Snake Coffee

TV-B-Gone Baseball Hat

Migraine Zapper

World's Smallest Camera

World Cup Surveillance Robot

Microscopic Bio-factories made from DNA 

Lord Leverhulme supposedly said, "I know half my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half."

A recent paper titled "The Future of Advertising is Now" by Christopher Vollmer et al attempts to solve his lordship's dilemma, at least for the automobile industry. Clearly, Lord Leverhulme's assessment remains remarkably accurate, as this chart from the paper shows.

What's even more interesting is the huge impact that the Internet plays in consumer's purchase decisions. It seems that marketeers at the car companies don't understand this just yet.

We decided to buy a video camera a month ago. When we bought a digital camera a couple of years back, we went to a store, looked at all the options, talked to a friend who is a bit of an expert on photography and another friend who is an expert on gadgets, decided which features were most important to us, went back to the store, shortlisted two models, went to a few more stores, compared prices, chose the store with the lowest prices and then finally decided which camera to buy.

This time it was quite different. We did talk to our friends, but most of our research was on the Internet. We found a couple of sites with expert reviews on video cameras as well as actual user post-purchase feedback and decided which brand and model to buy based entirely on this research. We determined the lowest price by looking it up on eBay. We didn't even go to a store - the video camera was delivered to our home by the dealer.

The key factor in both purchases was the experience of actual users. The Internet enabled us to find people who had used the latest models. Therefore we were able to make a very well-informed choice. The role of advertising? A priori, none! Even in-store advertising didn't count in the second case. In reality, the brands we considered - JVC, Sony, Panasonic, Nikon, Canon - have been advertising their technical expertise and quality for years. The advertising ensured that we considered their offerings. But that's it.

You can now find user opinions on everything from beach sandals to golf clubs on the Internet. Even mundane everyday products like soap are written about online by passionate users.

What are the implications for marketeers? I can think of a few:
1. Old-school mass communication will have less and less of an impact on purchase decisions. (Nothing new there, but it's still true.)
2. People are looking for the most credible source of information. The higher the involvement, the greater the investment in research. Figuring out how to engage with this research, to be aware of what actual users and influencers are saying about your brand or product is going to be critical, not in the future, but right now.

3. The Internet is a technical library where people can figure out how things really work, how much they really cost, how good they really are and where to get the lowest price. It is a democratic community where everyone can have their say and probably will. It is an entertainment & leisure medium where highly focused targeting is possible. It is a boundaryless, global network where national boundaries don't count.

Let me know if you can think of any more implications. Also, which firms really get this already? Do share any good examples that you can think of.

100 mile per gallon cars

Continuous loop elevators from Hitachi

Inside Innovation magazine from Businessweek

Robot Strider walks on water

Hidden beer bellies

I’ve written previously about the value of product prototyping in quickly creating and refining product designs based upon usability and human factors research. But what if the product involved is just too complex to even prototype? Many high-value products including medical implants, high-tech exploration devices and aeroplanes just can’t be prototyped, except at unviable costs.

In their paper on “Experience Prototyping”, Marion Buchenau and Jane Fulton-Suri of IDEO describe ways to get around this problem by prototyping user experiences. The authors describe 4 ways to prototype experiences:

1. Simulation:

Using a virtual or real substitute for the actual product and simple tools like cameras and diaries to capture the user’s impressions. What if you wanted to prototype chest-implanted defibrillators? The shock is enough to knock a man off his feet, so real prototypes can’t be used. One solution is to give patients a pager and whenever it buzzes, capture their impressions on film and in a diary. What if the patient is using a power tool or holding an infant? This led to the idea of finding a way to warn people that the defibrillator was about to go off.

2. Role-playing games:
Getting a design or client team to role-play the user experience with readily available props like chairs, tables and video cameras. What if you wanted to prototype a deep-sea submersible robot? One solution is to set up a room full of chairs (portraying underwater obstacles), have one person hold a chocolate bar as the target and another player plays the role of the robot by holding a video camera connected to a TV in another room, where the user of the robot relays verbal instructions to the person playing the robot. What if you wanted the camera to look right but the person moved to the right instead and collided with a chair? This led to the idea of separate controls for the camera and the robot.

3. Improvisation:

Using actors or design team members to improvise user experiences (acting out a situation without prior preparation) with the aid of instruction cards carrying contextual statements. What if you wanted to design a service for train passengers? One solution would be to put designers into the role of passengers and make them improvise real user situations with the use of instruction cards. “Pretend you can’t speak English.” “Be hungry, find something to eat.” This could lead to ideas about how trains should be configured and how staff should be trained.

4. Bodystorming:

Testing physical environment configurations by brainstorming within physically constrained setups. What if you wanted to prototype the interior of an aeroplane? One solution would be to set up explorations within a life-size fom-core environment, making team members enact real-life passenger experiences like sitting, reading, sleeping, talking, receiving and eating meals. This easily configurable enviroment allowed the design team to test many ideas for physical configuration and user comfort.

The authors posit that there are 3 types of activities where these processes are of value:
1. Understanding existing user experiences and context.
2. Exploring and evaluating design ideas.
3. Communicating ideas to an audience.

Experience prototyping is a concept with applications across industries. Whether you need to understand the user experience of a digital blood-sugar tester, design a new space shuttle or explain to a senior executive what a dark, cramped, low-income household’s bathroom is really like, this is a most effective tool.

Do leave a comment and share your experiences with prototyping or experience prototyping.

"To the man who only has a hammer in his toolbox, every problem looks like a nail."

I've just compiled a list of my favourite marketing innovation tools. This includes tools for:

• Idea generation
• Concept writing
• Rapid prototyping
• Innovation
• Decision-making
• Branding
• Advertising

Please give me your feedback about the tools and please write to me with suggestions about other tools which should feature in the toolkit.

Cook's 5 Ways to Innovate
|| 3. Focus on Customer Metrics || 4. See Things Differently ||
|| 5. Nurture Innovation Teams ||

This is a continuation of a five-part series based on the ideas of Scott Cook, founder of Intuit Software.

Cook suggests that innovative ideas come from seeing things from points of view other than our own:
a. The Customer's point of view:

What if your customer was a child? Imagine the world from her point of view: giant people around, god-like parents taking care of most of her wants, lots of products that are too difficult for her little hands to grasp and use. Try squatting and walking duck-fashion around the house to see the world from her point of view.

b. Who else might have a useful point of view?

Philip Kotler's Buyer Behaviour Model posits that customers seek information about the alternatives available to them. Highly credible sources of information include friends, family, colleagues, neighbours and trusted service providers (doctors, accountants etc.). Many of these people can also help us to gain insights and ideas.

(To be concluded.) 

We went to see X-Men III today (decent time-pass, but very ordinary compared to the excellent X-II) at a nearby multiplex cinema. During the intermission, an attendant came up to us in our seats and asked if we would like to order snacks or drinks. We declined as we weren’t feeling hungry. After a couple of minutes, the projector stopped showing commercials and shifted to an advertisement for the snack bar, with lots of mouthwatering photographs and a voice-over exhorting the audience to try each of the snacks. This went on for nearly ten minutes. It must have affected us because we now felt like eating something! So we called the attendant and bought some snacks.

Peter Drucker famously said that “the purpose of a business is to create a customer.” And that’s exactly what the advertising for the snack bar did to us. It turned us from uninterested non-customers who didn’t even feel a “need” for their product into customers who wanted and demanded it by simply stimulating our appetites visually, repeating a call to action verbally and eliminating the need for any effort on our part (other than taking twenty bucks out of my wallet).

This made me think about the frequent questionnaire-based polls that marketeers use to figure out what people need and how many people need it. If the snack bar had polled us before showing that advertisement, we would undoubtedly have said that we were not at all interested in buying their offering. Any decision based on such a poll would have left money on the table. The question to ask is: what would make people buy the offering? Another useful question is: why aren’t people buying it? In the case of the snack bar, the second question might lead to the insight that many people don’t like queuing up in a long line for their popcorn which may have led to the idea of in-seat service. The first question may well have led to the advertisement that turned us into paying customers of that snack bar.