- Peter Honnor - Head of strategy at 383. Its my job to work with clients to help them define their future strategic roadmaps and plans. Its my role to ensure our clients have strong and

robust product roadmaps that are

aligned to genuine customer needs

Today we wanted to dive into a couple of plays in the useful brands playbook to go through

PETER HONNOR

HEAD OF STRATEGY @383

- Today wed like to focus on 2 of the plays - play 6 - developing a periphery vision, and play 9, building useful partnerships

When we talk about a periphery vision, what we are referring to is the ability to identify, grow and develop viewpoints that are outside of your organisation, which can prove hugely

beneficial through any innovation, design or product delivery process.

And when looking at why it matters, we believe that lacking any outward vision can often harm and hinder your product delivery innovation strategy, almost to the point of being fatal.

To illustrate why developing a peripheral vision matters, I’m going to start

with 2 key statements we believe are fundamental to any brand’s experience

and innovation activity.

- Firstly, we recognise and understand that users expectations are

usually set outside of your experience. No matter how much a brand

spends on marketing or communications, its other brands and services

that really define what a user thinks is amazing, ok or useless.

Secondly, we believe that a lack of periphery vision and inward focus can

ultimately prove fatal for a brand.

To explain these in more detailed, were going to run through 2 examples of

the above, and a clear example of a brand exercising its periphery vision in

action.

- let’s start with with how users expectations are set outside of

your immediate experience, with an example we have recently

worked with at 383

Recently, we have been working closely with Hilton hotels, to help them reimagine part of their experience specifically relating to motivating users to book hotels for weekend and short breaks.

So at present, this is the current discovery and booking for hilton.com, and its one Im sure we've all used and seen before.

The further we dive into the site, the more it feels and acts like a shopping site with the sole purpose of buying a hotel room on a specific date.

Our challenge to hilton was to look outside of their immediate competition and to understand what emerging services are really drive uptake of hotels in key destinations

We initially looked to the OTA space, and we found a few clear and very different examples of how accommodation booking is driven through discovery and inspiration rather than through pricing and discounted offers.

This example is Zaptravel, which is very clear in its utility in driving users to destinations primarily through experiences and activities rather than price points and room amenities

Moving onto Peek, this is a start up that that solely provides utility around the discovery of key destinations that users may find inspiring.

Looking at their experience its clear that peek isn't interested in selling a hotel room in milton keynes or manchester , their utility in selling destinations is delivered by inspiring users to visit new places for new experiences. CLICK

So bringing this together, we can see that outside of Hiltons immediate competition, travel providers are resetting users expectations of travel services to create experiences rather than creating itineraries and price lists

Moving onto Peek, this is a start up that that solely provides utility around the discovery of key destinations that users may find inspiring.

Looking at their experience its clear that peek isn't interested in selling a hotel room in milton keynes or manchester , their utility in selling destinations is delivered by inspiring users to visit new places for new experiences.

So bringing this together, we can see that outside of Hiltons immediate competition, travel providers are resetting users expectations of travel services to create experiences rather than creating itineraries and price lists

- So Hilton is a recent example of a large brand using

their periphery vision for good, Id now like to give you

an example of how not having a periphery vision and

looking inwards can ultimately prove fatal for a brand.

So for me, this one is personal, way back around 2006, I was a young Experience Manager at motorola, and one of the first devices I was involved with was this one - the motorola Razr - Im assuming quite a few people remember this phone?

At the time this was a huge success, the phone was selling in huge numbers and everyone at Moto was very proud and thought it was the be all and end all of mobile devices.

So much so, that when it came to product innovation and subsequent releases of the handset, Motorolas innovation strategy looked like this

Yep, different colours. At the time, we were so focused internally on the success of the phone, innovation merely meant putting a slightly different spin on the colour of the device.

Of course, all good things come to an end, so what did we do when we ran out of colours?

Stickers. Yes, honestly, stickers. At the time it seemed perfectly logical, but speaking from experience, if any of your product roadmaps involve putting stickers on an existing device, you might be in trouble!

The problem for Motorola is that whilst we were focused on putting stickers on devices, user expectations were being set elsewhere.

At the time users expectations of what a music device should look like was being set by the iPod.

Expectations of what a mobile browsing experience should be was being set by early PDAs such as the ipaq

The Email experience was being defined and refined by BlackBerry, and how to get from a-b by TomTom.

At the time, these were on the periphery of motorola vision of mobile utility, but through a purely inward focus, someone else ultimately created and launched this….

Many moons ago….

The first iPhone.

When the iPhone was released, it was a huge earthquake in the mobile industry, and motorola possibly felt it the worst.

Now Im not blaming the iPhone for Motorolas ultimate fall, but from being close to the product roadmap at the time, with hindsight I can clearly recognise that lacking a periphery vision of where users expectations were being set at the time ultimately lead to an unappealing and unconvincing product roadmap that Motorola never really recovered from.

My personal learning from my time at motorola is this - that whilst ignoring your competitors can be harmful, ignoring your customers can be fatal

- So lets brighten things up a bit, Id like to look at a brand that is clearly using its periphery vision to disrupt and re-define a stagnant marketplace.

Also included in the paypal mafia was this guy, Elon Musk, who Im sure many of you recognise.

Following Paypal, Elon went on to found Tesla and Space X, but for now Id like to focus on Tesla and how his periphery vision outside of traditional car manufacturing is shaping the motoring marketplace of the future.

Before we get into Tesla, just to set the scene of the status quo of innovation within the automotive space, this is a nice example of BMWs recent history of the 3 series.

to me this seems kind of familiar back to the motorola example of innovation being all about respinning of a successful product rather than creating genuinely new experiences

Moving on to Tesla, heres a few stats to show that Tesla is doing something right -

At the moment Tesla is worth more than Fiat, Mitsubishi, Suzuki or Isuzu, and they have done that through only 52 showrooms globally. To put that in perspective, fiat have over 100 showrooms in the UK alone

When it comes to the cars they produce, there are only 6 parts in a tesla that need regular maintance - 4 tyre and 2 wiper blades

And finally, they have just invested over 5 billion dollars in a gigafactory in the us…so I think its clear they're doing something right in the automotive market

And looking at how Tesla are doing this, its clear that they are applying techniques and principles of digital product and service design to the automotive sector.

This for example is the interaction between a Teslas dashboard and smartphone integration.

Im pretty confident in saying that the most advanced in car and overall digital experience currently belongs to tesla owners, as the digital experience has been architected and integrated from the very beginning rather than added as an afterthought

This for example is an over the air software update for the onboard software for a P85.

Delivering software updates to modern cars is something that normally requires a trip to a local friendly and expensive dealer, but Tesla is breaking new ground by delivering this right to the users home as and when it is released, as ultimately this is just lines of code and can be delivered like any other software update

Moving outside of the physical car itself, Tesla has recognised that the driving experience is an ecosystem in itself, and has heavily invested in charging points to enable and deliver the experience directly to their customers.

This is the equivalent of Ford purchasing and owning a chain of petrol pumps up and down the country, which quite simply is unheard of, but Tesla is thinking of the entire end to end experience through the lens of product and service design.

Finally, to show that Tesla is genuinely considering the entire end to end experience of car ownership, they have recently invested 5 billion into a Gigafactory to create the energy needed to power their cars. Thinking back to the ford example, this is the equivalent of ford creating their own petrol and diesel products - again, completely unheard of, but a genuine part of the car ownership experience.

So hopefully its clear that bringing a periphery vision from outside of a stagnant marketplace can genuinely allow brands to build game changing products, services and ecosystems.

At this point theirs is often a key challenge for brands, and that is the challenge of how to effectively build and deliver the experience they have identified through their periphery vision……

Which brings us nicely to play 9 in the playbook, which describes how building strategic partnerships can allow brands to bring innovation to market, and some of the activities we can do

to ensure success

Within this plays, we have 3 clear activities that we believe can help brands to identify potential strategic partners to deliver new experiences which are

Identifying capability gaps to extend a users journey

Identifying complimentary utility to improve the experience

and finally to identify brands with similar purpose and share knowledge and activity.

to demonstrate these activities in action, Id like to

- To show these activities in a clear example of a successful brand partnership, Id like to focus on the recent partnership between Uber and Spotify. For anyone who hasn't experience this

yet, this allows Uber riders to play their spotify music in any Uber cab during their journey

- Starting with how this partnership came together, lets look at how Uber identified a capability gap within their experience, and an opportunity to extend their experience. - Looking at Ubers core proposition, their utility is all about getting their users from A to B- Anyone who has used Ubers service probably recognises that Uber has nailed both part of this journey with their current experience- From point A hailing a cab through to paying and reviewing a journey at the other end, Uber has genuinely delivered a great service- Realistically, the area of opportunity for Uber to enhance the experience lies in what happens in between a and b, so when a rider is sitting in the car on the way to their destination.

- So at this point Uber had a clear understanding of where the area of opportunity lay in their journey, and now needed to define a complimentary utility to improve the overall experience

- And being honest they probably didn't have to look very far or even into the future, as the answer has been around for almost as long as the car has.

This is a 1950s ford thunderbird, and the answer is lying in the dashboard - ……quite simply, everyone likes to listen to music whilst in the car

- When it came to enabling the experience, Uber already had a headstart, as every single one of its users has a mobile device, which as we've seen earlier, is how users now expect to

consumer music whilst on the move

- So within the mobile Space, Uber then spent some time understanding who they could partner with to enable a music service within their taxis.

They probably started with Apples iTunes and Googles play experience, but rapidly found them to be far too property and restrictive to be of any genuine constant utility

They then probably looked at platform agnostic services, and discounted some of the smaller services such as Rdio, before recognising that spotify has the scale, expertise and market

penetration to be of genuine user to their customers……CLICK….so then you can imagine the opening conversations between Uber and Spotify

- So at this point, Uber and Spotify were looking for a point of shared purpose

- So even though at high level, uber and spotify have very different purposes brands, but at very specific points in their customer journey they share the same purpose - to deliver the

best possible transit experience

- So all of this brings us to this point - a user being able to play their music in their Uber taxi, which is truly a synthesis of a useful partnership

So why do we think this is a useful brand partnership and why have I called it out today as a great example?

Well, lets break down all of the players in the experience and see how everyone wins from the partnership

- First of all, lets look at Uber, its clear that they have a significantly differentiated user journey for their users, which may result in more users choosing their service over their

competitors - you cant do this in a black cab

- For spotify, its clear that they have new routes to new users - for any regular uber rider who isn't a spotify customer, then the experience of listening to my own music in a cab could tip

me over the edge to sign up for a spotify premium subscription

- Looking at Uber customers, whilst Im sure this doesn't happen that often - but Id love it if it did, but Im pretty confident that they have a better taxi experience than with any other

provider.

- And finally looking to the driver, I initially though that this guy was getting the raw end of the deal in having to listen to awful spotify playlists day in and day out

Until I took a step back and realised that his focus of utility for uber is in making money and ultimately, more passengers results in more pay for himself and a better in-car experience

leads to higher ratings, so pretty much everyone is happy all round

- So bringing us back to our starting point of understanding our 2 plays, its clear that a periphery vision can allow brands to see customer problems and opportunities with new thinking to

solve their problems

And through working to build useful partnerships with new service partners brands can work to extend their experience into new areas of their users lives.

So at the heart is a genuine opportunity for innovation and utility to flourish when these 2 plays are brought together

That’s a brief overview of periphery vision and building useful partnerships and some of the insight from the Useful Brands playbook.

There’s 8 other plays in the book and you’ve found any of this morning interesting I’d recommend that you head over to usefulbrandsplaybook.com and sign up for a free copy