Innovating in blue cheese

A favourite cheese in our house is Oxford Blue. Have you tried it?

It was launched in 1995 by an English-educated Frenchman, Baron Robert Pouget, who was looking to develop for the British market a more creamy and less sharp blue cheese than the existing market leader, Stilton. Something closer to the French St Agur or the Italian Gorgonzola.

Since that time it has gradually built sales to become a regular fixture in the marketplace. Though in farm shops and the like, not in supermarkets.

According to Pouget the insight behind the product came from conversations he had with college chefs in Oxford, who told him that the dons would be more likely to choose that kind of cheese if it were made in England. He called it Oxford Blue because “it was the obvious name”. 

The background of this interesting innovator? After studying at Cambridge, he joined the French Marines, serving in the Algerian War, then becoming an artist and furniture designer based in Gloucestershire.

If I could offer you a taste of delicious Oxford Blue, I would.

How long haul business class was transformed

In the 1990s, there was a battle royal between airlines over long-haul business class.

In fact, the competitive situation seemed to me to be like angels being danced on the head of a pin, so slender were the real differences between the various players. One would offer a 45 degree seat recline, another an extra four inches of legroom, while a third would offer bone china crockery.

But in practical terms they were all so close together that customers bought primarily on price. Everyone was losing money.

So British Airways set up a big innovation workshop. People from every part of the airline plus several regular long-haul business class passengers. Some sixty of us in all. I designed and facilitated the workshop for them – in Dubai – and people flew in for it from around the globe.

Mostly on day one we brainstormed possible wishes for improvement. I was astonished by the services that business class passengers might wish for: massage my feet, cool my brow, peel me a grape, champagne intravenously and so on and so on.

Then, towards the end of the day, quite quietly, one of the passenger participants said: “You know, I’d trade all that, every bit of it, for a decent night’s sleep.” And what that meant, to him, was to have a flat bed, just like the folks in First Class.

It was as though the clouds had parted. Here was a genuine difference. After all, the majority of long-haul flights are overnight ones.

But identifying the breakthrough insight was just the beginning. BA then had to work out how to deliver the new benefit without sacrificing half the passenger density. And this they did using their “herringbone” layout.

Altogether it transformed BA’s long-haul business class – Club World as it’s branded – in terms of reputation, share, sales, price-point and profitability.

And for some reason or other, their competitors failed to respond for several years. But that’s another story.

Desires we never knew we had

A funny thing happened to Dr Geoffrey Miller. He’s a leading American evolutionary psychologist.

At a conference that brought together economists and psychologists in London in 1999, he noticed for the first time a group of people who looked different from all the academics there.

They were marketers. And they were interested in psychology because they wanted to know more about people’s preferences and how these worked.

Talking with marketers, Dr Miller noticed: “A new world opened up.” He recorded the experience in his book Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism, where he observed that marketers and marketing-oriented companies “help us discover desires we never knew we had, and ways of fulfilling them we never imagined.”

I don’t believe that traditional market research, nearly all borrowed from psychology, did any such thing. In my experience, that sort of enquiry, both qualitative and quantitative, was conducted in the present, holding firmly on to a rear view mirror. And this kind of research still holds sway in many of the more conservative organisations.

But over the past fifteen years or so, a sea-change has occurred whereby newly-developed “insight” processes (based on face-to-face interaction and walking together imaginatively into the future) have gradually replaced that rear-view mirror.

Of course, this work leads marketers to new and more interesting places – but it’s hard to replicate. So it can leave risk-averse managements very fearful of failure.

Trying things out is at the very heart of Darwinian evolution! The point for us is to manage the risks involved.

The future is a foreign country

The re-positioning of many traditional market research departments as “insight” providers has made a lesser contribution to successful innovation than might have been expected.

There are a number of reasons for this, perhaps the main one being that supposed “insights” often result from looking into what is in effect a rear-view-mirror.

What is needed, of course, is a way of walking into the future (together with customers, consumers, suppliers, experts etc) and gaining insights from that perspective. I think this is better described as “foresight”. And it’s not a good fit with people who have a strongly rational and logical cast of mind.

After all, nobody knows exactly what the future will hold. What we do know is that it will be different from the past. So walking into it is fundamentally an imaginative exercise – a new perspective from which fresh innovations can be created. And to do it well, it needs radically different methods.

To adapt LP Hartley’s famous opening sentence in his novel, The Go-Between: “The future is a foreign country: they will do things differently there.”

Words, words, words

At risk of catching the dread disease of definitionitis (see blogpost, 27 October 2010), I think it’s useful to distinguish between some words that are commonly used and confused. For example…

Invention: is the application of creativity to solve a problem, usually involving technology of one sort or another.

Discovery: is usefully applied to productive new insights and new understandings.

Creativity: is the generation of new thinking, ideas that may be quite speculative in nature.

Innovation: is the process of turning new ideas into reality, making them happen. It usually involves problem-solving.

How am I doing?

Dynamic Duo: Dyson and Who?

All the world knows about the brilliance and business success of the British engineer, James Dyson. Widely celebrated as the creative genius behind, amongst others, the bagless vacuum cleaner that showed Hoover the door. Charismatic and articulate front-man. He who talks with prime ministers and presidents.

But, hey, what is it that accounts for the dramatic rise in the company’s business since 1996. The company has grown since that time from £50 million to a staggering £770 million, a fifteenfold increase. At the same time, the company has diversified into 50 countries and is number one in the USA, Japan, much of continental Europe and the company’s home market, Britain.

It was in 1996 that Martin McCourt joined Dyson as a senior manager, becoming CEO in 2001. Clearly Dyson and McCourt make an absolutely outstanding team. What are the ingredients?

“I’m an engineer,” says Dyson, “and I need to know what people might want and where the market might go.” So that’s clear enough. Technical expertise, customer insight and imagination.

But what does McCourt bring to the party? He has described himself as “driven, approachable and questioning.” Three great qualities. But qualities shared with many other top managers.

So what does he look for in new hires? “Come with ideas and have the guts to push for them,” he says. “I like problem-solvers and people with high levels of inquisitiveness.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. Especially as recent research tells us that less than one third of British companies have anything to do with ideas, or problem-solving, or inquisitiveness in their recruitment processes.

I wonder what else there is in their particular mutual chemistry?

“Terminal 5 is working”

What a tragedy it was that London Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 should have started with those highly publicised baggage-handling issues. It’s a fine building – as big as the previous four terminals put together in terms of capacity. And, speaking as a frequent traveller, it works really well.

Together with a number of wonderful colleagues – Dave Smith, Marian Moriarty and Jonne Ceserani among them – we helped BAA to envision this massive undertaking. That was all of fifteen years before the eventual opening. It was one of the pioneering projects where we carefully mixed managers from many different functions within the company together with passenger-customers in order to dream, wish and create together.

The resulting brainstorming sessions produced ideas that were many and varied, but the Big Insight that emerged was the wish for the passage through the terminal to be totally free from queuing.

In so many ways T5 has met those needs. The orbital motorway, the M25, has been expanded to twelve lanes there and the access roads are so much better than for previous terminals. The passenger’s ability to check in electronically, both online and in the terminal, has been transformed. Fast-track has helped to ease congestion on arrival.

Of course, fifteen years ago we didn’t foresee the so-called War on Terror and the damaging effect it would have on time spent navigating through security. And I feel ashamed when I see the slowly crawling lines of “aliens” going through passport control on arrival.

Both issues need to be addressed creatively. My guess is that there is much to be learned from supermarket operators, who seem to manage fluctuations in traffic density so much faster and more flexibly.

What’s your experience of T5? And more generally of working creatively with consumers?

Seeing with new eyes

The problem with so much market research, or rather with our response to it, is that it often seems as though we have heard it all before.

I was working with a mixed group of managers from Nestlé, together with a gang of young consumers, endeavouring to find a new way forward for one of their pan-European chocolate brands. The problem seemed to be focused on the brand positioning and the advertising.

Early in the workshop, we sent them out in pairs (manager and consumer) to do some shopping together and to make notes of what they heard from each other. In the debrief, one of the managers said: “I knew that we had a problem with the communication strategy, but what my guy said just now was that he doesn’t really like the taste of our product.”

It turned out that this was a common piece of feedback from most other pairs.

“Why hasn’t market research been telling us this?” asked the international marketing director. “It has – in every study we’ve done,” responded the research manager. “We just decided it wasn’t that important.”

So every time they had heard it subsequently, they knew it could be ignored.

Hearing it with new ears, seeing it with new eyes, we were able to go with this “new” insight immediately to develop an improved, preferred recipe, which, together with a new communication strategy and new advertising, propelled the brand to double its sales across Europe within twelve months.

What the great French writer, Marcel Proust, said on this subject was: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Do you have special ways of doing this?