Nice article, Nikhil. More and more enterprises today expect consumerized products - it helps improve adoption and reduce training cost, meaning better ROI. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that a lot of our enterprise customers wanted gmail like "swipe to archive" experience. But all said, enterprises expect highly secure products which do not change frequently - notable difference from consumer products.
Just discovered this article, Nikhil. Definitely still rings true. The first thing I thought when I read it was, of course. Think about the user - people. The lines between work and not work continue to blur - and we want to use the same tools - the best tools - regardless of whether we're at work or at home. Just as consumers/employees demanded that they be able to use iPhones for work instead of their Blackberries, in the long run there is no way that people will be okay with having substandard products in either work or personal settings. And we don't want to have to learn and use different tools for official work projects vs side hustles vs personal tracking. It should all be as easy and fun to use as Slack, Gmail, Notion, etc. We are all workers and consumers, we are the same person and we don't even draw lines between working and not working anymore so why should our tools be siloed and different?
Working for a Financial Services firm, I have often pondered over the difference in user experience between consumer vs enterprise software - particularly since the end-users are consumers as well.
These days, large enterprises demand more customization in their products, seen particularly in risk management space. Makes me wonder what it would take for an existing company that follows traditional processes to embrace consumerization. My guess is the higher the barrier for new entrants, the slower they will be to adopt the change.
Nice article. We have seen user expectations in B2B space being linked to the retail expectations in terms of timelines. It took us a bit of time to understand that the customer was not benchmarking against the brick and mortar option, as we were 3x- 4x faster but to the retail experiences of product purchase wherein we were multiple x slower in providing the bid. This at that time was the first platform in its space and we were dealing with SMBs.
Since companies realized that using technology to create products and services based on the needs of the consumers and not the way arround, the probability of success penetrating the market is obviously a lot higher, there is no doubt that companies have a faster growth when there is the « consumeration of the enterprice ». I would like to use one of the examples used in this article: Zoom, to talk about how this idea was created to satisfy the consumer’s needs in 2012, BUT the real reason this company has become so popular in the last months is because the pandemic got this need multiplied X30!, still, the origin of this idea was born from a need.
Completely aided by reduction of work into malleable gigs, remote and micro entrepreneurship - moving away from the clutches of corporate walls - everyone is a CIO of their life now. This is one of my favourite blogs you wrote.
Interesting take! I don't believe "B2B2C" works though, because in its classic interpretation, to me that means SAAS for B2B that ultimately is leveraged by consumers (i.e. a dual-sided marketplace). What you are describing is more interesting in that the SAME SW that is traditionally used by the B2B community is now adopted directly by consumers! I'm not sure if such a term already exists...
The companies that are building the product in both categories are more likely to survive economics crisis and win a bigger market share in the long run.
I see the same picture with our customer base at PandaDoc.
Yes! I wrote about this back in 2016 after seeing Asana, Basecamp, Accelo, and Salesforce all go through a visual, very consumer, refresh in 2015: www.johnscrugham.com/b2b-ux. One thing I was seeing is that it goes beyond software; the devices we use set an expectation. If I'm picking up an iPhone or Android, I'm coming with a sense of what the interaction will feel like regardless of clicking on a B2B of B2C app.
Very interesting read. From a brand pov, B2B companies have started changing their marketing approach sometime in the middle of the last decade - by not being Boring 2 Boring anymore. They understood this fuzzing of B2B and B2C (ie "The Consumerization of the Enterprise and The Enterprization of the Consumer") and started moving on the fancy communications of their more glamorous B2C colleagues.
(PS: Boring 2 Boring no more is my rallying call for enterprise marketing).
I believe there have always been categories of products that are similarly useful across the spectrum from consumer to enterprise - Microsoft Office/ GoogleDocs/ Browsers/ FileSync&Share/ AntiVirus and some that are inherently specific Enterprise Accounting system is different from Quicken/Mint, Enterprise AntiFraud, Large Servers but the overlapping/extendible category does seem to be growing and the question is why. Perhaps it is as simple as the degree of compute power/mobile technologies we consumers all have.
Where would you put an old-guard company like HP in that diagram? I think they would be split far apart into both sides and not so much in the middle. They've been in both worlds forever but maybe missing this opportunity in the middle?
Nice article, Nikhil. More and more enterprises today expect consumerized products - it helps improve adoption and reduce training cost, meaning better ROI. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that a lot of our enterprise customers wanted gmail like "swipe to archive" experience. But all said, enterprises expect highly secure products which do not change frequently - notable difference from consumer products.
Just discovered this article, Nikhil. Definitely still rings true. The first thing I thought when I read it was, of course. Think about the user - people. The lines between work and not work continue to blur - and we want to use the same tools - the best tools - regardless of whether we're at work or at home. Just as consumers/employees demanded that they be able to use iPhones for work instead of their Blackberries, in the long run there is no way that people will be okay with having substandard products in either work or personal settings. And we don't want to have to learn and use different tools for official work projects vs side hustles vs personal tracking. It should all be as easy and fun to use as Slack, Gmail, Notion, etc. We are all workers and consumers, we are the same person and we don't even draw lines between working and not working anymore so why should our tools be siloed and different?
Working for a Financial Services firm, I have often pondered over the difference in user experience between consumer vs enterprise software - particularly since the end-users are consumers as well.
These days, large enterprises demand more customization in their products, seen particularly in risk management space. Makes me wonder what it would take for an existing company that follows traditional processes to embrace consumerization. My guess is the higher the barrier for new entrants, the slower they will be to adopt the change.
Nice article. We have seen user expectations in B2B space being linked to the retail expectations in terms of timelines. It took us a bit of time to understand that the customer was not benchmarking against the brick and mortar option, as we were 3x- 4x faster but to the retail experiences of product purchase wherein we were multiple x slower in providing the bid. This at that time was the first platform in its space and we were dealing with SMBs.
Since companies realized that using technology to create products and services based on the needs of the consumers and not the way arround, the probability of success penetrating the market is obviously a lot higher, there is no doubt that companies have a faster growth when there is the « consumeration of the enterprice ». I would like to use one of the examples used in this article: Zoom, to talk about how this idea was created to satisfy the consumer’s needs in 2012, BUT the real reason this company has become so popular in the last months is because the pandemic got this need multiplied X30!, still, the origin of this idea was born from a need.
Completely aided by reduction of work into malleable gigs, remote and micro entrepreneurship - moving away from the clutches of corporate walls - everyone is a CIO of their life now. This is one of my favourite blogs you wrote.
Interesting take! I don't believe "B2B2C" works though, because in its classic interpretation, to me that means SAAS for B2B that ultimately is leveraged by consumers (i.e. a dual-sided marketplace). What you are describing is more interesting in that the SAME SW that is traditionally used by the B2B community is now adopted directly by consumers! I'm not sure if such a term already exists...
Thanks for sharing the thought, Nikhil.
The companies that are building the product in both categories are more likely to survive economics crisis and win a bigger market share in the long run.
I see the same picture with our customer base at PandaDoc.
Clipchamp for video-editing
Yes! I wrote about this back in 2016 after seeing Asana, Basecamp, Accelo, and Salesforce all go through a visual, very consumer, refresh in 2015: www.johnscrugham.com/b2b-ux. One thing I was seeing is that it goes beyond software; the devices we use set an expectation. If I'm picking up an iPhone or Android, I'm coming with a sense of what the interaction will feel like regardless of clicking on a B2B of B2C app.
Very interesting read. From a brand pov, B2B companies have started changing their marketing approach sometime in the middle of the last decade - by not being Boring 2 Boring anymore. They understood this fuzzing of B2B and B2C (ie "The Consumerization of the Enterprise and The Enterprization of the Consumer") and started moving on the fancy communications of their more glamorous B2C colleagues.
(PS: Boring 2 Boring no more is my rallying call for enterprise marketing).
I believe there have always been categories of products that are similarly useful across the spectrum from consumer to enterprise - Microsoft Office/ GoogleDocs/ Browsers/ FileSync&Share/ AntiVirus and some that are inherently specific Enterprise Accounting system is different from Quicken/Mint, Enterprise AntiFraud, Large Servers but the overlapping/extendible category does seem to be growing and the question is why. Perhaps it is as simple as the degree of compute power/mobile technologies we consumers all have.
Where would you put an old-guard company like HP in that diagram? I think they would be split far apart into both sides and not so much in the middle. They've been in both worlds forever but maybe missing this opportunity in the middle?
To my understanding B2B2C is not how these companies work.(figma, notion,etc)
LambdaSchool is different, it might be a two sided marketplace.
But coming up with a new word which describe the "free for consumer, hefty for enterprise" model is needed. Is it really a new thing?