Today a series of events triggered me to share a little bit about one company's ability to serve its customers, rather than just serving itself.  LEGO has been a favorite toy of children for over 50 years.  From their home in Denmark, the little plastic bricks have traveled around the world.  Because of the longevity and popularity of the LEGO bricks, not only are they popular with kids, but they are very popular with adults too.  In fact, in a February 2008 press conference Lego CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp estimated that 20% of Lego sales come from adults.

Today's event was the release of the Castle Advent Calendar and while the product seems interesting, the story is how it came to be released is the real story.  As with many international companies, the products LEGO sells vary by country.  Frequently LEGO will release a product in one location before others and then expand the release.  This calendar set was announced to be Europe-only in early September and the AFOL (Adult Fans of Lego) in the US and elsewhere were distraught that they were missing out. 

In addition to standard ways that fans cry out to a company (blogs, forums, email), fans had another unique channel setup by Lego earlier this year, Ambassadors.  Many brands have official advocates and/or VIP customers, but as with almost everything they do, LEGO went about selecting their advocates in a unique and better way, they let the fans select their “representatives”.   Each of the approximately 10 US fan websites (and many international sites) was able to nominate their slate of ambassadors and in June, LEGO announced the 2008-2009 Lego Ambassadors. 

All of this came together yesterday when LEGO announced that they heard the fans outcry and are releasing the set to North America (sorry rest of the world).  Since LEGO was still resisting a full release of the product, they provided a special product code and phone number for US and Canadian fans via popular LEGO website Brothers Brick. 

So how can you apply this to your business?  Though most of us don't have a fan-base that is dying for our product, we do have customers who want to be heard.  My advice:

1. Build a the best product in your category
2. Establish liaisons selected by the community
3. Listen and react when the community speaks
4. Use the community’s tools to respond back them

LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies which does not sponsor, authorize or endorse this site. You can visit the official LEGO® website at www.LEGO.com.

(On top of listening to fans, Lego is very straight forward in how to use and not use their name, logos and other intellectual property with their Fair Play policy)

Play Well!

A library of 1000's of albums.  Listening to free music samples before you buy.  One click music purchase.  Sound great?  Sounds like iTunes? Well, I'm actually describing MCI's 1-800-MUSIC-NOW service.  I was cleaning my attic and came a cross a compilation of articles from the Washington Post in 1996.  I figured I'd leaf through it before recycling it and it fell open to an article about MCI's service.  For those that don't remember (since it only lasted about a year), the service allowed you to call  1-800-MUSIC-NOW, enter an artist's name and sample the album.  If you already had an account setup, you just pushed a button and the CD arrived at your front door in a few days.  How simple.  How convenient.  What a failure.  MCI recognized an opportunity to both make themselves more than a phone company and address a potential market need, but sampling over the phone and waiting for physical shipping just weren't what people needed.  Five years later, facilitated by the tremendous growth of the Net, Apple introduced iTunes and changed the way we buy music.

I think often about some of the innovations that DigiKnow has been a part of, several of which were built before their time.  Most near and dear to my heart are some of the projects we envisioned for the Cleveland Indians, back in the days before MLBAM. 

• Live Blogging - In 1996, before we were even familiar with the term blogging, DigiKnow staffers provided a text-based play-by-play "Cybercast" of every Indians game so out-of-market fans with no TV or radio access could be a part of the game as it happened.
• Subscription-based Audio/Video - In 1998, the next evolution from text was to audio and video for out-of-market fans, called IndiansXtra.  This subscription-based service allowed fans to listen to live audio feeds and get immediate post-game video highlights.
• View from Your Seat - In 1999, we added a seat viewer function to allow ticket holders and interested buyers to checkout what the view looked like from every section in the stadium.
• Ticket Exchange - In 2000, we built what may have been the first online ticket exchange.  This system allowed season ticket holders to put tickets up for sale to other season ticket holders (at face value).

So what happened to all these great systems? 

• Live Blogging - As Java/Flash replaced good ol' HTML, the written version was replaced by visual play-by-play we see today.
• Subscription-based Audio/Video - Although there were hundreds of dedicated fans getting their audio and video, there wasn't the critical mass necessary to sustain the service.  Today, MLB TV and their other audio/video products are wildly successful.
• View from Your Seat - Just about every stadium in the country now has some kind of view from the seats.  Basic images are starting to give way to 3D renderings and video from your seat, but the concept remains generally unchanged.
• Ticket Exchange - Unfortunately, the system never took off for the Indians.  Today between Ticketmaster, StubHub and others, you can buy and sell seats for almost any event through a secondary market.

With all that, is a good idea still good if it is ahead of its time?  My short answer is no.  A good idea must bring value to the market and if there is no buyer for a service, then there is no value.  But yesterday's failure can be tomorrow's success, so stop and think about an idea from the past could be redeveloped today.