Introducing the fifth in our blog series of eleven innovation and branding precepts for 2011.

TAKING BABY STEPS

Innovative products and services often require that consumers learn new behaviours, or modify existing ones, and often this can be a barrier to adoption. By focusing on making the whole consumer experience intuitive and simple, this barrier becomes much lower as consumers are happier to make the small and easy change to use your product or service.

ANGRY BIRDS
As mobile phones increasingly become entertainment devices, and mobile gaming attracts a broader appeal across age demographics, what better way to capture an audience and over 50 million sales than with a basic, yet addictive platform game that combines physics, skill and a comical storyline. The imminent expansion into consoles is a great example of how simplicity can help build a brand.

IPAD
Never a brand to rest on its laurels, Apple has done it again with its 2010 launch of the iPad, and recent launch of iPad2, setting a new standard for technology usability. The advertising says it all “You already know how to use it”, andeven a four year old can figure it out in minutes. Setting high
consumer expectations for intuitive user interfaces, other brands will be running to catch up and compete with the iPad with their tablet PCs.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT…
What are the barriers to behaviour change in your category? Brainstorm ways to overcome them – then simplify, simplify, simplify.

If you can’t wait for the next blog in the series, or you missed the earlier ones, all eleven precepts can be viewed here.

Introducing the fourth in our blog series of eleven innovation and branding precepts for 2011.

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS
 
Having distinctive origins and communicating provenance can be a key point of difference for a brand – it provides a story, and even a source of intrigue, as well conferring expertise by delivering a product from a place that ‘knows best’.
 
IZZY LANE
This British woolwear company proudly sources, spins, weaves, knits and dyes all its wool in the UK to create beautiful, stylish wool and cashmere pieces that counter the mainstream trend for sourcing wool and wool products from overseas. Not only that, but most of the animals providing the wool are rescued, as they would have been sent to slaughter by other mainstream farmers for unsuitable in some way, and are kept to the highest ethical standards. This is a brand that knows where it’s from and what it stands for, and it’s this, as much as its beautiful products, that attracts and delights its consumers.

CHASE VODKA
Named ‘the world’s best vodka’ at the Global Spirit Awards, Chase vodka is making all the noises of a top tier product, communicating its authentic, English countryside heritage and pride in how it’s made as a core part of its brand.

LOOK WHAT WE FOUND!
Focusing on simplicity in its gourmet range of ready meals and sauces, Look What We Found! produces hearty British favourites and features the ‘food hero’ behind each product on the packaging. Taking high quality ready meals out of the chiller cabinet and onto the ambient shelves was always going to present some challenges in terms of changing consumer perceptions, but focusing on their British countryside provenance communicates that Look What We Found! are high quality products made by people who care.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT…
Is there a story or history to your brand or product that could help you stand out from the crowd?

If you can’t wait for the next blog in the series, or you missed the earlier ones, all eleven precepts can be viewed here.

As a keen cook and foodie, I keep a close eye on all things food-related, and I recently noticed that there seems to be more and more media noise about food waste reduction.  I’m not just talking about composting and wormeries, but in fact about a rising awareness of how much food our modern consumer societies throw away. 

The first clue for me came not long after arriving back in the UK to live, in the form of the BBC’s Great British Waste Menu, which challenged four British chefs to create food for a restaurant-standard banquet for over 60 VIPs using ingredients that have been discarded, rejected or deemed unsuitable for sale.  The chefs successfully completed the challenge and along the way the show highlighted the shocking amount of food that is wasted all the way along the food chain, from the fields to the supermarkets to our plates.  It was powerful stuff.

The next clue popped up in Tesco’s introduction of buy-one-get-one-free-later deals to help shoppers cut down on food waste by reducing the amount of perishable food left to go bad in the fridge or the fruit bowl.  It’s only fixing one part of the massive food waste problem… but it’s a start.

The final clue came in April this year, when the government introduced new guidelines that put more focus on ‘use by’ dates for perishable items rather than the more widely used ‘best before’ dates, which have also been criticised for increasing the amount of perfectly usable food thrown out by UK households. 

It seems that a storm is brewing in these tight economic times – according to the advisory body Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap), consumers can end up binning up to a quarter of their weekly food and drink purchases – worth £680 to the average British household each year.

I wonder, then, how long it will be until one of the big grocery stores seizes the opportunity to own waste reduction as a source of competitive advantage?  Could it be the next ‘local’, ‘natural’ or ‘organic’, or is it just a lot fuss about nothing?

I’ve been watching with interest since Waitrose bought the flagging Duchy Originals brand to see what they would do with it. Having transformed it into their British Organic food brand across the spectrum of free and packaged food categories, I thought that would be the end of it. But what should I find in my local garden centre last weekend, but an array of Duchy Originals organic vegetable and herb seeds. Interestingly (and differently from other seed brands) the Duchy Originals packaging shows a clear link to the brand’s food heartland, with serving and usage suggestions on the front of the packs.

Digging a little deeper reveals that the seeds are produced by a partner producer called Thompson and Morgan.

We’ve been talking a lot here at The Value Engineers about clever, brand-appropriate licensing of brands. For me this is a great example of just that, and I can’t wait to see where Duchy Originals might extend its brand to next.

As anyone whose done a workshop with us will know, at The Value Engineers we often talk about ‘blue, red and green balls’ as the 3 essential principles for successful innovation: blue-sky creative thinking, thoughtful and considered screening of ideas, and driven implementation of successful concepts.

But it would seem that we don’t have a monopoly on using the blue, red and green balls to bring ideas to life….

On our recent trip to Indonesia, Alex Waters and I found that Jakarta restaurant ‘The Apartment’ had created a set of molecular cocktails called redballs, blueballs and greenballs. If you wanted to taste all three you could try the interestingly named ‘slurp the balls’ – a sampler of each of the red, blue and green molecular concoctions, served in individual Chinese spoons.

Great minds think alike?!