Tag Archives: New product development

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Bridging theory and practice: My CSULB talk on consumer-centric design

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Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Apostle Incubator. This is a course designed by Institute for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (IIE) at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). This interdisciplinary, entrepreneurial program brought together students from diverse backgrounds, creating a lively atmosphere for our discussion on understanding consumers.

In my talk, I shared insights from my project experience with Korean designers, where we explored how companies can use psychology to improve product design and boost sales. One project I discussed involved creating product bundles. I explained how even small changes can have a big impact on whether people decide to buy.

The students were curious and engaged, asking thoughtful questions. One asked, “What’s the difference between Samsung and Apple?” Others questioned about which marketing tools these companies uses now. We even touched on how Google Nest might face similar questions when trying to bundle products effectively.

Overall, it was inspiring to see the students’ enthusiasm. Many left with new ideas on how to think about consumers in their own projects. I am excited to see where these future entrepreneurs take these insights.

Cases

Will be canned wine successful?

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I drink wine often. It goes well with dinner, helps me read papers, and soothes me at night. In the past, I enjoyed numerous marriages of soil, weather, and grape variety. Now, my tongue is developed although I neither remember one nor am able to elaborate why I like one.

Recently, I went to Urban Break 2021 and saw a pop-up store of Babe Wine, a brand name of a canned wine. It attracted a crowd of visitors. Out of curiosity, I sampled a sip of Grigio, Rose, and Red. They differed from the wine I experienced before. They came out from icy-cold cans and had bubbles. I ended up failing to like this wine.

Despite of my disappointment, this canned wine attracts attention internationally. “From 2016-2020, BABE’s CAGR was nearly 2,000% according to IRI. These numbers quickly caught the eye of beverage giant Anheuser-Busch, who acquired Babe in 2019.” According to the article in Forbes, “Babe specifically focused on targeting the wine lover who cracked open bottles on the regular, but “couldn’t name a single brand,” says Ostrovsky.”” 

Why do people like a canned wine I do not? Indeed, I have a long history of prediction errors. On one hand, I once thought that BTS, Tiktok, and Instagram would fail to make a presence. On the other hand, I expected that Clubhouse, a social audio app, and Gathertown, a meta-verse service, would succeed in Korea. Not surprisingly, my predictions were proven to be incorrect.

Then, how could experts like me (e.g., wine lovers) predict whether a product is successful in the market when it is designed for novices (e.g., canned wine)? About 10 years ago, researchers at University of Oxford and New York University suggested that an accurate prediction of an extreme event is an indication of poor forecasting ability. This suggests that even experts who have forecasting abilities predict only non-radical events. Predicting the next hit is beyond our control.

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Reference

Denrell, J., & Fang, C. (2010). Predicting the Next Big Thing: Success as a Signal of Poor Judgment. Management Science, 56(10), 1653–1667.

Successfully predicting that something will become a big hit seems impressive. Managers and entrepreneurs who have made successful predictions and have invested money on this basis are promoted, become rich, and may end up on the cover of business magazines. In this paper, we show that an accurate prediction about such an extreme event, e.g., a big hit, may in fact be an indication of poor rather than good forecasting ability. We first demonstrate how this conclusion can be derived from a formal model of forecasting. We then illustrate that the basic result is consistent with data from two lab experiments as well as field data on professional forecasts from the Wall Street Journal Survey of Economic Forecasts.

Cases

How to breathe better with a mask

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Wearing a mask becomes common as the spread of Covid-19 (Coronavirus disease) dominates our lives. However, people find it difficult to breathe with a mask. I recently found an interesting new product for masks at Granhand where I visited to buy droppers or incenses for my office.

Though you can not seize nor hold the smell, it has a decisive effect on the matter of our memory and emotion and believes on its vitally of influences on our decision among our lives. GRANHAND gives faith towards the value of the fragrance and consistently pursues to make the scent part of our regular living. Although it may be slow nor has perfection, the variety of contents that our brand is offering will build the unique value of the experience that no other brand will possess. GRANHAND will not be a product where it vanishes with ease nor be neglected. It will continuously illuminate with a distinct presence and yield to warm people’s mind.

This store sells a natural oil named as “On Your Mask.” When we spray it inside the mask, we could breathe in a fresh way. This oil impressed me a lot because when I think about a mask in the past, I paid attention exclusively to its practical functionality. In other words, I simply ignored how much comfortable I should feel when wearing it.

Customer experience is not dried up for new product development.

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Reference

Kornish, L. J., & Ulrich, K. T. (2011). Opportunity Spaces in Innovation: Empirical Analysis of Large Samples of Ideas. Management Science, 57(1), 107–128.

A common approach to innovation, parallel search, is to identify a large number of opportunities and then to select a subset for further development, with just a few coming to fruition. One potential weakness with parallel search is that it permits repetition. The same, or a similar, idea might be generated multiple times, because parallel exploration processes typically operate without information about the ideas that have already been identified. In this paper we analyze repetition in five data sets comprising 1,368 opportunities and use that analysis to address three questions: (1) When a large number of efforts to generate ideas are conducted in parallel, how likely are the resulting ideas to be redundant? (2) How large are the opportunity spaces? (3) Are the unique ideas more valuable than those similar to many others? The answer to the first question is that although there is clearly some redundancy in the ideas generated by aggregating parallel efforts, this redundancy is quite small in absolute terms in our data, even for a narrowly defined domain. For the second question, we propose a method to extrapolate how many unique ideas would result from an unbounded effort by an unlimited number of comparable idea generators. Applying that method, and for the settings we study, the estimated total number of unique ideas is about one thousand for the most narrowly defined domain and greater than two thousand for the more broadly defined domains. On the third question, we find a positive relationship between the number of similar ideas and idea value: the ideas that are least similar to others are not generally the most valuable ones.

Cases

Design Thinking vs. Behavioral Economics

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Crate and Barrel sells various cookware. Most products in this store are grouped into product categories. However, some are grouped into why we need them. There are two “ad hoc” categories.

One is “7 Essentials for Every Kitchen.”

The other is “Everything You Never Knew You Needed.” 

Ad hoc categories, coined by Barsalou, motivate impulse buying. I bought some tools I did not plan ahead and saw some customers standing in front of one of the two sections for a while.

Interestingly, the two ad hoc categories in the Crate and Barrel tap into different psychological processes.

“7 Essentials for Every Kitchen” are the products selected by others. They nudge me to follow others, which is often recommended by behavioral economists. In contrast, “Everything You Never Knew You Needed” are the products useful for me. They help me discover my own unmet needs, which is often suggested by design thinkers.

Then, which framing is more effective between “competing against others” and “following your heart”?

I believe we could answer this question by comparing the sales numbers between spatula and dual citrus squeezer. The two products belonged to the “Everything You Never Knew You Needed” four years ago. Now, only spatula belongs to the [7 Essentials for Every Kitchen]. If spatula sales increased and squeezer sales did not, behavioral economics beats design thinking. In contrast, if spatula sales dropped and squeezer sales did not, design thinking beats behavioral economics.

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Reference

Barsalou, Lawrence W. (1983), Ad hoc categories, Memory & Cognition, 11 (3), 211-227.

People construct ad hoc categories to achieve goals. For example, constructing the category of “things to sell at a garage sale” can be instrumental to achieving the goal of selling unwanted possessions. These categories differ from common categories (e.g., “fruit,” “furniture”) in that ad hoc categories violate the correlational structure of the environment and are not well established in memory. Regarding the latter property, the category concepts, concept-to-instance associations, and instance-to-concept associations structuring ad hoc categories are shown to be much less established in memory than those of common categories. Regardless of these differences, however, ad hoc categories possess graded structures (i.e., typicality gradients) as salient as those structuring common categories. This appears to be the result of a similarity comparison process that imposes graded structure on any category regardless of type.

 

Publications

Empathy instruction backfires designers

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Abstract

Background: Empathy instruction (“please empathize with the person in the narrative”) is often provided when new product concepts are evaluated in a narrative form. However, concept evaluators tend to empathize with users differently; non-designers empathize with them insufficiently whereas designers do so sufficiently. Therefore, we expect that the effect of empathy instruction on concept evaluation will differ depending on the design expertise of individual evaluators. Empathy instruction will benefit non-designers whereas it may not benefit designers. We hypothesize that non-designers evaluate a concept more positively while designers evaluate the same concept more negatively when empathy instruction is provided than when it is not.

Methods: We conducted two studies with 74 practitioners (study 1) and 87 undergraduate students (study 2) by asking participants to evaluate a new service concept for long-distance communication. Half of the participants were provided with empathy instruction (“please watch a video clip about a long-distance couple”) and the other half were provided with control instruction (“please watch a video clip about nature). Then, we compared the concept evaluation scores between the two groups.

 

 

Results: The two studies showed that when the participants received control instruction, their concept evaluation scores between two groups did not differ. However, when they received empathy instruction, non-designers’ concept evaluation scores increased whereas designers’ concept evaluation scores decreased.

Conclusion: Our findings highlight the dark side of empathy in concept evaluation. When empathy instruction is provided for narrative concept evaluation, it needs to be used carefully depending on the individual concept evaluators. More discussions are needed for customized empathy.

 

Keywords

Concept evaluation, design expertise, empathy instructon, narrative concept, new product development

 

 

Courses

New product project: Stain free

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“Stain Free” gives a proactive solution for those who concern about makeup stain on the clothes while getting dressed and undressing the clothes. It is portable silicon collar made from organic material so there should be no harm on the skin. Customers will put “Stain Free” on the collar of her or his clothes before getting dressed and undressing so it prevents the stain. After using “Stain Free”, customers will be able to easily remove the stain on the product, so they can use the product in a clean condition as frequently as they need.

NPD_Stain freeAlthough Make up stain is classified into temporary stains, it is still hard to be removed as cosmetic is composed with complex chemicals. We have found many people online looking for reactive solutions to remove the makeup stain and sharing the solutions with others. After surveying 70 women, we have realized that every one of them has experienced makeup stain on the shirt and they wished they had a product that can prevent. Out of all the opportunities we have come up with, “Stain Free” was evaluated by RWW Chart as the most feasible with the greatest competitive advantages and it was financially prospective. However, the result was not over “108”, therefore we were still required to improve our opportunity based on the customer’s need. We found the product called “Face Cover” as our potential competitor. However, we also found a number of disadvantages of the product from the reviews on the internet as well as the 1 on 1 interview we conducted. As well, we have drawn a couple of personas with two different life-styles in order to figure out how “Stain Free” will adapt on our customer’s daily life. Eventually, it was clear to see that customers demand the convenient, market available, and affordable product.

Based on the insight we have examined earlier, we improved a number of attributes of our product such as materials, design and the ways of distribution etc By writing HOQ, we were finally able to specify the product and also generated a number of concepts of our product to meet our customer’s needs. We have selected the product made from silicon as our ultimate concept after evaluating 3 different concepts with Pugh Matrix and we expect see our annual revenue over $113,400.

 

Written by Seunghyun Yoon, Sooyoen Lee, Yurim Lee, and Mohammed | New Product Development 2016 Spring | College of Business Administration, Kookmin University

 

https://youtu.be/OmltB8JPsQA

Courses

New product project: Cup crash

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Cup crush

How many cups of coffee do you drink a day? Nowadays, it easy to find people holding a cup of coffee in your surroundings. Coffee has become a commodity in our lives. However, as demand for coffee has increased, it also increased the number of disposable cups. This causes trash bin to be over floated which leads to environmental problems. For these reasons we planned to make a new product for environmental protection. And we focused on reducing the amount of trash.

NPD_Cup crash

Well, there are various ways to reduce waste. For example, we could increase the number and volume of trash bin. Or we could also try to reduce the size of trash. However, we think it is most effective to decrease the volume of trash. It’s because it has spatial limitations as we increase the size of trash bin, and also it can’t solve essential environment issues. But in contrast, reducing the volume of trash has many great benefits.

As a solution to minimize the volume of the coffee cup, we came up with the idea of paint bucket. It is effective to reduce the volume of the cup. If you simply press the top and bottom part of the cup, you can reduce more than one third of the volume. This product is more effective than the existing products because the existing products require more force and once it is squashed, it seems that there is not a huge difference in terms of volume. Furthermore, our differentiated design may provide freshness to customers. Not only that, it arouses a trend of participating in an event of reducing trash which leads to saving environment.

Our main targets are both individuals who sell coffee and who drink coffee. From the perspective of cafe owner it allows them to keep their cafe clean and reduce the cost of refuse disposal by reducing the amount of trash. From the perspective of people who drink coffee, customer can give such positive effect that has been mentioned. Also, our product can create social trend that has image of protecting environment by reduction of trash. Social trend involves meaning that each and everyone will try to reduce the amount of rubbish like a campaign.

It is common sense that social trend like this which is protecting environment is healthy. However, crushing the empty cup could be tiresome for somebody. Therefore, we would like to put small sentence or character to attain user’s interest to encourage crush the cup. When the cup is completely crushed, new picture or sentence can arouse people’s interest.

In other words, by launching “Cup Crush”, It will drive a lot of benefit for not only just coffee seller and coffee buyer, but society also.

 

Written by Bohee Cheong, Donghui Kim, Hyuntaek Lee, Wonjoon Cheong, and Yan He | New Product Development 2016 Spring | College of Business Administration, Kookmin University 

https://youtu.be/ShfjRbjX9lU

Courses

New product project: Fur away

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https://youtu.be/5RHwEP_jNoo

 

Furaway“Fur Away” is a machine that removes animal hair on our clothes. Cat hair is so light and thin, it sticks everywhere in the house and very easy to be seen all over your clothes. It is there even after you put your clothes in laundry machine. With Fur Away, you can simply click the button to activate, and the machine does all the hard work for you. Our main target is pet owner who suffers from animal hair on their clothes.

We thought of many ways to activate the machine and narrowed down to use static electricity or air suction. We have asked several questions to 30 pet owners (10 students, 10 office workers, 10 house wives), and every single one of them has answered that they are suffering from their own pet’s hair. A majority group of pet owners have answered that they use box tape, and round-shaped modified sticky tape to remove hair. Plus, their most concerning factors were: First, spending too much time to remove hair; Second, difficulty of perfect removal; Third, product’s expendability.

Based on customer needs, we have invented a machine that looks resemble with spin-dryer which use static electricity or air suction. Inside the machine, the cylinder rotates fast and sucks pets’ hair. A strong friction will suck animal hair and capture them perfectly, so pet owners can spend less time to remove them. There were 6 alternative concepts we discussed, and problems are decomposed by creating functions and shapes: 1) Vacuum-Room; 2) Auto-brushing Room; 3) Steam-Room; 4) Adhesion-Flat; 5) Spin-Cylinder; 6) Static-Cylinder. Function tells you how to detach fur from a clothes, and shape means how the other design looks like.

As an example, room shape looks like closet that clothes can be hanged in, flat shape looks like scanner that clothes can be put in unfolded and cylinder shape has form which makes it easy to spin. These 6 concepts are scored and screened to develop the best concept. As a result, our team decided to continue develop Vacuum-room, Spin-cylinder, and Static-cylinder and discontinue others.

We surveyed 20 people who raise pet, and the result is analyzed by Q=NAP. Therefore, we set the price as 80,000Won ($75). Overall, Fur Away enables you to save time and provides convenience in removing animal hair. Also, people are desperate for this product to come out.

Written by So Yea Jeon, Ga hye Kim, Seung Beom Kim, Ji won Hyun, Kyung won Kim, Dong hyun Gim | New Product Development, Spring 2015 | College of Business Administration, Kookmin University

Publications

Bridging the Chasm between Design and Marketing

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DML_Productdesign_UoT_02Although integrating design and marketing is critical for successful new product development (NPD), there has been a limited attention to the potential problems that arise during the NPD process and their possible solutions in academic literature. In order to narrow this gap, our study conducted a series of surveys of an interdisciplinary class project between marketing and design students over two year periods and identified two major potential problems: (1) conflict from the functional background, and (2) the conflict from imbalanced decision-making authority between design and marketing. In order to resolve such conflict, we found the two contrasting solutions: (1) facilitating communication to enhance cross-functional integration between the two groups and (2) prohibiting communication to protect each group. Our findings contribute to the formation of a theoretical basis for research on the topic of design-marketing integration.

 

Cases

Expert Products, Novice Consumers

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Crate and Barrel, one of my favorite stores following Pottery Barn and Williams and Sonoma, has a section called “Everything You Never Knew You Needed.” It introduces highly specialized kitchen utensils including jar spatula, melon baller, strawberry huller, avocado slicer, dual citrus squeezer, egg timer, and herb scissors.

At first, they look useless for many who do not cook often. Even if they do so, they can slice avocados and trim herbs using existing kitchen utensils. However, it is true that people often fell in love with a product only after they experience it. For example, I love the salad spinner by OXO, Panini grill by Breville, and wine decanter by Spiegelau. Although I am able to dry vegetables, grill sandwiches, and oxygenate wines without using these products, they make my cooking experience enjoyable. Indeed, I believe most smart kitchen products are the nice marriage of careful observation of people’s behavior in the kitchen with just a bit of technological flavor. If I should slice many avocados and trim a lot of herbs all the time, I may need a slicer and a pair of scissors designed exclusively for them to enjoy my cooking experience.

This leads us to a series of critical questions about new product development. Should designers and marketers ignore the novices’ voices (e.g., I am fine with an existing slicer) but listen to the experts’ voices more carefully (e.g., I need a better slicer for avocados)? If so, how do designers and marketers confirm that there will be a market for highly specialized expert products (e.g., avocado slicer)? Alternatively, how should designers and marketers “educate” novices when launching highly specialized products so that the newly developed products are appealing to novices ?

DesignMarketingLab