular idea or innovation. It’s the marketer’s job to properly recognize, navigate, and in some cases create these systems, says Giesler, and he can help you do it.
