INNOBLOG

A brewing discussion about Starbucks’ new coffee flavor highlights a challenge facing innovation-seeking incumbents: Which customers should we listen to?

As part of a broader effort to reinvigorate the company, Starbucks recently rolled out a mild-tasting coffee called “Pike Place Roast.” It has quietly moved away from offering bolder-tasting coffees, such as its Sumatra brand, particularly in the afternoon.

Starbucks brought Pike Place Roast to market in response to complaints from Consumer Reports and others that its coffee tasted bitter or burnt. A small group commercialized the brew in six months—an astonishingly short period of time in the food industry.

While Consumer Reports and the mass-market has cheered, a vocal group of core Starbucks loyalists panned the coffee—one reviewer on a Starbucks Web site designed to solicit customer feedback called it a “fundamental, grievous error”—as watered-down and away from what makes Starbucks distinct.

Incumbents seeking to create new growth often face a version of this dilemma. Should we listen to our best, most loyal customers, or should we turn our ears towards customers we’re not serving well, or even to customers we are not serving at all?

Read the rest on Scott's Harvard Business blog, Innovation Insights.

Today is the official launch of The Innovator's Guide to Growth, so in addition to Amazon, you should be able to find it now at your local live-action, in-person bookstore. To recap: this Harvard Business Press book is the latest in the series exploring disruptive innovation that was started by Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997 and continued in Christensen’s The Innovator’s Solution in 2003. The Innovator's Guide to Growth was written by Innosight's president Scott D. Anthony, co-founder and chairman Mark W. Johnson, and partner Joseph V. Sinfield, along with Elizabeth J. Altman, vice president of strategy and business development in Motorola’s Mobile Devices business. The book has a foreword by Clayton Christensen that can be downloaded free here.  HBP marked the occasion today by issuing a press release that features links to goodies such as video interviews and the book's Facebook page.

Something strange happened at the gym last week. I was in the locker room recovering from a workout and a strong, familiar scent filled the room. No, it wasn’t the usual gym locker room smell. It was sweet and fruity and, for some reason, it made me feel young.

I wasn’t the only person to notice the smell. Like prairie dogs, women popped their heads up looking for the source. After a few seconds of searching, we found it: Two bright pink bottles of Salon Selectives shampoo and conditioner.

“Salon Selectives! I haven’t seen that in years!” 

“I thought they stopped making that!”

“I used to love the smell of that!”

The chatter started almost instantly and every comment was positive. Women talked about the smell, the bottles, and the fact that no girls’ toiletry kit in the late 1980s was complete without those green-apple scented pink bottles.

It’s not often that shampoo evokes such excitement, which may indicate that Salon Selectives has tapped into something overlooked by many products: It is is meeting either an unmet or under-satisfied job-to-be-done. But with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of hair care products on the market, what job could possibly be left undone?

The answer probably lies in the first reactions of the women in the locker room: Remember simple pleasures and happy moments.

Hair care products today address every possible functional job-to-be-done: Give volume to thin hair, decrease frizziness in curly hair, preserve color in dyed hair…the list goes on and on. Brands position themselves to address many of our social jobs (those jobs related to how others perceive us) by showing us celebrities and models with stunningly beautiful and healthy hair, with the implicit promise that, with proper shampoo choice, our lives will be equally fabulous. But very few hair products or brands address our emotional jobs (those solely focused on the user).

The importance of marrying emotional jobs with social and functional jobs is something we often stress with clients and something that River West Brands (owners of Salon Selectives) and similar firms tap into when they buy the brand equity (and little else) of a dead or dying business. These companies use the power of our memories and the associations we make with a brand to meet our emotional jobs-to-be-done. Then they can update it to meet the functional jobs-to-be-done of today’s consumers. Finally, through the positioning and marketing of the brand, the company can address our social jobs, delivering the trifecta that often leads to brand success.

Combining memories with products and brands that meet important functional, social and emotional jobs-to-be-done can be extremely powerful. Perhaps, if that prairie-dog reaction to the Salon Selectives bottles in the gym is any indication, powerful enough to bring a dead brand back to life. 

The GM Volt blog posted an interview yesterday with Chevrolet brand manager Ed Peper in which he discussed work Innosight is doing with GM for the Volt launch. When asked, Do you have a plan on how to educate the public to understand the car since its so unique in order to make it more readily salable? he answered:

"We're actually doing a lot of work right now to understand in general who the consumer is for this product. We're working with a group that’s based out of Harvard and there a company called Innosight. What their working with us on is developing a jobs-based positioning for Volt. Which means what are the jobs that Volt really needs to handle for the consumers that buy them. On an emotional level, on a social level, on a functional level, what are the jobs that this vehicle must perform and must do well. Were in the process right now. We’ve done a couple of focus groups. We have a lot of data that you and others have provided us. And its going to help us from a marketing standpoint, what things should we talk about, what things shouldn’t we talk about. And how to we best present the category buster. How do we present this in such a way that consumers who are interested will know this is the first of its kind and this will be the best of its kind and it will be the only one of its kind when it hits the market place in 2010."

Well, one commenter wrote that my sentence-long analysis of Nokia's acquisition of Symbian in this post was too simplistic. I agree. Innosight Senior Partner Steve Wunker, who worked at Psion in the 1990s, had the following thoughts:

Ten years ago, a bevy of companies shocked the communications industry when they announced the formation of Symbian—a for-profit consortium that would transform the PDA software of Britain’s Psion PLC into a platform powering high-end smartphones.

Back then, these smartphones were gleams in engineers’ eyes (the first—Ericsson’s Project Pamela—was the size of a small book and never commercially produced). But, almost unanimously, industry analysts foresaw them taking over the premium tiers of the mobile market and requiring a common software platform for the third party developers who would create the applications that users would demand. At its peak in August 2000, equity markets valued Symbian at nearly $10 billion.

This week, Nokia bought out the remaining shareholders of Symbian for about $410 million, and immediately declared it would give away the software code to a non-profit Symbian Foundation.

Was this tumble because Symbian produced a bad product? Not at all. By most measures—system reliability, power consumption, etc.—Symbian’s mobile operating system is the best on the market.

Rather, the world changed in ways very few industry analysts expected. A decade ago, intelligent people reasoned that the processing power of the mobile would start catching up to PCs, and so people would start to demand PC-like functionality on their phones. Moreover, the mobility of the phone would lead to many unique applications being developed for this platform.

Read the rest on Scott's Harvard Business blog, Innovation Insights.