Technological Innovation and Leadership – The Guide to Successful Innovations (The 6th of a Many Part Series)
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In my previous post I wrote about ‘Freedom of Choice’, ‘Cost Miniaturization’, and ‘Help’ and how they are the essential generic benefits that manifest in the form of:
1) Customization/ Personalization
2) Convenience
3) Participation
4) Anticipation (intuition)
5) Compatibility
6) Easy trials
7) Easy use
8) Benefits that can be learnt while being seen
Today I am going to attempt to give some justice to the 1st three categories and try and co relate my observations with the Internet as much as possible.
1) Customization – Customers are increasingly wanting “what they want”. Their needs are personal and individual. They also often have time and place preferences. With the Internet the opportunity for User Generated Content is huge and it’s the ultimate level of “customization”. Care must be taken however, to ensure that the customer is only given a platform and has to do very little with respect to “customization” because they are looking to pay companies for that.
For technological products with an interface, companies can provide customization with respect to the user interface. Eg. For a PS3, the opportunity to customize the buttons, the opening screen etc. can be added. This is keeping in mind that a lot of PS3 users often go over to their friends’ houses to “compete”.
Customization has been spoken by many marketers at length – the challenge now is – how to anticipate customization without actually letting the customer ‘customize’. The Google Reader anticipates – it tells you what links you might want to add to your feed reader. But its not anticipation in its entirety. You still have to fill in certain details and subscribe to few categories. The next level of customization will be when the consumer will not even have to do that – the company will do all the thinking and actually ‘customize’.
2) Convenience – Convenience relates to the purchase experience as well as ‘functionality’. Customer barriers to entry must be extremely low. Delivery platforms must be convenient for the customer. Here I can think of the example of Mobile TV – I have already spoken about mobile snacking – that’s one example of convenience. Optimizing content for the mobile so that the consumer does not have to wait too long for a show to ‘show up’ and his or her viewing experience becomes pleasurable.
The other form of convenience is ‘functionality’. Functionality refers to the ‘juicing out’ of one product in such a way that one does not need any other products. To put it simply – providing Bluetooth options to Mp3 players, or providing cameras to mobile phones. Functionality essentially means convergence. Or at least it is the result of convergence. Any innovation especially with respect to TECHNOLOGY must have convergence in built.
For Internet related content too convergence is happening. Social Networks such as Facebook let you privately message your friends (email), post photos and showcase them as slideshows (a flickr kind of application), write notes (blog), play games etc.
Google Reader also recently allowed users to share their content with friends. That’s convergence again! With convergence, sites, devices etc. will have a core benefit or maybe more than 1 core benefit – but they will also have a host of fringe benefits which will ensure that the user is more ‘hooked’ on to the product or service.
3) Participation – This again is similar to customization on one level because it requires user involvement. There are 2 dimensions to participation. One is participation at the level of content creation with the producer and the other is participation with other customers by forming communities. Participation is slowly breaking down the distinction between “producer” and “consumer”. Navin raised a point in the 1st post on this series that when I spoke about Facebook’s applications, he said that I was wrongly crediting Facebook because the applications were not necessarily created by Facebook itself. This is a clear example of the blurring meaning of the term “producer”. There are often many producers – sometimes consumers themselves are producers. Especially with Social Networks.
Participation at a community level is also great to engage users and create loyalty. Getting consumers to connect automatically creates content that is worth for many others to look at.
I see a lot of brands opting for the community platform. The key will be brand fit and relevance. Consider Nike Plus – it worked extremely well as it really mattered to the customer. It provided the customer with a real benefit – it improved his running.
Nike Plus is basically a special edition Nike site where users
(who have the Nike shoes that sync with the iPod Nano) can compare their running stats with other runners – create races, create courses and basically optimize their running skills.
If community platforms are created solely for generating conversations, they will not succeed. There is way too much chatter anyway and there will be no way that a brand will be able to engage the user for too long – consider Sunsilk Gang of Girls.
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