Alain Breillatt

In my last post I kept referring back to that old simile of building the next great thing since sliced bread. Well, believe it or not there is innovation in things as common as sliced bread and Sara Lee is an example of a company who gets it when it comes to listening to consumers, identifying the real problems they are trying to solve, and then implementing a product that exceeds their expectations.

Sara Lee was one of 11 winners in the Chicago Innovation Awards in October and the success the award celebrated was their new Soft & Smooth Made with Whole Grain White Bread. If you click on the CIA link and select “2006 Awards” at the bottom of the page you will see a brief video of Peter Reiner, VP of Sara Lee brands, discussing how they came up with the truly innovative new bread by leveraging deep consumer insights.

What is it: a whole grain white wheat bread with the appearance, texture and taste of a refined white bread that young kids and adults love.

What problem it solves: Consumers in general realize they need to improve their diets and “whole grains” is one of the areas that the FDA and nutritionists have identified as a lack in many Americans’ diets. Heather Hawkes on the Harvard Medical School Consumer Health Information site explains,

New government guidelines recommend that Americans make half of their grains whole, eating three or more 1-ounce servings a day. Yet it’s estimated that the average consumer eats less than one-third of the recommended amount of whole grains and 40% of us never eat whole grains at all!

Moms want to feed their children healthy food and despair that their children refuse to eat wheat bread because it doesn’t taste good or is too “crusty” to eat. Kids want great tasting sandwiches made with white bread (that light and airy stuff with no nutritional value – think Wonder Bread when you were a kid). Just try to get a young child to eat wheat bread, experience shows they can be pretty intractable. One of the best insights I’ve seen came from a director of nutrition services in the Omaha Public Schools, “The hardest thing is to get a kid to eat something that’s brown or anything that looks like it has seeds in it.” Given the focus on children’s health and obesity, the Public Schools clearly have an interest here as well. In my house it’s not a problem, the girls eat nothing but Great Harvest whole wheat, but for most families this is a deep set issue.

But it’s not just about children either. As Heather Hawkes explains further in her article, research in the Harvard Medical School’s Nurses Health Study demonstrates that a diet with greater emphasis on whole grains also contributes to weight loss or maintenance for women.

Now if you know nothing else about food, you should quickly realize that children’s health and women’s weight are probably the two biggest lodestones when it comes to trends and issues in American eating. Find a product that reasonably and effectively answers these issues and you have just hit the mother lode.

So Sara Lee’s product captures both of these insights and satisfies both the target consumer and the target purchaser.

What are the results: The #1 selling bread in the bread aisle of your local grocer – a hotly contested shelf space. According to IRI data, Soft & Smooth sold 16.7 million 20 ounce loafs or $30.2 million in sales between the launch in July through December 2005. That’s $30 million in 6 months! Again, for those not in the know, a single new product launch into grocery that delivers $30 million in the first year is a homerun. Sara Lee knocked this one out of the park and on its way to the moon just on revenues. But other indicators show that this is not just a one hit wonder where consumers try it once and move on. A survey done by Sara Lee among the target audience showed that 90% of Women with Children in Household rated the bread in the top two boxes of Very Favorable or Somewhat Favorable and again 91% indicated a high intent to purchase again after first trial. The bread did so well for Sara Lee at launch that they cut ad spending and dedicated the marketing dollars to production in order to meet demand.

How did they do it: Sara Lee partnered with a K&A client, ConAgra Foods, (and by this I’m not implying we had anything to do with the product development) and is leveraging their Ultragrain Whole White Wheat as a key ingredient. What is White Wheat you ask? According to Ms. Hawkes, it is essentially albino wheat with none of the tannins and acids that make traditional wheat bread (made from red wheat flour) taste bitter:

Traditional wheat flour comes from red wheat. The bran layer contains tannins and phenolic acid, which are bitter and account for much of the taste difference between whole wheat and white bread. The red bran coloring is responsible in part for the darker color of whole wheat.

White wheat is a natural albino variety. It does not contain the tannins or acids that red wheat does, so the taste is sweeter and milder. The flour coloring is lighter, more golden. What’s more, it is touted as being the nutritional equivalent of its red wheat counterpart.

Sara Lee has leveraged this success into Whole Grain hamburger and hot dog buns and other breads that are equally experiencing strong success. So not only is this a great product, it also established a great platform for further product development in related spaces. There you have it, a great example of how focusing tightly on the problems customers face can lead to significant product success and strong customer loyalty. Sara Lee did go out and ask customers what they wanted, but they also went deeper and worked to identify the underlying issues and emotional drivers. This is the key to new product success in any business. Most marketers nod their head and say “Yup” when you say, “Thou shalt know thy customer.” Yet all they know is quantitative data which will tell you whether or not they like your product or brand, but it won’t tell you the kind of data that is gathered through ethnographic interactions and cultural research. You have to peel back the layers on the realities of your customers’ experiences. You have to REALLY know your customer, the world they inhabit and the true sources of the problems they face to see this kind of success. Either that or be extremely lucky.

Products typically are not imperfect – they’re perfectly designed to fit a particular need as defined by the team responsible for building the product.  And yet everyday the targeted users of those products very often find themselves saying, “I wish they would make [some change] to this product, then it would be PERFECT!”

Perfection is in the eye of the beholder, or in this case, the eye of the customer.

Every product or service that is released to the market is a result of multiple compromises based on decisions made by the brand manager, the R&D product manager, the marketing manager, and everyone else who has skin in the game as they prepare the offering to meet the needs of their target customer. How these decisions are made is the focus of this site and I will work to shed light on the keys to success using examples across many industries.

The title of this site was inspired by an article I came across a few years ago in USA Today (not the newspaper but instead a magazine published by the Society for the Advancement of Education) describing the work of Henry Petroski, a professor of Civil Engineering at Duke University.  The text of this article is quoted below since the actual article is not available online.

I take a slightly different stance on imperfect design leading to imperfect products.  I have a firm conviction that the real reason for product or service imperfection (or the product not quite matching the intended user’s needs) is due to imperfect insight where the brand or product manager has failed to truly grasp the reasons why you or I or my mother would want to use a product like theirs.  Or at a more fundamental level, the product manager failed to grasp the complete conceptual picture of the problem we are trying to solve in using this product. Hence, “Picture Imperfect.”*

We’ll explore this in future posts.

Imperfect Designs, Perfect Products – INNOVATION

What do paper cups, toothbrushes, grocery bags, kitchen faucets, doorknobs, and automobile cup holders have in common? They all are the imperfect products of designers seeking to come up with something better for consumers. Henry Petroski, Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University, Durham, N.C., looks at the design of things we take for granted and concludes there can never be an end to the guest for the perfect design.

In Small Things Considered, Petroski notes that all plans involve choice, usually to satisfy competing constraints, whether they be cost, size, efficiency, or the myriad other factors that make the difference between a design that works and one that doesn’t. “. . . The design of made things, as opposed to design in nature and the artistic interpretation of it, necessarily proceed within the confines of the laws of science and economics. An . . . inventor or designer of practical things must accept the realities of gravity and budgets, keeping his feet on the ground and his eye on the price.”

Petroski examines a variety of common objects and how their designs evolved. Take the paper cup, for example, which was spawned early last century when people began to realize that the communal tin cup from which everyone-healthy and sick alike-drank at the public water barrel, well, pump, or spigot often was the source of germs and disease.

Inventor and entrepreneur Lawrence W. Luellen eventually came up with a design that had a flange around the top edge of a cup to stiffen it and make it easier to dispense one at a time from a stack of nested cups in a machine. Luellen and his partners later named the product the Dixie cup.

While most people now drink water from their own plastic bottles, the Dixie cup remains widely in use. Not so for the paper grocery bag, which was developed in the mid 1800s. The plastic bag was introduced into American supermarkets in the mid 1970s and its sturdy handles, which enable shoppers to carry many more bags at a time, are among its most competitive features. “The plastic bag has clearly become the container of choice, we shoppers adjusting to its limitations the way we adjust to those of all designs. The once near-perfect up-standing paper grocery bag has mostly been displaced by something that is at the same time superior and yet inferior. That is the way it often is with designed objects.”

*Note: the title of this weblog also has something to do with the fact that I am a bit of a shutterbug and still struggle at perfect image composition since I have way more power in the camera than I am able to handle.  So it is not unusual to hear me muttering about the shot that got away due to improper focus or depth of field or any of a number of other failures.  Thank goodness for digital photography where I can see the results immediately and recompose on the fly.  That is my saving grace!