When in Doubt – Observe and Ask

With times becoming tougher and the environment more competitive, it’s now more important than ever for marketers to focus on their customers or consumers, and to remember to make business decisions in the context of the effects those decisions will have on them.

One leader at asking and listening to consumers is the marketing giant, Procter & Gamble. In recent years, under the leadership of A.G. Lafley, P&G has refocused itself to the idea that the consumer is king — -and that the role of the company is to find out what consumers really want, and deliver it to them. In their new book The Game-Changer, A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan describe how multinational corporations such as P&G have transformed their approach to innovation and to deeply understanding consumer needs in a multi-cultural world where low-income families in fast-growing countries now have significant purchasing power. P&G did not merely adopt “The consumer is the Boss” as its motto, but as its real driver for innovation, product development and its quest for growth. The book illustrates how the principles of innovation need to go hand-in-hand with in-depth comprehension of consumers’ needs at the grass-roots level. It also highlights the importance of engaging multiple stakeholders in this process.

Here are two quotes:

On the structure of innovation:

“Long known for a preference to do everything in-house, we began to seek out innovation from any and all sources. Innovation is all about connections, so we get everyone we can involved: P&Gers past and present, customers, suppliers, even competitors. The more connections, the more ideas; the more ideas, the more solutions.”

On the old regime of research:

“P&G was talking to a lot of people, but not listening to them. The company also tended to narrow in on only one aspect of the consumer – for example, her mouth for oral-care products, her hair for shampoo, her loads of dirty clothes for laundry detergents (most P&G consumers are women). P&G had essentially extracted the consumer (and at times a particular body part as well!) from her own life and focused on what was most important to the company – the product or the technology.”

ER

Javabot takes Coffee Vending to next level

Today, consumers greatly enjoy getting immersed into interactive food and beverage experiences, where they do not just savour, eat and drink, but rather see for themselves actual ingredients and participate in the processing of these ingredients. Whether they make their own pizzas and pastas, grill their own steak, heap up their ice-cream cones or grind and roast their own coffee, more consumers take pleasure in indulging in new, exciting encounters with food and beverages outside their homes.

Javabot walk-in coffee machine in New York is a superb example of how interactive coffee making can be and how the whole coffee experience could be heightened by the various sights, sounds and smells entailed in the coffee roasting and grinding processes. People can select their own blends of coffee roast, grind and have a cup of coffee freshly made in 30 seconds.

The concept behind Mike Caswell’s Javabot also helps change consumers’ perceptions of vended beverages as being old, not fresh, and containing chemical ingredients. This machine displays the natural coffee beans in glass containers and shows consumers the complete coffee making process in a transparent way. It not only provides customized coffee suited to individual preferences, but also makes those fresh, natural, green beans totally visible to consumers, thus ensuring them that a “real” fresh ingredient is used to produce their beverage.

Roasting Plant’s Javabot Store at 81 Orchard St., New York, NY 10002

This coffee machine occupies an entire store front and combines
storage, metering, roasting, grinding and brewing operations.

The design efforts involved the creation of rotary diverters that accurately
guide just the right amount of beans int the pneumatic conveyor for their trip
to one of the brewing machines from Egro Swiss Coffee Systems.

Images: Roasting Plant

ER

Nokia’s Dream Phones

In a rapidly changing world, where consumers’ needs and preferences are constantly changing and where new ones are inevitably emerging in line with global trends as well as socio-economic and cultural diversity, companies are racing to generate innovative ideas that enable their products to satisfy unmet consumer needs.

More than ever before, manufacturers of consumer goods are eager to get their designers out of their labs and to allow market researchers to walk unconventional paths in search for new horizons of creativity and innovation. To achieve this, consumers are no longer regarded as research participants or passive receivers and users of products and services. Rather, ordinary members of local communities from different walks of life are sought to share their own perspectives of what new products should be and do.

Alternative methods, such as getting ordinary people to engage in studios, film making and culinary designs, are increasingly being used to obtain user-generated innovations. BMW, Dell (IdeaStorm), Nike, and Starbucks are few examples of companies that chose to take the “full of nice surprises” road.

Very recently, Nokia publicized its similar approach to finding how ordinary people in different parts of the world envision their dream phone.

Image: BusinessWeek

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ER, PEZ