Please don’t misunderstand, I respect Todd highly and he offers an accurate analysis of what Nielsen’s Homescan panelists (125,000 demographically diverse households spread across the United States), answered in response to a 2008 survey asking the primary shopper about their tendencies for reading labels on food and beverage packages.

But if you relied solely on the data that in summary says 61% of households agree completely or agree somewhat that they read product labels you would be drawing very faulty conclusions as to how readily consumers are responding to what is printed on the product labels.  And such conclusions can lead to bad policy decisions among government and health regulators, bad ingredient decisions by food scientists, and bad marketing decisions by brand managers.

Well why is that you might ask?  Two reasons come to mind:

Quantitative data offers only a narrow slice of understanding consumers’ actions, attitudes, and beliefs

Quantitative data is useful in defining and tracking trends in behavior.  But you cannot get to the truth of what someone actually does unless you actually go out and observe them in the environment where they engage in this activity.  You see, it’s not even good enough to sit down with consumers in a focus group or one on one interview and ask them what they do.  In the case of consumers reading labels, you must go out and visit grocery stores and observe from afar to determine whether people are actually reading labels.  Then if you approach them you can find out what they are looking for on the label and why they read it.  The ethnographic approach complements quantitative data by providing definitive proof of behavior and rounds it out with cultural and personal drivers.

 A combination of confirmation bias and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle impacts truthful self reporting

Maybe you realize it, but the truth is, we lie all of the time when our behaviors do not match what we know “the experts” or “society” or even we ourselves have come to believe is the “appropriate behavior.”  If you don’t floss on a regular basis and the dentist confronts you with the results of this by saying “your gums are a little inflamed, are you flossing regularly?” how likely are you to admit, no, I never floss even though I know it’s good for me?  So think about those individuals who reported that they agree completely or agree somewhat that they read product labels.  Some of them probably absolutely do read the labels, especially if they or someone in the home have a restricted diet due to food allergies, health conditions, or less likely, are on a diet.

However, my experiences as a new product development consultant where I engaged with hundreds of consumers and visited dozens of stores demonstrated that most consumers move through the store in a mindless mode of filling their carts with the products and brands they know and only rarely stop to examine the label.  Nielsen’s own (warning PDF) DeltaQual research (warning PDF) shows that once these habits or Omega Rules are formed, only a certain type of trigger might cause a consumer to stop and scrutinize the brand or label more closely.  This differs of course by category where shopper modality adjusts accordingly but the average shopping list from week to week is probably 80% identical and probably 99% identical across an 8 week period.  I described one such delta moment scenario in my last post concerning the not-from-concentrate orange juice “lie” that ruptured the Breillatt household’s perception of what constitutes “fresh squeezed orange juice in a box.”

In reality, consumers may not even realize the lie to the “truth” that they claim defines their behavior.  It is not unusual when visiting a home and asking one member of the family questions about their behavior to have a son or daughter or spouse pipe in with, “No way, that’s not what you REALLY do.” You see, as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (as misused by social scientists) states, “the very act of observing a phenomenon inevitably alters that phenomenon in some way.”  Consumers may believe they’re checking labels because they’ve heard how important it is to be aware of what they’re eating what with the food pyramid from the USDA, the constantly improving Nutrition Facts, and dietary recommendations from pediatricians, Dr. Oz, Dr. Gupta, and every other guru they encounter through media. They remember that of course they checked out the label of many of their foods when the big uproar came up around trans fats or high fructose corn syrup or whatever the latest nutritional crisis might be.  Of course, they forget that they did that once during three weeks’ worth of shopping 2 years ago until they were caught up again by the latest scandal to grip TMZ and the gossip rags at the checkout line.

Allow me to expand on that thought with a recent and relevant example - especially for you social media researchers who are trying to figure out how to leverage the data such sites like Twitter and Facebook offer.  Just a few days ago, the Nielsen funded Council for Research Excellence released the results of the Video Consumer Mapping Study which identified that:

The amount of time Americans report they spend watching online video has been, on average, grossly overstated by conventional forms of media research and audience measurement …conversely, traditional TV viewing has been pretty drastically under-reported” by research that asks people how they consume video.  The reason why, is that research based on how people perceive they consume media isn’t nearly as accurate as research that actually observes how they use it.

The ad industry historically has known about such “halo effects” and the fact that it is considered socially unpopular for people to report that they watch as much TV as they actually do. On the other hand, people tend to over-report their online and mobile video consumption, because “it is new and cool.”

As Arsenio Hall used to say, “Things that make you go hmm.”  Social biases have a real impact on how survey participants perceive themselves and therefore how they report their activities.

So my recommendation is, if you’re going to rely upon a statistic as the foundation for taking an important action to your product, make sure you have a good interpretative lens based on true consumer / user behavior to provide the full color for interpreting the data.

The article is a Q&A with Alissa Hamilton, a Woodcock Foundation Food & Society Policy Fellow, discussing her forthcoming book, “Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice.”

Let me just cut to the pulpy core of the issue: practically every carton of “not-from concentrate” orange juice you could pick up in the refrigerated section of your local grocery is NOT what you think it is.

As Ms. Hamilton states,

It’s a heavily processed product. It’s heavily engineered as well. In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn’t oxidize. Then it’s put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it’s ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.

Sitting in a metal vat for a year = freshly squeezed? Right, that’s what you’re drinking.  Not something that was freshly picked from the grove, squeezed and then rushed to your grocer in a matter of a few days.  Even though that is what they would like you to think and for which they expect you to pay a mighty premium.

Until February of this year, my family of 5 were loyal purchasers of the 4 pack of 64 oz Tropicana Premium from Costco and paid something like $4 a carton for what we thought was a close approximation to fresh squeezed juice. Give or take a couple of weeks.  I mean, look at the side of the carton where they romanticize the freshly delivered juice that is rushed up the Eastern seaboard from the grove to big cities in the refrigerated Tropicana Juice Train.

Is there any reason to believe there won’t be a huge outcry when consumers learn what they’re actually drinking is not fresh juice taste but a manufactured simulacrum of it? And that even worse, more and more of that juice is not fresh from Florida but instead shipped from Brazil?  At that point, the damage done by Mr. Arnell’s ill considered packaging refresh will be a tempest in a teacup compared to the response to Ms. Hamilton’s book explaining how inauthentic Tropicana’s pretty little cartons of juice really are.  Then Mr. Arnell can add yet another definition to what the phrase “squeeze” means in the minds of Americans today.

What change did the Breillatt household make, you ask?  We decided to go with the best tasting frozen juice we could find since it’s half the price of “not-from concentrate” and essentially the same except you’re not paying for shipping water and the more expensive manufacturing process. Plus you can determine how “juicy” you want your juice by reducing the amount of water you add. Costco has a 6 pack of their Kirkland brand that is actually really good.  And when we want that truly freshly squeezed taste?  Occasionally we’ll squeeze our own oranges to get nothing but juice.

What’s the lesson from this story?  It’s yet to be certain how much of a hit Tropicana and other juices like Florida’s Natural, Simply Orange, and even Minute Maid will take from this revelation.  But if they learned anything from the high fructose corn syrup debate, I’m sure they’ll be lining up their brightest PR stars to attempt to make this story go away.

The better answer though is to be truthful with your consumers.  In this era where their trust has been battered in multiple areas of our life, consumers are increasingly showing loyalty to brands that stay true to their promises.  There really is something to the maxim “authenticity speaks for itself.”

[Update] Seth Godin nails the authenticity trend with his brief post, “What you say, what you do and who you are.”

If you’ve ever found yourself working for a start-up or really small company - I’m talking less than 15 employees - then you’ve no doubt encountered the siren song filled dreams of a mammoth sized marketing budget.

“If only we were like P&G or Apple or Accenture,” the song goes, “with six, seven, yes even eight figure R&D and marketing budgets…we could blast our message on billboards and in every Google Ad possible…starlets would preen around our product in every episode of the best shows on Must See TV…we would have access to all of the research ever generated about our target customer and I could quit guessing when the CEO asks me what is the right next step….Man, our brand would be ubiquitous…customers across the country, even around the world would know how amazing our products are and…we would be inundated with sales…because they would love us.”

Yes, it would be amazing wouldn’t it Virginia?  But be careful because as the Bible says, “where much is given, much is expected.”  It’s enticing to believe that all of the money in the world would provide you with the absolutely complete and perfect understanding of your target consumers.  Your war room would be filled with books (OK well not books but given the thunk factor of those PowerPoint decks when printed and dropped on the board room table, they might as well be) carefully crafted by only the best consultants detailing everything you never even dreamed you wanted to know about the habits of your customer.  You would have hours of candid video footage which you would spend hours studying the minute details of freeze frames like Phil Jackson preparing for the big game.  The best designers would be on speed dial and shower you with their most brilliant and most modern concepts.

Sounds like nirvana, right?

And yet, if that is what a massive marketing budget can provide, then what in the world happened to those poor schlubs over at Tropicana who arguably own the concept of fresh squeezed orange juice?

As Grant McCracken, pop cultural anthropoligist extraordinaire, explains, they were swayed by everything money could provide: the glitz AND the glamour! Those entrusted with this sacred brand allowed a so-called guru with the hippest eyewear you ever saw, run their brand right off the cliff.

What, you mean the iconic mouthwatering orange with the straw in it is so fraught with meaning that abandoning it for a sterile, generic looking, impossible to distinguish from the cheapest watered down so-called orange juice sitting at the bottom of the shelf package, would actually lead to a 20% decline in revenues in the critical first 3 months after launch?  As our good friends over at Calculated Risk like to say, “Hoocoodanode??!“  It’s amusing that Tropicana’s initial response to the flat-lined launch was that complaints came from a loyal vocal minority.  A vocal minority?  REALLY?  You lose $33 million in revenues on top of a failed $35 million packaging redesign / launch campaign and you say a vocal minority caused you to stand up and pay attention?  Sounds more like a full scale revolt of a significant portion of your customer base.

McCracken pulls no punches in his cutting critique of Peter Arnell - the so-called guru - and Massimo D’Amore, the Tropicana executive who sponsored the whole debacle.  And Arnell’s response demonstrates an over-engineered thinking that only the brightest minds could produce.  Consumers know what the juice looks like, Peter, the key is making them think they’re about to drink straight from the orange.  No one I know could ever have imagined that they were freshly squeezing the juice by rotating your little orange cap.  Talk about artifice.

The lesson from this story my friends is that no matter how large your budget, if you don’t ask the right people the right questions, you can expect similar results.  And in corollary, the larger your budgetary spend, the more likely your spectacular failure will go down as a Harvard Business School case study of what not to do.

So remember, as one entrusted with a product brand story, you are an artist and your product is destined for the masses - your customers - so if you’re going to entrust your art to some guru, make sure they go out and talk to those same masses and actually LISTEN TO THEM.  In fact, in today’s world of Social Media, for a lot less than what Arnell costs, you can learn more just by dipping your toes in conversations flowing around your brands each day.  Why not strike up a conversation and see where it leads.  Because while those same masses may not know art, they absolutely know what they like:

The public is the tribunal before which all art is judged – not the critics or the academies. The public is the artist’s only patron, and has certain fundamental rights. It will submit to education, and will respond to suggestion, but it will not be bullied. Walter J. Phillips

And to those iconoclastic designers out there who hold themselves above the masses?  I can only say that mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity.

Next to come, an exploration of why competitors fail to act on customer opportunities in categories clearly demonstrating strong growth and significant innovation.

Adam over at Hot Meteor unearthed some incredibly cool vintage advertisements from National Geographic for the DHARMA Initiative - jump over to his Flickr stream to see the whole collection.  For all of you fellow LOST junkies, you have to agree that this is some amazing work!  If I’m ever looking for a designer in the future, Hot Meteor will be one of my first stops.

Hat tip to Jason Kottke for the pointer.

I personally believe the framework for new product development remains highly relevant even for novel solutions where  a real world context is hard to identify.  It just requires flexibility in how you approach it and a willingness to proceed based on your own personal convictions while seeking additional data to support your belief that there is a pony in there somewhere.

How can I determine the need and saleability of a “new to the world” product?

Make sure you go read the comments at Jeff’s site because they add some real depth to the answer and respond to at least one facet of the question I should have considered.

With that said, here’s the answer:

This is a question every product manager will likely face at some time in his or her career and it is one of the more complex challenges due to the multi-faceted answer it requires.

But let’s start at the most basic assumption: you know who your initial customers are and you’ve determined what problem your product solves for them. You do know this, right? Somewhere among your PRDs, MRDs, spreadsheets and extensive collection of feature defining Keynote decks is a single document with one short paragraph that describes:

 [This group of customers] will use [my product] to solve [this problem] in [this context].

You have this right? Don’t feel bad if you don’t. But if you haven’t started actual production / development of your product, don’t go any further until you have this nailed to the wall of your boardroom with the signatures of all internal parties.

[Note, I’m not going to go into the details of what it takes to generate this target customer / product profile but if you want a good primer on this go read Innosight’s write-up of their “JOBS™” methodology. Christensen didn’t invent this concept of ensuring your product aligns with a real job a customer needs to do — it’s Marketing 201 (a.k.a. market segmentation by need states) — but his team does a nice job of framing a successful approach for avoiding the all too common dilemma I’m about to describe. I would also point you to my friends over at K&A as well but none of their relevant materials are posted up on the site.  I’ll just say you won’t truly succeed until you learn the full meaning of the word ethnography.]

In my experience, especially when dealing with engineering-minded entrepreneurs developing “new to the world” products, there is a tendency to enthusiastically focus on developing the new product without stepping back to ask, “Who will want to buy this and why?” Some people call this the Mt. Everest Syndrome — we build because we can and because it is a very cool and extremely technical challenge. There’s nothing wrong with doing it this way, but the problem is that once you’ve reached the “summit” of developing this amazing, mind blowing new widget you suddenly look up and realize, “Wait a second, now what do I do?”

The natural response is to begin chasing after potential customers because you want to get paid for your work. But if you don’t have a clear conceptual model of the person and behaviors you’re targeting, then this will be a very frustrating endeavor because at every turn you will hear a different response from a different type of customer. The Director of IT at one of the still surviving major financial institutions will tell you that your solution would be perfect to audit their expenditures of TARP funds if it had an ITIL compliant server back end that could interface with their Exchange setup. At the same time, the “typical consumer” will tell you that your GUI is too complex and ask why you can’t just dumb it down so that little Kylie can embed photos of her pet fish in her newsletter and easily send them out to the local family mailing list? And of course, the 3l33t programming types will just shake their heads and say, “Dude, where’s my command line interface so that I can link up to my headless virtual servers to manage my growing collection of torrents?!?!”

So, which one of those customer types or “personas” did you want to use for your pricing, sales growth, and marketing outreach planning purposes?

Skriiiiiitch! [mimicking the sound of a needle being yanked across an old LP].

Remember when I said there was nothing wrong with building the product first and then trying to figure out how to market and sell it? Please reach into your ears and yank out this piece of nonsense because in most cases it is absolutely wrong advice. What I haven’t said — and experience teaches — is that there is a strong possibility that you’re going to show your widget to every potential customer out there and people will shrug and say, “So what?”

Those two words should be among the most used words in a good product manager’s lexicon. “So what?” is the defining question for determining whether you have identified a solution that delivers a unique and valuable answer to a real job that an identified segment of customers want to accomplish and for which they would be willing to pay real money.

Unless you work for Microsoft Research or Los Alamos National Laboratory or some other well funded research tank, every single product idea you pursue needs to be latched onto a well-defined customer persona. That customer group is who you will target for your roll-out of the new product when it is actually released.

This is why a proper new product development effort would begin with identifying a problem or “job” that a target group of people need solved and determining:

1. Who are these target customers? (think demographics)
2. What existing solutions do they use and/or what work-arounds do they leverage against said existing solutions?
3. Where and when do they use these solutions; or, better yet, where and when would they like to use these solutions?
4. Why aren’t existing solutions solving their problem?
5. What are the key attributes a successful solution needs to provide? (this should be a very short list of probably no more than 3 attributes)
6. What value do these potential customers place upon such a solution?

See, here’s the thing; once you’ve identified the target customer and have some understanding of the value they place upon an optimal solution then you have completed 80% of the work required to answer your original question: how do I determine the need / saleability of a new to the industry product?

You should now know:

1. Your hypothesized initial target customer persona — when applied against the right demographic data this should enable you to identify a market sizing, which is a critical component for defining your growth model.

2. The value they place on the ideal solution — when combined with an understanding of the competitive landscape and your fixed plus projected variable production costs, this will help you determine pricing.

You still have to do the other 20%, but at this point it’s more a process of filling in the blanks than it is inventing something from whole cloth.

I know, you’re sitting there staring at the screen and thinking, “OK great, Alain, if you’re so smart, how do I accomplish that last 20 percent?”

Well, I’m glad you asked because that was my next point. When I worked in business development it was not unusual for someone from marketing or sales to send me a hurried email asking about a particular solution space and what our potential TAM was if we decided to expand in that direction. I always was quick to ask, “Are you looking to understand our Total Available Market or the Total Addressable Market?” Usually if I was talking face to face with the requestor I got a blank stare in response to that question.

Here’s the thing — if you want determine the potential opportunity for your product, you first need to know the size of the market you are considering entering / creating and what share of it you intend to own. That is the distinction between Available and Addressable. And this isn’t an easy effort. In the book, Marketing Metrics: 50+ Metrics Every Executive Should Master, the authors elaborate:

    Market definition is never a trivial exercise: If a firm defines its market too broadly, it may dilute its focus. If it does so too narrowly, it will miss opportunities and allow threats to emerge unseen. To avoid these pitfalls, as a first step in calculating market share, managers are advised to define the served market in terms of unit sales or revenues for a specific list of competitors, products, sales channels, geographic areas, customers, and time periods….

Data parameters must be carefully defined: Although market share is likely the single most important marketing metric, there is no generally acknowledged best method for calculating it. This is unfortunate, as different methods may yield not only different computations of market share at a given moment, but also widely divergent trends over time. The reasons for these disparities include variations in the lenses through share is viewed (units vs. dollars), where in the channel the measurements are taken (shipments from manufacturers versus consumer purchases), market definition (scope of the competitive universe), and measurement error. In the situation analysis that underlies strategic decisions, managers must be able to understand and explain these variations.

So in defining your market the steps to follow include:

1. Define the boundaries of the target market and determine / estimate the number of consumers / business entities who would be buyers of any solutions that are or could become available. In this case we are considering a “new to the industry” product so, while an existing solution may not exist, there likely are substitutes available that customers are using. Back in the 1950’s before there was a handheld mobile phone, everyone who needed to communicate by voice used landline phones or two-way radios. Therefore, if you were Motorola developing your analog handheld mobile cellular telephone — of which the DynaTAC was the first US public commercial prototype in 1974 — you would have defined your Total Available Market as the entire population of people who seek to communicate by direct voice transmission.

Because Motorola was a large successful company at the time, they likely projected against a global TAM. Of course, a true visionary might have said that the market was broader than just voice communication and included wireless and image communication as well and therefore broadened the TAM to include users of snail mail, telegraph, teletype, television, and messenger services.

But where do you get the data to put an actual number to that projection? Well most industries have a trade association that annually reports the manufacturing numbers or revenue for each defined product space. For PC and software worldwide and regional numbers I always relied on data from International Data Corporation (IDC), Gartner, and Jupiter Research.

Here’s an example of how Macromedia defined their TAM methodology which pretty much mirrors the approach I used to take for Macrovision. What’s interesting about their example is that they also leverage point of sale (POS) data from NPD. Nielsen, the company I work for now, provides this type of data for manufacturers and retailers in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods space. Using this level of data sophistication dramatically improves the accuracy of product growth projections, although access to this data is a costly option on the order of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you’re focused exclusively on the consumer space then census data is your friend and a good starting point. Typically you can search out additional descriptions by analysts that spring up in corporate quarterly reports, investor presentations and online repositories including blogs authored by sector experts.

2. Describe the competitive landscape including the type and size of competitors and the nature of their rivalry, threat of entry, threat of substitute solutions, bargaining power of customers, and finally bargaining power of suppliers. The astute among you quickly identified this as a five forces analysis as defined by one Michael Porter of Harvard Business School fame. I’m not going to dive into detail here other than to say, if you haven’t done so, go read his seminal article describing this model and how to effectively use it in defining a competitive market space. A critical component is building an expanded SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) analysis for each primary competitor since it provides a useful characterization of their capabilities and product directions. You need to avoid becoming simplistic in building this analysis and you should clearly identify where your knowledge is factual vs. hypothesized.

3. Break the market into segments and estimate their size. Market segmentation here should really focus back on the jobs a customer is looking to accomplish when they use this solution. For instance, mobile phone users differ significantly between corporate users who are looking to stay in touch with the office and their professional network as they travel across the country and the globe as compared to heavy socially mobile consumers who want the latest games, ringtones, and to be able to share photos and texts with their wide group of close friends who probably live within the same metropolitan area.

Each group has a defined set of requirements that you should ferret out and determine how valuable the opportunity is in pursuing them. Part of your consideration should include attitudes and speed of adoption. It is not always fair to assume that the best market is the 18-34 year old market in spite of what many on Madison Avenue believe. Age and socioeconomic status may not even be the appropriate characteristics for measuring the markets you are trying to define.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Your market segmentation is not necessarily based on age, income, or gender. It should be focused on people who highly identify with the problem your solution solves — whomever they might be and their likelihood for early versus later adoption.

4. Estimate market share of competitors in each defined segment. This is fairly straightforward — like I said, filling in blanks — but you should carefully consider who the competitors and how tightly they hold to your target customer base. Since this is a “new to the industry” solution you need to keep your definition broad until you have narrowed down the precise requirements. With your requirements in place you can effectively identify who plays in your identified target segment for initial launch.

So now what? Well, with all of this data in place, you need to create a market growth projection. There are a number of ways to go about this and in reality all of them are filled with guesswork, estimations, hypotheses, and at least a little gut based decision making. But no VC or CEO is going to accept that you’ve built this model based on your gut so you need some type of analytical model to back up your assertions.

Let me introduce you to the Bass Diffusion Model of adoption. If you’re familiar with the Crossing the Chasm series then this graph should feel comfortable. If you’re not familiar with it then you really should just go read the book or at least a summary of it. Unless your product is completely lacking in analogous solutions that are already or historically have existed in the market place — it does occasionally happen — you should be able to use the Bass Model as a means of projecting your sales or unit growth over the next 1, 3, 10, or 20 years. The formula may appear daunting at first glance but the two key variables you need to worry about are the coefficient of innovation and the coefficient of imitation. As the folks over at smbZen BizJournal state:

The “coefficient of innovation” is the probability that an innovator will adopt the product and, in its calculation, includes the impact of awareness building efforts. The “coefficient of imitation” simply represents the probability that your friends will adopt the service if you did.

“But,” you say, “what if there is nothing analogous that I can project against?” Well, you need to be creative and figure out an appropriate analogy because this is to some extent how you will describe the solution to your target investors as well as your target customer. If it’s completely new to the world then they will be looking for an appropriate analogy and you should be the one to provide it to them. [Note: David Locke in the comments to the original article makes the excellent point that hopefully in this case you’re looking at a technology play where you’ve developed an interesting and unique capability that now needs a market sponsor to help you exploit it and build a market for it. Go read David’s comment for deeper understanding.]

In the consumer packaged goods world, brand managers typically will supplement this data with test market research that includes both panel and real world, hand’s on test product feedback research. My employer, The Nielsen Company, has a strong lock on the former with our BASES studies methodology that leverages a very deep database of historical product introductions and actual sales performance as measured against advertising and promotional spending. We help clients like P&G build concept boards that describe the product in significant detail including imagery, branding, messaging, product SKUs, benefits, and pricing. These boards are then put in front of a few thousand consumers who fit the target customers’ characteristics and feedback is solicited through online surveys and webcasts.

Depending on how the product performs, clients may decide to put actual prototypes of the product in the hands of the sample consumers and test out their experiences with the solution. All of the data gathered from this experience enables a more realistic projection for how the product will perform at launch time.

But if you’re not a P&G you can still go out and do some of this similar effort in alpha testing of screen shots and product descriptions either through online surveys or in-person focus groups. This in part is why Google takes their “Beta” approach to many of their solutions that evolve out of Google Labs.

Finally, it is possible that you can’t go out and do any of the research I have outlined. It is entirely possible that you have developed something like Twitter — a technology that was originally created because someone thought it would be a cool idea and it slowly evolves through constant iterations and significant stumbles into a true utility that consumers love and use ravenously. But unless you are already independently wealthy or have an understanding sponsor, or are willing to spend all of your free time outside of that you spend doing your day job, this is a very difficult path to pursue. Further, there’s no evidence at this point that Twitter is actually going to produce real revenue in the long run, so you may want to focus on developing a solution that pays the bills from day one.

WHATEVER - though there is probably something to be learned from that experience.  I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.  What happens when the services we depend upon are not accessible to us?  Those who are active tweeters who have experienced the fail whale on many occasions know exactly that of which I speak.

With that said, here’s the main thrust of this post.  Hat tip to John Gruber for bringing Matt’s rant to my attention.

Maybe you’ve already seen Matt Haughey’s [founder of MetaFilter] rant on “How Social Media Really Works” on his personal website.  If not, it’s worth a read.

Make sure you read through the entire set of comments.  Basically his argument breaks down to: I research products by asking the people I trust and their opinion is really what matters most to me.  In the end, I want to buy the best products available so my suggestion to the marketers out there is build an excellent product and the voice of the masses will discover your excellence.  Gaming the system will gain you nothing if your product sucks.

In my mind there is strong value to his argument.  As the Cluetrain Manifesto once upon a time declared, markets are conversations.  Any attempt to game those conversations will eventually come back to bite the author / sponsoring company in the ass.  If you become a part of the conversation and realize that in today’s market, your brand is largely no longer controlled by you, then you have an opportunity to first hear, then learn from, and if you’re really good, educate your community.

A brand manager’s responsibility in this new era is to foster and cultivate their community by developing products and experiences that offer answers to the jobs their customers have that need to be done.  It means do an awful lot more listening and a lot less talking.

I literally took time to smell and cultivate the roses in my backyard and clearly see the benefits of taking a 3 month sabbatical about every 10 years.

So with that said, here’s a fun little piece I wrote in response to a request from Jeff Lash who runs the Ask a Good Product Manager web site.  It’s always fun to flex the innovation fingers a little and think through the hard questions.  This will likely spawn about a half dozen other posts in the coming weeks on how to attack or defend a market with products and how to harness innovation in order to accomplish that endeavor.

So here’s the question: 

What do product managers do for commodity products like toothpaste, pens, pencils, staplers, coffee mugs etc. where customer needs have not changed for ages. How do you differentiate in an overcrowded market? 

Ah, the age old question, how do you survive in a market with slim to zero margins because consumers see no difference between your brand and that provided by competitors A, B, through Y and Z?  The simplistic answer is to use the cheapest raw materials possible, offshore your manufacturing, go for scale in distribution, build tight relationships with your channels, and roll up your competition until you own the market.  That used to deliver some success but in the world of Wal-Mart, Costco, private labels, and gads, a bazillion on-line stores, even that is not enough.  Why?  Because year after year, for any product that is the same as what you sold them last year, Wal-Mart will say, “Here’s the price you gave me last year. Here’s what I can get a competitor’s product for. Here’s what I can get a private-label version for. I want to see a better value that I can bring to my shopper this year. Or else I’m going to use that shelf space differently.”  

So what do you do?  Innovate!  And by that I don’t mean go brainstorm what the next new pencil or pen or stapler ought to look like.  What I mean is you need to reconsider the market you compete in and more closely examine the consumers you are serving.  Let’s walk through one of the examples you outlined and consider how one might differentiate within that market.   

Pencils

We’re talking about a writing implement that has been around for over 400 years, the basic form and construction of which hasn’t changed since originally designed back in the 1700s.  This should be the ultimate manufactured commodity product!  When we think of a pencil inevitably most of us think of the good old standard wooden yellow no. 2 lead pencil with a red (or maybe green) eraser held on top by a compressed aluminum or brass ferrule. 

What’s the benefit of the standard pencil?  Some people use pencils because they’re cheap and easy to replace if lost.  A former boss of mine, a professor, would use pretty much nothing but a no. 2 pencil and by observation I would say that’s because he’s an old creature of habit who wants an erasable writing implement but who also loses them or leaves them behind everywhere he goes.  Parents and teachers give children pencils because the impermanence of their marks makes them good for correcting mistakes as well as cleaning up stray scribbles on desks, clothes, and walls. Artists and architects prefer pencils for their ability to sharpen the point in the manner they like and the various textures this facilitates creating on paper. Obviously the lasting power of the wooden pencil is its ability to satisfy these needs and many others.   

 To put some numbers to that point, consider that in this era of modern technology where the pen followed by the typewriter followed by the word processor supposedly replaced the pencil, approximately 2.4 billion pencils of all types are still sold annually in the United States.  The average cheapo private label yellow no. 2 pencil based on a quick check at the neighborhood Staples sells for 99 cents a dozen.  In other words, the cheapest wooden pencil available sells for less than a dime a piece.  And a pencil is a pencil, right?  So how do you ensure consumers buy your brand at a premium price?  

The intuitive product manager might think, let’s consider what’s wrong with the no. 2 pencil: 

1. You have to keep sharpening it

2. You must have ready access to a sharpener

3. The pencil shortens with every turn of the sharpener

4. It’s a waste of natural resources because you never use the entire pencil (see #3)

5. The wood shavings are messy

6. The shape and diameter make it hard for young and aged hands to grasp leading to writer’s fatigue

7. You keep paying for the container (the wood) when all you really need is the lead

8. It doesn’t offer multiple lead diameters from very fine (.03 mm) to very fat (5.6 mm)

9. You have to carry multiple pencils for various weights of lead

10. The lead point is constantly exposed so the lead marks up whatever it rubs on or else it breaks easily

Given all of these problems the product manager might automatically determine that clearly there is a market for a mechanical pencil and they should start manufacturing those. Perhaps, but doing so requires completely new capabilities from the design to the manufacturing stage and if all you make is wood pencils, a shift like that represents significant capital investments to either build or acquire such specialization.  And yet given the continued demand for wooden pencils, there are interesting ways to differentiate within the confines of the original product definition alone – consider special hardwoods, eco-friendly renewable forests, recycled woods, and specialty leads.   

It’s important to frame this thought in the triangle of consumer values – sometimes called the Value Mix.  Consumers evaluate the benefits they gain from a product across three variables as described below.

This is an important framework to consider since with a commodity product, the functional requirements (wood, graphite, eraser, shape, size) are fairly universally met across available competitive offerings and therefore manufacturers are forced to compete on either economic (a race to the bottom for lowest price) or psychological (appealing to a consumer’s particular desires for esteem or recognition).  Ignoring price, this leaves us with a psychological approach that might be supported by adjustments to the functional attributes. Let’s think about the three groups of consumers discussed above and consider how a pencil manufacturer might effectively target each one of them in a manner that would drive a price premium and brand differentiator. 

Teachers

Educators who work in K-12 are a perfect segment for targeting given that pencils and school seem to go together like peanut butter and jam.  Consider that in primary education (Grades K-4) and secondary education (Grades 5-12) respectively, women comprise 89% and 63% of the teachers.  If women are a primary target, then perhaps aligning your pencil with a cause that they are passionate about makes sense.  For example, selling a pencil that is pink or covered with painted pink ribbons and marketed with a campaign that states a percentage of the revenues for these pencils are contributed to supporting breast cancer research, might be appealing to this group.  Dixon Ticonderoga sells just such a pencil and they retail at $4.29 a dozen.  That’s a 430% increase just by painting a pencil a different color and aligning your product with a cause. 

Children

Young children are going through the process of learning to write and doing so requires significant development of the fine motor skills in their hands.  Teachers and parents look for ways to help the child improve those skills and one approach is to increase the diameter of the pencil, thereby making it easier to grasp during the earlier stages of the learning experience.  One way to accomplish this is with one of those rubber triangular sleeves that covers ¼ of the pencil.  But an approach that plays to the pencil manufacturer’s existing capabilities is to simply increase the diameter of the wood encasing the pencil and the stick of graphite inside accordingly.  Take it one step further and market the pencils as “My First Pencil” and suddenly you have a product that retails for $5.29 a dozen.  Now considering that this pencil is 13/32” in diameter versus the typical ¼” diameter pencil, there is an increase in material costs but only by a factor of 2 while your retail price has jumped by a factor of 5.3!  That means you’re still making ~300% more in profits on a simple wooden pencil. 

And if you’ve already made a name for yourself with the teachers of these children, it’s highly possible your brand will be included in the list of recommended supplies to purchase that the teacher gives out at the beginning of the school year.  This is important because the 4 weeks preceding and 4 weeks following the start of school is when 25% of the annual school and office supply purchases occur. 

Designers/Architects

When you think of this consumer group you realize that functionality is critical to them since the pencil is a key tool of trade and therefore an important part of their work product.  But you also realize that their work is all about aesthetics so image has a strong impact as well in what they choose.  Two possible approaches here that both play on the same psychological dimension should be considered.  Take a typical pencil, die the wood black, paint it a glossy black, add raised dots to create a grip, get rid of the eraser, and suddenly you have a sleek black arrow that looks elegant on the desk or in the hands of the user.  This pencil reflects their style and sense of design.  And it also sells for $24 a dozen as the Faber Castell “Black”.  Even if the materials (graphite, wood, dye, paint) are 400% more expensive, you’ve realized a 2000% increase in profits where the pencil goes from less than a dime a piece to $2.00 a piece.

And if you think that is something, try creating “The Perfect Pencil” which is the combination of a fine cedar pencil with SV-bonded anti-break lead in B grade and sporting a soft non-smudging eraser with an aluminum extender (for when the pencil shortens) with built-in sharpener with a high-quality sharpening blade and a sprung pocket clip.  The price on this bad boy?  Between $75 and $250 for the pencil gift set (depending on where you buy it) which includes the extender and three pencils.  And then you can purchase pencil refills at 5 for $50.  That’s $10 a pencil.  Making it a 10,000% increase just connected to the prestige of a niche focused product.  Now granted you won’t find many who are willing to pony up that kind of cash for the Porsche of pencils, but that’s what segmentation is all about. 

Apple!  Apple!  Magazines can’t possibly be wrong so Apple is clearly the Most Admired, the Most Innovative, and the Master at Design. 

Let me tell you, when what you teach and develop every day has the title Innovation attached to it, you reach a point where you tire of hearing about Apple.  Because everyone believes the equation Apple=Innovation is a fundamental truth akin to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Boyle’s Law, or Moore’s Law.  But ask these same people if they understand exactly how Apple comes up with their ideas and what approach they use to develop such blockbuster products and whether it is a fluky phenomenon or based on a repeatable set of governing principles and you mostly get a dumbfounded stare.  This is what frustrates me because people worship what they don’t understand.

 I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time but finally sat down and put pixel to screen after coming across a description of Michael Lopp’s (a Senior Engineering Manager at Apple) discussion of how Apple does design during the panel he did at SXSW Interactive with John Gruber (yes for you Apple heads, that Daring Fireball guy) on March 8th titled Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts.  I know, you’re saying, It’s been 13 days Alain, how slow can you be?  Well, I was waiting for someone to post an actual recording of the seminar but neither video nor audio seems to exist at this point.  If someone reads this and happens to have such a recording please, please, share!

What will follow then is a collection of insights that various attendees created from their notes of attending and then my own personal discussion of what this portends for people who aspire to be like Apple.  My intention is to attempt to synthesize what various attendees have written into a single representation of what Lopp and Gruber actually said.

Helen Walters at BusinessWeek summarized Lopp’s panel with five key points:

Apple thinks good design is a present.  Lopp starts off this section by discussing of all things, the story of the obsessive design of the new Mentos Box.  You know Mentos right?  The really odd packaging (paper rolls like Spree candy) promoted by some of the most bizarre ads on TV? It’s the candy that nobody I know eats, they just use it to create cola geysers.  Have you looked recently at the new packaging Mentos comes in?  Why did they change the packaging from a roll to a box?  I’ll do a post on this later but if you want to read about it here’s an article from 2003 discussing the rationale for the change.  Lopp says the new box is a clean example of obsessive design because the cardboard top locks open and then closes with a click - there’s an actual latch on the box and it actually works.  It’s not just a square box but one that serves a function and works.  I went out and bought a box just so I could examine it more closely and it’s an ingenious design of subtle simplicity that works so well even shaking it upside down does not pop the box open.

According to John Gruber, the build-up of anticipation leading to the opening of that present is an important (if not the most important) aspect of the enjoyment people derive from Apple’s products.  The world divides into two camps: 

1. Those who open their presents before Christmas morning
2. Those who wait - they set their presents under the tree and like a child agonize over the enormous anticipation of what will be in the box when they open it on Christmas morning

Apple designs for #2.  No other company is so heavily fetishized in the online unboxing photo documentation phenomenon.  But few companies put as much attention to detail as Apple does to the fit and finish of the box let alone the out of box experience.  How many companies do you know that make packaging p*rn? And you can capture that Christmas morning experience more than once a year with every stop you make at the local Apple store.  Apple wraps great ideas inside great ideas and the whole experience is linked as the present concept traces from the bottom up: Apple’s OS X operating system is the present waiting inside its sleek, beautiful hardware; its hardware is the present artfully unveiled from inside the gorgeous box; the box is the present waiting for your sticky little hands inside its museum-like Apple Stores; and the bow tying it all together? Steve Jobs’s dramatic keynote speeches, where the Christmas morning fervor is fanned on a grand stage by one of the business world’s most capable hype men.

Pixel perfect mockups are critical.  This is hard work and an enormous amount of time but is necessary to give the complete feeling for the entire product. For those who aren’t familiar with the term this means the designers for a piece of software at Apple create an exact image down to the very pixel (the smallest point of light on your monitor - it is the basic unit of composition on a computer or television display) for every single interface screen and feature.  There is no Ipsum Lorem used as filler for content either.  At least one of the Senior Managers refuses to look at any mock-ups that contain such Greek filler.  Doing this removes ALL ambiguity - everyone knows and can see what the final product will look like and critique it accordingly.  It also means you won’t get changes by the designer or engineer after the review as they are filling in the content - something I have seen happen time and time again.  Ultimately it means no one can feign surprise when they see the real thing later on.

10 to 3 to 1.  Take the above concept and pile on top of it the requirement that Apple designers expect to design 10 different mockups of any new feature that is considered.  And these are not just crappy mockups, these all represent different but really good implementations that are faithful to the product specifications.  Then narrow these down to 3 based on specific criteria that the team spends months further developing until they finally narrow down to 1 final concept that truly represents their best work for production. This approach is intended to offer enormous latitude for creativity that breaks past restrictions.  But it also means they inherently plan to throw away 90% of the work they do.  I don’t know many organizations for whom this would be an acceptable ratio.  This is a major reason why I say you can’t innovate like Apple.

Paired design meetings.  Every week the teams of engineers and designers get together for two meetings.

1. Brainstorm meeting - leave your hang-ups at the door and go crazy in developing various approaches to solving particular problems or enhancing existing designs.  Free thinking with absolutely no rules.
2. Production meeting - The absolute opposite of the brainstorm where the aim is to put structure around the crazy ideas and define the how to, why, and when.

These two meetings continue throughout the development of any application and if you know the stories of Steve Jobs discarding finished concepts at the very last minute you will understand why the team operates in this manner.  It’s part of their corporate DNA of grueling perfection.  But the balance does shift away from free thinking and more toward a production mindset as the application progresses even while they keep the door open for creative thought at the latest stages.

Pony meetings.  These meetings are scheduled every two weeks with the internal clients (AKA God himself and his minions) to educate the decision makers on the design directions being explored and influence their perception of what the final product should be.

They’re called “Pony” meetings because they correspond to Lopp’s description of the experience of Senior Managers dispensing their wisdom and wants to the development team when discussing the early specifications for the product.  “I want WYSIWIG…I want it to support major browsers…I want it to reflect the spirit of our company.”  [What???] In other words, I want a pony.  Who doesn’t want a pony?  A pony is gorgeous!  The issue that anyone who has sat through these types of experiences can tell you [we do it all the time in our senior management interviews as we develop a strategic vision for new product development] is that these people are describing what THEY think THEY want.  Lopp cops to reality in explaining that since they are signing the checks you cannot simply ignore these senior managers, but you do have to manage their expectations and help align their vision with the team’s.

 The meetings achieve this purpose and give a sense of control to senior management so that they have visibility into the process and can influence the direction.  Again, the purpose of this is to save the team from pursuing a line of direction that ultimately gets tossed because one of the decision makers wasn’t bought in.

Now, if you want to get the quick summary of what we just discussed, I highly recommend reading Mike Rohde’s SXSW Interactive 2008 Sketchnotes.  He took highly illustrated notes of the Lopp/Gruber panel.  Content for this write-up also came from: Scott Fiddelke, Dylan at The Email Wars, Jared Christensen, David at BFG, and Tom Kershaw.

 What else does Apple do differently?  If you read the various interviews that Steve Jobs and Jon Ive have given over the last few years you’ll find a few specific trends.

1. Apple does not do market research

This is straight from the man’s mouth: We do no market research.  They scoff at the notion of target markets and they don’t conduct focus groups.  Why?  Because everything Apple designs is based on Steve and team’s perception of what THEY think is cool.  He elaborates further:

It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.  So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what’s the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse.” ‘

Said another way, Steve hires really smart people and he lets them loose on a leash since he overlooks it all with an extremely demanding eye.  If you’re seeing visions of the “Great Eye” from J.R.R. Tolkein’s books then you probably wouldn’t be too far off.  Here’s the way their simple process works:

1. Start with a gut sense of an opportunity and the conversations start rolling…
2. What do we hate? (Our cellphones)
3. What do we have the technology to make? (A cellphone with a Mac inside)
4. What would we like to own?(An iPhone, what else?)

But Jobs also explained that in this specific conversation, there were big debates across the organization on whether or not they could and should do it.  Ultimately, he looked around and said, Let’s do it. 

I think it’s clear they also benefit with the inauspicious leak out to the market - and by that I mean I think this overly tight-lipped organization occasionally leaks early ideas out to the market to see what kind of response they might generate.  Again, what other company benefits from having thousands of adoring designers who come up with beautifully photoshoped concepts of what they think the next great product should look like?

2. Apple has a very small team that designs their major products 

Look at Jonathan Ive and his team of a dozen to twenty designers who are the brains behind the genius products that Apple has delivered to the market since the iMac back in 1998.  New product development is not farmed out across the organization but instead is creatively driven by this select group.  Here’s how one journalist described them:

“Apple is a cult, and Apple’s design team is an even more intense version of a cult,” notes Riley. Actually, it’s not a big cult — just a dozen people or so. But they operate at an extremely high level, both individually and as a group. Ive has said that many Apple products were dreamed up while eating pizza in the small kitchen at the team’s design studio.

It’s a team that has worked in idyllic comfort for many years. Some designers were at the company long before Ive arrived in 1992. They rarely attend industry events or awards ceremonies. It’s as though they don’t require outside recognition because there isn’t any higher authority on design excellence than each other, and because sharing too much information only risks helping others close the gap. And they personally reflect the design sensibilities of Apple’s products — casually chic, elitist and with a definite Euro bent. The team, made up of thirty- and fortysomethings, has a definite international flair. Members include not only the British Ive but also New Zealander Danny Coster, Italian Daniele De Iuliis, and German Rico Zörkendörfer. “Its good old-fashioned camaraderie — everyone with the same aim, no egos involved,” says British fashion designer Paul Smith, a friend since the late 1990s when Ive sent him a new iMac. “They have lots of dinners together, take lots of field trips. And they’ve turned these gray frumpy objects called computers into desirable pieces of sculpture you’d want even if you didn’t use them.”

Most of Ive’s team live in San Francisco, and rumor has it that the starting salary for the group is around $200,000, some 50% above the industry average. They work together in a large open studio with little personal space but great privacy. Many Apple employees aren’t allowed in, for fear they’d catch a glimpse of some upcoming product. A massive sound system pumps up the music. Ive invests his design dollars in state-of-the-art prototyping equipment, not large numbers of people. And his design process revolves around intense iteration — making and remaking models to visualize new concepts. “One of the hallmarks of the team I think is this sense of looking to be wrong,” said Ive at Radical Craft. “It’s the inquisitiveness, the sense of exploration. It’s about being excited to be wrong because then you’ve discovered something new.”

Ive’s team at Apple isn’t the usual design ghetto of creativity that exists inside most corporations. They work closely and intensely with engineers, marketers, and even outside manufacturing contractors in Asia who actually build the products. Rather than being simple stylists, they’re leading innovators in the use of new materials and production processes. The design group was able to figure out how to put a layer of clear plastic over the white or black core of an iPod, giving it a tremendous depth of texture, and still be able to build each unit in just seconds. “Apple innovates in big ways and small ways, and if they don’t get it right, they innovate again,” says frog design founder Hartmut Esslinger, who designed many of the original Apple computers for Jobs. “It is the only tech company that does this.”

Jobs himself has delegated away many of his day-to-day operational responsibilities to enable him to focus half of his week on the high and very low level development efforts for specific products. 

3. Apple owns their entire system

They are completely independent of reliance on anyone else to provide inputs to the design and development of their products.  They own the OS, they own the software, and they own the hardware.  No other consumer electronics organization can easily do what Apple does because they own all of the technology and control the intimate interactions that ultimately become the total user experience.  There is no other way to ensure such a seamless experience - a single executive calls the final shots for every single component.

Jobs says this question of control is critical to Apple’s success:

I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do. Take audio. For years, the primary technology was the [marking mechanism] inside a CD or a DVD player. But we became convinced that software was going to be the primary technology, and we’re a pretty good software company.

So we developed iTunes [Apple’s music jukebox software that later morphed into the iTunes Music Store]. We’re a good hardware company, too, but we’re really good at software. So that led us to believe that we had a chance to reinvent the music business, and we did.

4. Apple focuses on a very select group of products

 Apple acts like a small boutique and develops beautiful artistic products in a manner that makes it very difficult to scale out to broad and extensive product lines.  Part of this is due to the level of attention to detail provided by their small teams of designers and engineers.  To think that a multi-billion dollar company only has 30 major products is astounding because their neighbors at that level of revenues have thousands of products in hundreds of different SKUs.  As Jobs explains, this is the focus that enables them to bring such an extensive level of attention to excellence.  But it is also an inherently risky enterprise because they are limited in what new product areas they can invest in if one fails.

“Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we’ve got less than 30 major products. I don’t know if that’s ever been done before. Certainly the great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products. We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. The clearest example was when we were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90% of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road. They don’t put information into it. Pretty soon cellphones are going to do that, so the PDA market’s going to get reduced to a fraction of its current size, and it won’t really be sustainable. So we decided not to get into it. If we had gotten into it, we wouldn’t have had the resources to do the iPod. We probably wouldn’t have seen it coming.”

5. Apple has a maniacal focus on perfection

They say that Steve Jobs had the marble for the floor at the New York Apple store shipped to California first so he could examine the veins.  He also complained about the chamfer radius on the plastic case of an early prototype of the Macintosh.  You had better believe, given the 10 to 3 to 1 approach for design, that every shadow, every pixel is scrutinized.  It’s in their DNA.  They are willing to spend the money to make sure everything is perfect because that is their mission.  Just as an example, when Jonathan Ive and team developed the original iMac they wanted to give the colored plastic shell on the back a crystalline look:

To understand how to make a plastic shell look exciting rather than cheap, Ive and others visited a candy factory to study the finer points of jelly bean making. They spent months with Asian partners, devising the sophisticated process capable of cranking out millions of iMacs a year. The team even pushed for the internal electronics to be redesigned, to make sure they looked good through the thick shell. It was a big risk for Jobs, Ive, and Apple. Says one rival: “I would have had to prove that transparency would increase our sales, and there’s no way to prove that.” He figures Apple spends as much as $65 per PC casing, vs. an industry average of maybe $20. 

So is it possible for you to innovate like Apple? 

Now, given all of this, what is a company to do if they want to innovate like Apple?  First, forget about it unless you are willing to invest significantly and heavily to establish a culture of innovation like Apple has.  Because it’s not just about copying Apple’s approach and procedures.  The vast majority of executives who say, I want to be just like Apple, have no idea what it really takes to achieve that level of success.  What they’re saying is they want to be adored by their customers, they want to launch sexy products that cause the press to fall all over themselves, and they want to experience incredible financial growth.  But they generally want to do it on the cheap. 

To succeed at innovation as Apple has you need the following:

 You need a leader who prioritizes new product innovation.The CEO needs to be someone who looks out on the horizon and consistently sets a vision of innovation for the organization that he/she is willing to completely support with people, funds, and time.  Further, that leader needs to be fluent in the language of your customer and the markets you compete in.  If the CEO cannot be this person then they need to be willing to invest that role into a senior executive and give them the authority and latitude to effectively oversee the new product development process.

Jobs explains it this way:

You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe. But it doesn’t add up to much. That’s what was missing at Apple for a while [during the 11 year period between 1985 and 1997 while he was gone]. There were bits and pieces of interesting things floating around, but not that gravitational pull.

People always ask me why did Apple really fail for those years, and it’s easy to blame it on certain people or personalities. Certainly, there was some of that. But there’s a far more insightful way to think about it. Apple had a monopoly on the graphical user interface for almost 10 years. That’s a long time. And how are monopolies lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly.

But after that, the product people aren’t the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It’s the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever. Because what’s the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself?

So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. John Akers at IBM (IBM ) is the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason. But by then the best product people have left, or they’re no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn’t.

You need to focus.  A cohesive vision needs to be established that describes the storyline for your products and services.  That storyline needs to decisively state what is in bounds and what is out of bounds over an 18 month to 3 year period.  Everyone who matters to the development process needs to be in lockstep with this vision which means you need to have open lines of communication that are regularly and consistently managed.  This storyline or strategic vision needs to be revised according to market changes and the evolution of your new product pipeline.  It helps that Apple tends to approach their products with a systemic frame of mind, looking to develop the “total solution” rather than just loosely joined components. 

Again, here is how Jobs describes their approach:

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

He continues the thought by describing that they focus on two things and the first one is to create the best products available whether its PCs, or phones, or music players or online media stores:

We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the [executive team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.

Obviously, the other focus is to make a profit since that is what supports the continued efforts to design the next great product.  And when every one of the major products is a moonshot, they have to work to ensure it meets exacting standards to do everything they can to ensure success. 

You need to know your customer and your market.  Steve Jobs and team can get away with not doing market research, identifying target markets, or going out and talking with customers because of the markets they play in and the cult-like customers who adore them.  Most technology companies believe they can get away with this and most technology companies get it wrong.  Quick, identify 10 different pieces of technology that truly understood and met your needs and don’t bug you due to a major flaw that you either have to live with or compensate for in some fashion.  Could you come up with more than five?  I didn’t think so.  We’re drowning in a sea of technological crap because every product that is released to the market is a result of multiple compromises based on decisions made by the brand manager, the R&D product manager, the marketing manager, the sales manager and everyone else who has skin in the game as they prepare the offering to meet what THEY think the target customer’s needs are.

The reason Jobs and Jonathan Ive get it right is because they design sexy products with elegant and simple interfaces for themselves and count on their hip gaggle of early adopters to see it the same way.  Once the snowball starts rolling, it’s all momentum from there.  Apple doesn’t sell functional products, they sell fashionable pieces of functional art.   That present you’re unwrapping is all about emotional connection.  And Steve Jobs knows his marketplace better than anyone else.

Because you’re not Apple and you are likely not selling a similar set of products, you must do research to understand the customer.  And while I’m sure Steve says he doesn’t do research, it’s pretty clear that his team goes out to thoroughly study behaviors and interests of those they think will be their early adopters.  Call it talking to friends and family, but honestly you know that these guys live by immersing themselves in the hip culture of music, video, and computing.

The point is not to go ask your customers what they want.  If you ask that question in the formative stages then you’re doing it wrong.  The point is to go immerse yourself in their environment and ask lots of why questions until you have thoroughly explored the ins and outs of their decision making, needs, wants, and problems.  You should be able to break their need or opportunity down into a few simple statements of truth.

As Alan Cooper says, how can you help an end user achieve their goal if you don’t know what it is?  You have to build a persona or consumer model that accurately describes the objectives of your consumer and the problems they face with the existing solutions.   The real benefit, as I saw in my years working at InstallShield and Macrovision, is that unless you put a face and expectations on that consumer, then disagreements on features or product positioning or design come down to who can pull the greatest political will rather than who has the cleanest interpretation of the consumer’s need.

You need the right people and to reward them accordingly.  The designers at Apple are paid 50% more than their counterparts at other organizations.  Now these guys aren’t working at Apple simply because they’re paid more.  They stay at Apple because of the amazing things they get to do there.  Rewards are about salary and benefits, but they are also about recognition and being able to do satisfying work that challenges the mind and allows the creative muscles to stretch.  Part of this also comes down to ensuring your teams are passionate about innovation and dedicated to the focus of the organization.  As Jobs says, he looks for people who are crazy about Apple.  So you need to look closely at who you are hiring and whether you have the right people in the organization in the first place.

It’s not much, but I’ve only begun to carve out what it takes for you to succeed at developing “perfect” products like Apple does.  And honestly, their products are far from perfect.  But that’s a post for another day.

One would think that the back story would be that the boys kept getting picked on at the playground and became determined to find a way to save their tender derrieres with a simple solution.  However, apparently, the boys’ Mom caught them in the basement one day giving each other the wedgie treatment and she scolded them.  Then as any parent might do when faced with the inexplicable shenanigans of young boys,  she suggested that someone should invent wedgie-proof underwear.

Inspiration!  The boys were looking for a concept to develop for the Central Ohio 2007 Invention Convention which encourages young people to come up with creative solutions to everyday problems and they had found their idea.  In fact it took them all the way to 2nd place in the competion and invitations to be on Fox Morning News, MSNBC, CNN, and even The Ellen DeGeneres Show.  I’m surprised that Dave Letterman never invited them on to his show for the Young Inventors segment but I guess it might be too low-brow for his show’s theme.  Though how that is possible given his “Will it float” series I’m not exactly sure. 

One might ask what will happen next when the kid is standing there commando and the bully is running around with their underwear.  This is the point according to Justin, where teacher intervention would be called for.  Still, in my mind, the fact that they could pull your underwear off would likely correlate with more wedgies rather than fewer given the way I recall the 8 year old mind works.  But at least they wouldn’t be painful so I guess one would classify the invention as protective rather than preventative.

It turns out this isn’t a new story, it was all over YouTube and Digg back in November 2007 but somehow I missed it.  Still, in celebration of their genius, I’ve decided to dedicate my Thursday posts, when they happen, to novel inventions by young innovators.  Who knows, these boys might go on to be anything from fashion designers to nanotechnologists with their creative minds.

 *The thought that I would say, I was watching the news on my gas pump TV this evening, just seems so outlandish but Madison avenue is always looking for new ways to reach the consumer where they are idle and have time to fill.  Perhaps personalized advertising as envisioned in the Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report, was not that far off after all.

What a brave new world we have entered.