Many companies conduct product management without product planning.
They copy a product which is originally designed by other companies, and modify it.
They strive to survey technology/market trends and roadmaps from leading companies/giant research firms.
And they enhance the variety of functions and/or the numbers to make their spec table better.
They love to swim in the ‘red ocean’.
Apple is one of the companies which is carrying out product planning as well as product management.
It often enters the market very late, but re-creates the market itself.
Apple strives to understand what the user-experiences the customer looks for, values, and needs,
and re-invents the product category to make customers’ lifestyle better.
Apple loves to make her heart sing with her product.
5. The most important task is to find out:
“what user-experiences the customer looks for,
values, and needs”.
Everyone knows this, but this isn’t an easy task.
6. Instead, many companies give an ear to the
industry’s influencers and oversee competitors,
apart from their target customers.
Influencers:
- Big research firms
- Oligopoly firms
Competitors
Target
Customers
(*)
A Company
(a consumer products company)
7. Curiously, influencers provide the vision of the
newly defined product category for their customers
– the consumer products companies.
(*) examples of influencers
8. In fact, many influencers have global marketing
platforms to survey their customers’ potential market.
9. The problem is that the influencers’ happiness
do not correspond with the companies’ happiness.
10. The influencers’ happiness is to spur intense
competition in their customers’ market because
such competition brings them huge revenue.
Everybody Netbook!
(with Wintel !!!)
15. Many companies start from products.
They improve existing products and
make their spec table better.
Existing market Existing market
New segment
Sometimes they create a new segment.
16. Fewer companies start from people.
They innovate new user experiences
and make the people’s life better.
Existing market Existing market New market
Sometimes they create a new market.
17. My focus here is clearly on the latter case:
“Start from people”.
*Lots of theories, practices, consulting services are available for the former case, such as theory of
competition, product management practices, social media marketing, etc.
18. True marketing says “These are the [user-experiences](*)
the customer looks for, values, and needs.”
– Peter. F. Drucker
(*)In the original, the term “satisfactions” is used.
19. To find out “the user-experiences” is the starting
line for new product planning, however,
20. “You can’t go out and ask people, you know,
What’s the next big thing?”
– Steve Jobs
CNN Money, Aug/03/2008
21. “This product is ‘Innovative’” means that the
product brings far better user-experience to the
target customers.
23. What ordinary people can imagine is limited to
incremental improvement of existing products,
their imagination can’t go beyond this discontinuity.
24. If I had asked people what they wanted,
they would have said “faster horses”
– Henry Ford
Founder of the Ford Motor Company
25. We did market survey (around 2000) about the demand
for camera-phone; not once but four times the results
showed negative. However, nowadays, camera-phone
have become the standard.
– A comment from a marketing director
(Martin Cooper’s Keynote Speech at IEEE Wescon 2005)
26. It’s really hard to design products by focus groups.
A lot of times, people don’t know what they want
until you show it(*)
to them.
– Steve Jobs
(*) From the context, “it” doesn’t mean prototype, “it” means
finished product such as shown at Apple’s conference.
27. It’s us who have to answer the question:
“What’s the next big thing?”
28. Masaru Ibuka,
photo from www.sony.net
Both Honda-san(*)
and I had never started product
development from a technological point of view.
The first and foremost priority was our goal
what product we really wanted to make.
– Masaru Ibuka, co-founder of Sony
Quoted from“The Soul of Monozukuri”
(*) Soichiro Honda, founder of HONDA
29. The idea for the Walkman had come from Ibuka, who was
over 70 years old, and Morita(*)
, himself approaching 60
enthusiastically supported it.
Not content to rest on their laurels, both kept looking for
new ideas and strove to understand what kind of
products would meet the lifestyle needs of young people.
– Quoted from “Sony History”, www.sony.net
(*) Morita: Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony
Sony Walkman TPS-L2 (1979)
Photo by GeorgeArthur, Wikimedia
30. "It was very nearly fetishistic, in fact – he even had a
collection of Sony letterhead and marketing materials,"
laughs Deutschman(*)
. "Sony was a company that Jobs
instinctively admired and saw as model from the very
beginning.”
By Jeff Yang,
"How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan”, SF Gate
(*) Alan Deutschman, Author of "Walk the Walk", Professor at University Nevada-Reno.
32. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty
good at having the right discipline to think through
whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too.
That's what we get paid to do.
– Steve Jobs
CNN Money, Aug/03/2008
33. Once we are confident that “a lot of other people
are going to want it, too”, then most barriers
which prevent us from innovation are removed.
35. “I requested an engineering team to implement that
feature, but they said it was too difficult and too risky
to do it. So, we had to abandon it. However, our
competitor could do it and we are in for it now.
Stupid engineering team!”
Marketers
36. “I asked marketing guys how critical to implement
that feature for our business. But they didn’t show
any compelling explanations. So, we had to make it a
lower-priority task. Otherwise, we could do it!
Our marketing team doesn’t work at all”
Engineers
37. Before iPhone, most manufacturers believed
that it was impossible to implement a full-web
browser on a mobile handset.
38. But just less than one year after iPhone, many
manufacturers released mobile handsets with
a full-web browser.
40. We see a lot of similar stories in our history:
Transistor Radio, Home VTR, Walkman, Personal
Computer, Megapixel Digital Camera, Full-flat CRT,
Large format LCD, Broadband, Tablet PC, …etc.
42. Barriers against an innovation are not so high if
we share strong confidence that
“a lot of other people are going to want it, too”.
43. This confidence fires up us to realize far better
user-experience, innovative products, no matter
how high the barrier may be.
44. You know, potential ability of engineering is
much higher than we expect and engineers can
be more flexible if they share the confidence.
45. Marketing, sales, logistics, legal, production, PR, IP,
HR, or top managements, in whatever sections,
persons in charge can be more passionate and
creative if they share the confidence.
46. The missing piece for innovation is the strong
confidence that “a lot of other people are going
to want it, too”.
47. The key to get strong confidence is the ability
to understand and share the feelings of target
customers, that is, “Empathy”.
empathy:
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
(Concise Oxford English Dictionary)
49. It's in Apple's DNA. The technology alone is not enough.
That is technology married with the liberal arts, married
with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes
our hearts sing.
– Steve Jobs
Keynote speech, Mar/2011, from Apple.com
50. This sentence explains about the advantage of
Apple’s products, but it doesn’t explain why they
can create such attractive products.
51. The question I’d like to ask here is:
“How to create such attractive products?”
56. Category Inception Apple Product Released
MP3 Player 1997 iPod 2001
MP3 Download(*)
1999 iTune Store 2003
Smart Phone 2001 iPhone 2007
Mobile App(**)
1999 App Store 2008
Netbook 2007 iPad 2010
Apple’s blockbusters
So, Apple often enters the market very late, and
attractively re-defines the product which makes
customers’ hearts sing as well as itself.
(*) Napster, etc.
(**) NTT docomo, etc
57. The greatest praise an innovation can receive is
for people to say,
"This is obvious. Why didn't I think of it?"
– Peter. F. Drucker
58. Looking back from today:
The demands for iPod & iTune Store was
obvious around 1999.
The demands for “Breakthrough internet
communicator”(*)
was obvious around 2005.
The demands for “big iPhone” was obvious
around 2008.
(*) Steve Jobs’s introductory words about iPhone
59. It may sound paradoxical, but Steve Jobs says:
We do no market research. We don’t hire
consultants.
61. Apple Store was launched in May 2001, five months
before the first iPod was to be released and two years
before the iTune Store was to be launched.
Apple Store
Photo by Camillo Miller, Flickr
(*)At that time, Apple's annual revenue was only $5.4 billion and loss was $25 million.
There were only Notebook and Desktop computers in the Apple Stores.
62. In 2011, Apple has 336 stores in 11 nations:
Japan: 7
US: 240
Canada: 20
Australia: 12
France: 7
Spain: 2
UK: 30
Germany: 5
Italy: 6
Switzerland: 3
China: 4
63. 5.8 millions people come to Apple Stores each week
and 610,000 members in “one-to-one” service.
(data from ifoAppleStore.com)
One-to-one service at Apple Store
Photo by Phil Photostream, Flickr
64. Apple has about 50,000 employees and about 30,000
of them are working at Apple Stores as full-time
employees. 60% of employees are there sharing their
vision "Enrich Lives".
(*) Gateway, now a subsidiary of Acer, had similar retailing strategy, but they didn't hire
their own people, didn't own real estate. On the other hand, Apple does.
Apple Store
Photo by Camillo Miller, Flickr
65. The only way to enrich their life is to be part of
their life.
– Ron Johnson
Senior Vice President of Retail, Apple
66. Apple Store has become the most powerful
“empathy” platform on the planet.
68. The business enterprise has two – and only these two –
basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing
and innovation produce results; all the rest are “costs”
– Peter F. Drucker
70. Empathy
Imagination (feel)
Creativity (think)
Innovation (produce)
Passion (triumph)
Motivation (act)
encourage
inspire
[ref] ”Towards a Definition of Creativity”, Wisconsin Task Force on Arts and Creativity in Education
Empathy: [em-puh-thee]
- the ability to understand and share the feelings of the
target customers; “the Source” of Innovation
71. “Empathy” is the very core ability for both
marketing and innovation, the two basic
functions of business enterprise.
72. Some companies have already executed drastic
investment for Empathy as a system.
73. Apple has been building a huge and stunning
Empathy platform: the Apple Store.
74. Samsung has a “Regional Specialist Program”,
a very aggressive Empathy cultivation program.
(*) see http://is.gd/Eu0Gfy
This is very old program, since 1990.
75. Dyson’s vacuum cleaner DC12,
a strategic product for Japan market
Dyson’s engineers home-stayed in Japan several
months to understand and share the people’s
lifestyle before designing DC12.
76. However, to build the Empathy as an effective
system is not easy, especially, in this profound
changing age.
77. Life Style
Declining Birth Rate
and Aging
Population
Diversity &
Inclusion
Sustainable Society
Later Marriage
…
Connected Society
78. Share of Global GDP
USA: 31%(2000) 18%(2015)(*1)
BRICS: 8%(2000) 23%(2015) 31%(2020)(*2)
Share of Global Cell-Phone Market(*3)
USA market: 50% (1998) 12% (2015)
Asia market: 19% (1998) 50% (2015)
E7 will go beyond G7 in 2020 in terms of GDP(*4)
(*1) IMF
(*2) BRICS Summit
(*3) Softbank
(*4) PWC
Global Economy
83. Are you and your company ready for
the next decade?
84. … to be posted.
An answer will be shared here in version 1.0
Hinweis der Redaktion
In order to really create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks. – Steve Jobs
Martin Cooper
“ To establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society, and work to their heart’s content.” Masaru Ibuka (Co-founder, Sony Corporation)
Sony Walkman TPS-L2 (1979) Photo by GeorgeArthur, Wikimedia
"You know how you see a show car, and it's really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory! "What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, 'Nah, we can't do that. That's impossible.' And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, 'We can't build that!' And it gets a lot worse." Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1118384,00.html#ixzz1Uf1Ug8I8
"It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do. "So you can't go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There's a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, 'If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me "A faster horse." ' " http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0803/gallery.jobsqna.fortune/2.html
Sony also often entered market Radio -> Already widespread in 1955 -> Transistor Radio, pocket radio Color TV -> in 1960s, color TV’s market share was growing to 25%. -> Sony released the color TV very late. But it was Trinitron, very bright. Sony had got market leader next over 30 years. VTR -> entered late, but like Apple’s Apple II, first home use VTR Game -> Nintendo, Sega -> PlayStation Walkman and bunch of “world first all transistor xxx. Digital tape, CD, MO, MD
“ Towards a Definition of Creativity“ Wisconsin Task Force on Arts and Creativity in Education