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joshua duncan – January 18, 2010
I spent last week putting the final touches on a Voice of the Customer research effort we conducted near the end of 2009. As a product manager there is something very satisfying about coming back to the office with a list of potential ideas.
Listening to your customers is a great way to generate ideas. Some of these ideas will align nicely with your current thinking and some will present challenges. Then there are ideas that sound just plain crazy.
The just crazy ideas are usually the quickest to be dismissed. The idea maybe technically impossible or cost prohibitive. Often, it comes down to a belief that customers just won’t buy it.
However, paying attention to crazy ideas can pay off, and LEGOs are a great case study to prove it. LEGO (eventually) started listening to the 5% minority of their customers (adults) who had become enthusiastic fans of the product line. This minority set of customers were spending 50 times more a year than the 95% majority customer (the Gaspedal word of mouth marketing blog has a good overview of the LEGO case here).
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joshua duncan – November 7, 2009
Great story on P&G’s ability to use consumer insights to deliver innovation, one small win at a time. From the Harvard Business article:
Innovation doesn’t always involve new features, functions, services, or business models. Sometimes it can be as seemingly simple as a new marketing message.
Of course, I’m a fan of big bang disruptive innovations that create categories and land entrepreneurs on the cover of magazines. But the Hipoglos story shows how a disciplined approach — coupling a point of customer frustration with an innovative approach to address that frustration — can lead to small wins. And enough small wins can combine to create major impact.
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joshua duncan – October 8, 2009
Kellogg Professor Tim Calkins has a great take on his blog about the new StarBucks Via instant coffee. Tim’s take is that the coffee is not bad but that it seems to run counter to the Starbuck’s brand experience. Tim explains,
Starbucks has long worked to embrace the coffee experience, the crisp beans coming from exotic lands all over the world, the grinding noise, the wonderful aroma, the ritual of precisely measuring coffee and water and then waiting for it to brew. Starbucks has taught us that coffee isn’t just coffee. There is much, much more to it.
On the surface, you could argue that instant coffee makes sense for Starbucks, right? You can definitely see how the case for it was argued from a product perspective: Starbucks sells coffee, instant coffee is a big market, Starbucks should sell instant coffee. At least it is a coffee product and not something as crazy as Burger King’s “Flame” body spray (who doesn’t want to smell like a whopper).
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joshua duncan – August 24, 2009
Voltaire’s famous quote can explain a lot these days. Instead of waiting for the perfect solution, customers are settling on at what at first glance seems like imperfection. Why would anyone use a simple document editor (Google docs) when it doesn’t have the litany of features that Microsoft Word has been building for years? Why stop to see a general doctor at a pharmacy when you can go to a hospital and have access to many doctors?
In this month’s Wired article, “The Good Enough Revolution” , Robert Capps covers several products/industries that are being radically changed by new products/services that focus on simplicity, accessibility, and cost: flip video cameras, online TV, netbooks, e-laywers, and more. And for why he explains:
The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect.
Lots to consider for the product manager here. The general rule is that the next release must have more features, right? Who wants to go backwards?
In the new reality, there may be opportunies to meet your customer’s needs with a simpler (and cheaper solution) than you are currently offering. The question is, can you and should you try to offer it first? Not an easy question (see the Innovator’s Dilemma). The risk is that if you don’t, you may be playing catch-up or worse, left behind.
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joshua duncan – August 23, 2009
Unfortunately, buybacks are rampant in industries where investment in innovation is crucial—energy, technology, and pharmaceuticals….And five high-tech leaders—Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM), Cisco Systems (CSCO), Intel, (INTC) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ)—are in the Top 10 of repurchasers, each having spent more on buybacks than on research and development from 2000 through 2008. (While spending $73 billion to buy its own stock, IBM increased its offshore employment by 133,000, reducing U.S. jobs by 36,000.)
Via BW’s The Buyback Boondoggle.
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joshua duncan – August 13, 2009
Nokia believes there are three reasons why people adopt new technology:
Survival
Social
Entertainment
via Fast Company’s September ‘09 article, “Nokia’s Plan to Rule the World“.
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joshua duncan – April 7, 2009
Procter & Gamble’s CEO, A.G. Lafley, is interviewed in this week’s Business Week magazine on managing during these troubled times. In the article, he as some great quotes on innovation:
We continue to invest in our core strengths. First, we don’t skimp in understanding the consumer. Second is innovation. Our capital spending will go up in 2009 for new engineering and manufacturing technology.
You need creativity and invention, but until you can connect that creativity to the customer in the form of a product or a service that meaningfully changes their lives, I would argue you don’t yet have innovation.
Read the full article here.
