Author Archives: John R Moran
On the surface, Gillette looks like a model of innovation success. A flagship brand of innovation champ P&G, Gillette’s achieved a remarkable ~70% share of the global men’s razor market, all while maintaining huge margins. The secret to getting so many men to pay so much is a series of new-and-improved razors that – despite making Gillette the butt of endless jokes – has carefully targeted areas of consumer dissatisfaction. Last year’s new Fusion ProGlide was a perfect example: it built on a key insight – men get post-shave irritation due to facial hair “tug and pull” – by using finer blades to slice through tough beard hair more effortlessly. Despite blade cartridges retailing for roughly $4 each, ProGlide sales since launching last summer – backed by a massive marketing campaign – were some of Gillette’s best ever for a new product. They’ve followed their innovation playbook for so long that it looks easy: a great business model + … Continue reading
The Evolution of Recommendations by John R. Moran One of the great promises of the Digital Age is a better way to figure out the answer to the question above. People love great writing, artwork, film, and music, but no one is going to experience, in their lifetime, more than a fraction of all the content in existence. That’s why we try hard to find the stuff we’ll probably enjoy. But that’s always been really difficult – as the saying goes, you can’t judge a book by its cover. Even if you could, no one wants to waste time searching through every title ever written to find the ones they’ll like. So for ages we’ve relied on poor solutions for discovery of new content (not to mention food, fashion, software, etc.). The three main ways we’ve done this are: 1. Curation Experts decide what the best content is, and we … Continue reading
My friend Dave is a great guy, but terrible to go to restaurants with. Invariably, he ends up peppering the server with endless questions, trying to order things not on the menu, and complaining about the food once it’s served. People like Dave may be hard to dine with, but they can be great for innovation. That’s because they’re continually dissatisfied with what’s available, looking instead for an ideal experience. The best innovators utilize several techniques to understand consumer dissatisfaction – and then use that understanding to drive innovative ideas. Listen to problems, not solutions Recently, many have cited Henry Ford (who famously quipped, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”) and Steve Jobs (“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them”) to make the case that listening to customer feedback is pointless. But as … Continue reading
