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Innovation and customer experience basics
This past weekend, during an otherwise normal visit to a bath-and-kitchen store, I was struck by the amount of product being sold by Apple. There were no iPods or MacBooks among the towels and mops and kitchen gadgets - no discernible Apple logos - but there were quite a few items dependent on Apple.
I refer to the following six products, a non-exhaustive list that I compiled while shopping for other things: the iSing, iSnug, iConnect, iSoundSpa, iBlasterOrb, and taking it one notch higher, the jWin. (Yes, with a "j". In the words of Spinal Tap, "these go to eleven.") There were probably others, too, that I missed during my visit. (All product photos below.)
While a couple of the products were meant to plug into the Apple iPod, others were unrelated, somewhat comical "me-too" designs. The iSing, for example, is a plastic FM radio whose chassis is clearly inspired by the iPod. The name, the design, even the thing that looks like a scroll wheel but isn't - everything says "this is close enough!" - as though the designers were desperate for some of Apple's magic to rub off on the cheap gadget.
Looking at these not-very-clever knockoffs, I could only think that they offered a lesson in innovation. It's one thing to make a superficial copy of a success story; quite another to truly learn from it and build a success of one's own.
In the early years of the Web boom, I remember clients constantly asking us, during our consulting projects, to "help us become the Amazon of our industry." Amazon.com was hot, and many companies figured that if they could just add the "collaborative filtering" (a late 90s buzzword, somewhat like "social networking" today) or some other magic feature that Amazon had, they'd "be like Amazon" and make boatloads of money.
In that sense, Apple today is like Amazon eight years ago. The iPod is revered and praised at conferences, on blogs, and in bath-and-kitchen stores. The praise is well-deserved - the iPod is a great product - but the lessons people draw from it aren't always sound. Naming something with an "i" doesn't make it innovative; neither does adding a fake scroll wheel. Talking and blogging endlessly about "innovation" - another current buzzword - also doesn't necessarily mean that anything new is being discussed.
For customer experience practitioners, true innovation means finding what customers want that's not currently available to them: these are customers' key unmet needs. They often have nothing to do with the buzzwords, naming trends, or "hot" features that are currently in vogue with business magazines and bloggers. If anything, I usually find that innovation means going back to basics - the old things, the obvious, the simple, the non-fashionable things - and offering those to customers who really just want a better experience. Almost by definition, anything that follows current trends isn't innovative - the trend shows what's already been done!
So consider the irony: the most innovative companies and people today are often those with the courage to ignore superficial fashions and strike out on their own path. Sometimes this means creating something no one has ever seen before, like the iPod. More often it's a basic improvement: in a society obsessed with the newest trends and buzzwords, success can be as easy as doing the old thing that everyone else forgot along the way.
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Below are the products I spotted at the store:
iSing...
iConnect (a "squishy pillow" that connects to an iPod)...
iSoundSpa...
iBlaster Orb...
iSnug...
...and a product creatively taking it one notch up, the "jWin". Yes, with a "j".
iHilarious. Any of these could be named "imStuck."
Hi Mark,
You write: "the most innovative companies and people today are often those with the courage to ignore superficial fashions and strike out on their own path." But in actuality, the iPod could be looked upon as just a knock-off of the many mp3 players that have been on the market years before Apple launched their iPod.
Sure the iPod has a better UI and design, but does that make it innovative? It seems incremental to me. I'd appreciate your thoughts.
MC
I don't like it when people call the Apple iPod innovative... Creative beat them to the punch but Apple ended-up executing a better product overall. They weren't incredibly innovative, simply taking something that was already out in the market and making it better.
I'm a big Apple fan and I'm always telling friends what great computers they they make. But recently I wanted to get audiobooks from the library, and I was going to buy an iPod to listen to them on. But it turns out you can't. Nearly all libraries' audiobooks are not compatible with iPods or Mac computers. Apparently, Apple thinks you should only buy books from iTunes or another pay service. I was really disappointed in Apple. It's such a Microsoft thing to do.
"simply making it better" can be incredibly innovative, especially when you go after this goal with the kind of laser-sharp focus that apple has.
Apple won because of three things: a. they spent a truck load of money on advertisement so everybody and their brother would think the only way to get MP3's was to buy their product; b. they changed the way in which the music is encoded so it can only be played with iPods (risky move) and if you happened to have an iPod, you'd have to buy music from them (which is actually more expensive than other sites); and c. they had impeccable timing.
Apple was not innovative; they were smart, but not innovative. They didn't have the best product, Creative's Zen's are a million times better; but Apple got to the public first.
So in the long term, presentation skills and timing can weight more than product development and nice features.
The big question now is: will Apple's luck with the iPods translate into user migration to their operating system (which their advertisement would suggest they’re hoping for); and if so, what does Bill Gates know that has kept him so calm? He certainly did not jump into the scene screaming “anything you can do I can do better…” The Zune was more like an “anything you can do I can do too.”
He definitely has got a card up his sleeve that we don’t know about and that, my friends, is innovation: knowing that the market will be doing something totally different tomorrow and rather than try to jump on today’s wave, prepare for the future, and wait until the time is right. Do I think his secret card is Windows Vista? Nope… not even close. :)
i think apple is innovative. ipod = genius. people think that every other manufacturer could have done it. before apple, mp3 players were just some bland tech gadget. apple invented a brand-new interface and user experience that seems so simple people would say there is no innovation there. its not incremental at all as another visitor said earlier. no other manufacter has a total user experience like apple, iTunes music store + itunes + ipod. except microsoft with zunes, but it is pretty easy to copy after 5 years.
i am not at all an apple fan, but you have to recognize their creative, technological and business talent.
Hi Mark,
I'm not positive whether the inclusion of jWIN was facetious, but I'd always assumed it was the name of a little Asian electronics company that pumped out disposable consumer goods, so I did a little search about it. It is actually the name of the company, not a product. According to this page (not the most authoritative source, but their site is vague), they've been around since 1997, although I suppose they *could* have changed their name after the iPod came out. Also, I think I remember that adding the little letter, especially Es and Is, before product and dotcom names was trendy even before iPod, so they could have simply jumped on that bandwagon instead.
I was a little surprised to learn that jWIN seems to be based entirely in New York, since the name also reminds me of the way that some products I've seen in Akihabara, Tokyo, sometimes borrow truncated words and throw them together (Japan+WINdows). I'm still not giving up on an Asian connection in management, though.
Or, my "research" could simply be lazy and flawed :)
I think that it has the most to do with marketing and perception. People perceive things to be real all the time. Some people are to busy to find out the facts. Some are to lazy to think for themselves. Some think that if it makes sense to the way that they think, it's true. Some are just ignorant. I think that most of us are so busy that we only remember parts of things and we aren't sure ourselves what is fact and what is fiction.
As for your journey into the bath and kitchen store, the products that you saw did exactly what the marketers wanted them to do. You...thought about and related them to one of the best selling gadgets around today. Not only that, you also wrote about them and showed their images to others. Kudos to the innovation of those marketers, shallow as it may be. Now this may not get YOU to buy them but there are others out there that are followers, of trends. The important thing is that next week I'm going to see a friend of mine and tell him that " some guy's blog I read said that they were selling iStuff in a bath and kitchen store". And, of course, I wouldn't lie to him, we're friends. And the week after that, he's going to tell his buddy...
If other MP3 player manufacturers could have done what Apple did with the ipod, why didn't they? Rio and Creative spent plenty of money on marketing and had their products in the market first. Rio seemed to have a first mover advantage for a while. They were the trendsetter. But what happened?
Early MP3 players required you to know how to rip CDs into MP3's, or where to find MP3 files on the Internet. You had to find separate software to make MP3s or connect to an (illegal) source to download (risky) files on your computer so you could dowload those to your MP3 player. None of these tools were made by the same manufacturer and incompatibilities (and viruses) were always possible.
Apple introduced an entirely new experience. The ipod wasn't something hanging in blister pack at the local store that you had to figure out how to use. The ipod was a comlete musical experience. Apple made it simple, elegant, and better than anything else available on the market. 10 or 20 GB of music in a small player was a huge innovation. Coupling that with a simple interface and a ready-made system for getting and *managing* the tunes was also huge. And let's not forget the packaging!
Apple's attention to detail and their interest in creating the best user experience is what makes the ipod innovative. That attention to detail and user experience is also what makes Amazon great. This is true of every breakthrough innovative product or service. To call the ipod merely incremental is missing the point.
Creative and Rio didn't "get it." Apple does.
Copying Amazon's use of collaborative filtering makes sense. This is a tool that can (and does) vastly improve the user experience in many industries. This is actually something that Microsoft really dropped the ball on. One of the pioneers of collaborative filtering was a little site called Firefly. Microsoft bought it for another feature it pioneered, passport-based security, and didn't do anything with the collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering is now fairly common on e-commerce sites. Netflix uses it, for example, but I wouldn't say they just copied Amazon when they developed their business.
It seems to me that adapting something Amazon did to improve the customer experience is different than copying Apple's superficial design features or naming conventions.
Is there really such a thing as "trendy innovation" or an "innovative trend?"
If anything else, "i" will potentially go out like "e" did and NOT be the letter to stick in front of everything under the sun, i.e. logos, software, etc. Besides, "i" does not necessarily mean "innovative" especially if you are just doing it like everyone else...
This is just a quick comment directed towards Nancy who wrote:
"Apparently, Apple thinks you should only buy books from iTunes or another pay service. I was really disappointed in Apple. It's such a Microsoft thing to do."
As a librarian, I'd like to point out that it's the vendors who decide what hardware to support. In the case of audiobooks, vendors have chosen not to support the iPod, despite the fact that it's by far the most popular digital audio player on the market. Instead, they've gone with Microsoft's DRM-laden WMV format, which will expire a digital audio file after a certain period of time. Why ignore the most popular platform on the market? Because, like the major record companies, they're terrified of unauthorized digital copies proliferating on the web.
Take that for what it's worth, just don't put the blame on Apple in this case.
It is amazing that it has taken this long for customer experience to come ot hte forefront of competitive attribtues for organizations. However, with the success of Apple and other customer-centric organizations it is customer experience is critical. I like to think the the age of Wal-Mart as the low-cost era and the age of Apple as the customer experience era.
There is a company that produces a kit designed specifically to help companies analyze and solve their customer experience issues.
Clearbrick Customer Experience Solution - www.clearbrick.com
I think this is an example of the creative solutions in the market that organizations can use to improve their processes.