Design - Opportunities to Interact with the Consumers

What got me to write this article is my encounter with a company executive who had come home to deliver a candle(filter) for the water purifier. Basically, the water purifier is sold at a relatively low cost but it requires candle replacement periodically for which the company executive visits the customer premises. I am assuming in this article that the company has its own servicing team. The company that I am talking about is an Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) giant with presence in almost every consumer category.  They have a robust distribution network across cities, towns and rural areas.

That sounds great! But, the bigger question that kept ringing in my mind is that what a fabulous opportunity to Interact with the Consumers?

Having said that, I looked at exploring the following three opportunities:

1. Direct Selling
2. Sampling
3. Feedback

Why Direct Selling?

It offers a fantastic opportunity to cross sell. Let’s say the company creates a card on which they mention all the products available and the company executive who has come to deliver the candle hands it to the customer. Consumer ticks all the products required for a bulk purchase. This is delivered to the consumer on the next purchase of the candle (Assuming periodic replacement). This channel then becomes an additional point of contact for reaching the consumers apart from the regular retail channel.

Why Sampling?

Whenever the company executive is coming down to a consumer place to change the candle, he can offer FMCG products for sampling. This is a cost effective solution for sampling and the marketer can get instant feedback from the customer.

Why Feedback?

Since the company executive is interacting with the consumer directly, spontaneous feedback can be solicited from the customer on various products.

These suggestions are purely on the basis of the observation that I made while interacting with the company executive of one of the biggest FMCG player and needs to be proved through a pilot. Moreover, not all FMCG companies can implement it as most sell only through a retail channel.

- by Anuj Chaudhary

Power of Reduction in Innovation

Innovation is about doing something new, thinking something new or perhaps challenging the set decorum to design a new process altogether. Most of the time we think that Innovation is something very far off thing, good for people with a lot of grey cells.

Power of Reduction clearly challenges this by proposing that anybody can think different by just removing the obvious and the most important element of any process or thing.

Let’s understand this by an example of airlines booking. What if I remove the most important element of date from the airlines booking site?

Now, think, what would this website do?

If I don’t need dates for a holiday then what all could I do?

•  Lets say you gift a holiday to some one…
•  Corporate purchase of holidays for employees
•  Future booking at cheap cost
•  Meet new people Travel – once a set number of people signs up, you decide a time period. Itinerary is already pre-defined.

Point being, that the moment I played up with the most essential element for travel then it gave me a plethora of options to evaluate in terms of an innovative offering.

Having said that, I would urge people to apply this technique to come up with more ideas for a holiday without dates.

- by Anuj Chaudhary

9 Brilliant Inventions Made by Mistake

Request you to please click on the link below to discover these inventions which have become indispensable in our day to day life.
http://www.inc.com/tim-donnelly/brilliant-failures/9-inventions-made-by-mistake.html?nav=pop