Holding The World’s Largest Gripe Session

Eric Schulz

We all know that person who can gripe about anything.  A beautiful day with blue skies and 78 degrees (wouldn’t that be nice right about now), and they complain about pollens making them sneeze, bugs or anything else they can think of. 

While griping is hardly ever encouraged, this week in my marketing classes I took off the gloves for an hour and declared our time together as “The World’s Largest Gripe Session." "Complain to your delight!" I told them. "What bugs you? What do you hate?"

It was wonderful. Everything from “I hate scraping ice off the inside of my car windows," to “I hate not having a place to put my backpack under my seat," to “I hate when the dryer eats my socks.”  In just one hour the class generated over 1,500 complaints and gripes!  Why did I open up the class to nothing but negativism and criticism? Because within gripes and complaints are the seeds for innovation!

Now we will take those seeds of problems and use them as inspiration in DESIGN THINKING, designing and creating new products and services to solve these very problems.  For example, using the three gripes above, great new product ideas jump out — what about a hot can of air to melt the inside ice on your car window?  Or an ice scraper with the right bend to conform to scraping the INSIDE of your car window?  Or adding backpack holders under the seats in classrooms (similar to the holders on the California Adventure ride at Disneyland)?  Or what about “Snap Socks” where your sock all now have a snap at the top to snap them together before washing and drying so that one of them doesn’t fall prey to the dryer monster? 

If you are looking for new ideas, BEFORE you start brainstorming, do a giant gripe session to identify problem areas, and your time spent creating new ideas will be much more fruitful and useful!

The Idiocy of Apple

Eric Schulz

Everyone thinks that Apple is brilliant. Phooey. What kind of genius company takes their best-selling products and discontinues them, introducing an upgrade virtually every year?  Apple! Did the world really need an iPhone 2, iPhone 3, iPhone 4, iPhone 5; iPad, iPad 2, The New iPad, mini iPad? Did they ask for an iPod, iPod mini, iPod Touch, or an iPod Shuffle? Not only did the world need these upgrades; they demanded them!

Apple IS brilliant. They understand the importance of innovation, of having a healthy dissatisfaction for the status quo. Apple has an inbred DNA that says, “we can do better," and then goes out and does it.

Look at the personal music player business segment. For decades, SONY dominated the market with its Walkman, first introduced in 1979. They did very little innovation to the product. Every five years, from 1979 to 1999, they celebrated their anniversary with a new cassette model introduced on July 1. Every FIVE years! 

In 2001, Apple introduced the first iPod, using digital storage instead of cassettes or CD’s. They introduced the iTunes store from which customers could acquire their music. And instantly, the Walkman was dead.

By all rights, SONY should be the dominant player in personal music. They had worldwide domination of the category with their players. But they didn’t do what Apple did—innovate, and vertically integrate. Instead of saying, “lets sell a new digital music player," Apple said “lets sell music AND a digital music player, and an online storage vault for our customers to store their music and download onto other Apple devices.” Game over. Apple won. And what is sometimes lost in this history is that at the time of Apple’s move into music, it was a struggling computer company that was popular only in the graphic-designers market. 

It’s been said that courage is the willingness to innovate when you don’t have to. It’s easy to change when your business is on the rocks, but when things are going well, it takes real courage to say, “let’s make it better." Studies have shown that companies that have innovation as part of their primary business model average more than15% profit margins, the highest in most industries. Why? Because they are in tune with their customer needs, constantly working to improve and make their products even better and more relevant to their customer's changing needs. The SONY example clearly shows that when you are self-satisfied and stand-still, that’s when you are most vulnerable, as somebody will surely come from behind and run you over, and you likely won’t even see it coming. Every business should learn from Apple, and start working on an innovation pipeline and begin hiring innovation managers to lead their new initiatives.