In an overly crowded commercial world, where diverse products are more in abundance than ever before, big retailers are setting a new trend which is bottom-up and basically consumer driven. The relationship between retailers and manufacturers is taking a new turn, as retailers no longer want to only negotiate prices with manufacturers and choose from an existing range of finished products, but rather to have a say in what manufacturers are to produce for them.

“Big retailers want to be more in control”, says Frank Tyneski in an interview with BusinessWeek Innovation chief Bruce Nussbaum. Retailers want to differentiate products for their retail channels in order to address their customers’ unique needs. To achieve that, they are setting up their own research and design departments to gain better understanding of their customers’ needs based on observations, ethnography and other qualitative research techniques.

This acquired knowledge of consumers’ needs is then used to put pressure on manufacturers to create unique products especially for them. The rules of the game are surely changing!

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The fourth annual international Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference 2008 will take place at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark from October 25 - 18, 2008.

Praticipants will explore the paradoxes and practices of (In)Visibility and bring to life the concepts, theories, plans, worries, approaches and ideas that can expand and advance the practices of ethnographic work in and of industry.

EPIC is the premier international forum bringing together artists, computer scientists, designers, social scientists, marketers, academics and advertisers to discuss recent developments and future advances around ethnographic praxis. It aims to promote the integration of social and cultural perspectives, theories and method into business practice.

Questions that will be explored during this year’s conference:

• What important issues can ethnograpy in industry shed light on?
• Are some ideas and things better left invisible?
• How do we work with things which are themselves essentially invisible?
• In what ways are we (in)visible as ethnographic practitioners in industry? In sites of scholarly production? What are ways of making the value of ethnographic work more visible to organizations, participants and stakeholders, and academic and other intellectual communities?
• Is the invisibility of theory in much ethnographic work in industry a problem, a virtue, or both?
• What invisible traces do we leave in industry?
• What do different representational practices make visible, what do they obscure, and how do other senses come into play?
• Does, and how does, ethnography’s bias for observation work to balance other forms of understanding in the context of industry?

Conference Programme

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

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

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

[ Get the full story¦BusinessWeek ]

ER, PEZ

Green Gadget ¦

The Powermonkey-eXplorer is a two-part device, which can be used separately or together. This gadget is a water-resistant, tubular unit that holds a rechargeable battery. It can link to a solar slave for power from the sun. Charging via solar panel is cool but takes almost 18 hours.

Image: LikeCool

Scientists say there is no evidence drinking large amounts of water is beneficial for the average healthy person. The widespread idea that drinking eight glasses of water a day is good for your health has been dismissed as a myth. A Telegraph report suggested - no one knows how this widely held belief came about … but it has spread throughout the world, and in absence of clinical study against this belief, it has been taken as a “fact”.

Many people in Europe think drinking a lot of water is healthy and they may say so spontaneously. Like a PC or telephone, the water bottle is now part of the office desk. While it is clear that humans cannot survive for longer than several days without water, very little research has assessed how average individuals’ health is affected by drinking extra fluids.

Specialists in kidney conditions in America reviewed research on claims eight 8oz glasses of water help flush toxins from the body, preventing weight gain and improving skin tone. Dr Dan Negoianu and Dr Stanley Goldfarb, of the Renal, Electrolyte and Hypertension Division at the University of Pennsylvania, said no single study indicated average healthy people needed to drink this amount of water - a total of 3.3 pints - each day.

[Get the full story - Telegraph.co.uk]

Related story: Marathon Runners: Beware Of Drinking Too Much Water

Image: Cristiano Peçanha

KJ; DW; PEZ

Video length: 1:55 mts.

In 2008 US$ 1.38 bn is expected to be spend on ads on social networks. Here are 10 tips and pitfalls:

• Although the online population explosion continues, Datamonitor predicts social net expansion will peak worldwide in 2009 and plateau in 2012.

• Mobile and niche social networks will take off.

• Real-time keeps getting realer.

• A profile backlash makes things simpler.

• Voice and video will keep people connected.

• Branded social networks will be integrated, not tacked on.

• Yahoo will use social networking to take down Google.

• Virtual communities will remain problematic for advertisers.

• What old media does well - create content - may finally give them an edge in new media.

• Users will make the Web their social network.

Link:
OMMA: 10 Things You Need to Know About Social Networking by Liz Tascio

Photo: xsmommy