YouWish

As the world becomes ever more interlinked, the division of labour is now on a global scale. The manufacturing clout of the new Eastern economic powerhouses is the globalised equivalent of the industrialised North of Italy, or the mills of Northern England. The division of labour is the same, it’s just that now the things we buy are made in Shenzen rather than Sheffield.

Now that the UK economy is primarily service based, the natural result has been the emergence of countless niche services. If you have a need, no matter how unusual, you can be sure that in 21st century Britain you can pay someone to fulfil it for you. But with all this choice, does a one size-fits-all web search give you the best result? Search engines can certainly find the cheapest prices for one-size-fits-all products, think TVs, flights or credit cards, but when your need is more important or more costly, a personal response based on your specific requirements is more apt.

Unlike traditional search, YouWish doesn’t give preferred placement to the companies with the biggest advertising budget, when you place a wish, the responses you get will only be from companies that can meet your specific requirements.

After many months of planning and some rigorous beta testing we’re almost ready to take the password protection of the main YouWish site. We’ve had some great companies sign up and a good number of consumers too, but as the site opens to the wider world, if you’re reading this then you can sign up too.

If there’s something you just don’t have the time to find, or you really would prefer a personal response to, then why not make a wish at youwish.com.

Can you imagine any business in this economic environment turning down real customers?

Well bizarrely that is what I have experienced in the last 2 weeks. You Wish has a number of real customers looking for unusual things. We facilitate the matching of these customers with businesses that sell the relevant products and services. At the moment we are in a free trial so any customers we bring to a business are free. This is a sensible strategy for a new service that needs to register a range of different businesses.

Most companies I ring to sign up to respond to these customers are delighted with the You Wish proposition and service. However, I have been amazed to see that some are just too suspicious of a new company and a new service to want to proceed. For example a furniture company could not believe we had a customer who wished for a bespoke TV Cabinet, that had not found them. They assume that busy people have time to search endlessly for solutions on any search engine, but this is naive. This business would rather miss out on the chance of serving a customer than try out something new. It all sounds too good to be true, they cry! It sounds like another marketing wheeze! Well it’s a sad state of affairs if “marketing” is responsible for bringing such cynicism into the business environment. We clearly all need to do a better job of policing our own industry.

How often do we think of things that we want, but they always seem to end up in the too hard basket and we never get them.

You Wish is an antidote to this! You can list exactly what is important to you and get personal or tailored solutions from Britain’s best businesses. Things that you can’t find or don’t have time to search around for.

Your health. Is it good enough? Is the problem you want a fun and varied exercise programme rather than a standard gym membership and without it you will give up quickly?

Your appearance. It might be the teeth whitening that you have always wanted. Or maybe you need a makeup artist to come to your home because you are just too busy to get out

Your wellbeing. It might be you want some peace and quiet in a yoga retreat.

Your children’s wellbeing. It might be that you are concerned about your teenage daughter. Maybe you need an eating disorder specialist to help?

Whatever it is, the more specific you are, the more likely we are to find a business to match it.

We are signing up lots of businesses who see the benefits in getting people to tell them exactly what they want because these are real people in market for their services. It also makes it easier and more cost effective to give them what they want and build loyal and satisfied customers. It’s what some marketing folk are talking about as “seller relationship management” or SRM. It’s a reverse of the old world where large organisations run large customer relationship management programmes (CRM) and hope that they can sell packaged products to groups of likeminded people.