Design Thinking in Product Innovation

SAP has trained and put together a pool of 100 people who are practitioners of design thinking. It is a new approach to product innovation. Here the primary figure is not an engineer but a designer. The idea is to create desirable products. There are small teams each having a designer-in-residence. He initiates the process by interviewing the end user in terms of his expectations. The inputs are used before building a prototype. To set the content, they work like start-ups in their own space, away from cubicles and processes. All people in the organisation are not involved in design thinking—just 10-20 per cent of the people to overcome the innovator’s dilemma.

Design Moving from Maximalist to Minimalist and Other Trends

Karim Rashid, a prolific designer, who attended the India Design Forum in 2012 spoke about the change in design industry from designing for mass production to elitism to going back to a ‘ designocracy ‘ as we are beginning to witness now. Rashid fails to appreciate sentimental design e.g. a restaurant services innovative food, but makes you seat on a 16th-century European chair. He is for beautiful objects that make our lives simpler. Rashid created a bathing luxury — all in one TV-tub unit made of acrylic resin with a waterproof LCD-screen that allows you to watch TV and DVDs and listen to MP3 format music and surf the net. According to him, contemporary design has the power to shape the future. The role of a designer today is to make the world a better place by influencing our everyday behaviou r— functionally and emotionally. Good designs reduce the stress in our environments and in everyday life. His best designs function both as sculptural and functional objects. Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher, called all objects obstacles in our experience of the world. Rashid evokes him and says that indeed we are living in poorly designed world.

According to Lidewij Edelkoort, a trend forecaster, India urgently needs to create its own design language. Contemporary Indian design has completely distanced itself from the past. Design schools should take on this task.

International design moves along the continuum of lush-and-plush ( Versace ) to clean-and-simple (Apple ). The extremely of less-is-more has found favour in recent times. Design itself has been used as a strategy by Steve. Dieter Rams, now 80 ( 2012 ), a German designer wrote As Little Design As Possible and put forward the maxim good design is as little design as possible. It stands in sharp contrast to the complex and cluttered Indian design.We focus more on embellishment and less on functionality. A good design is holistic. It is balanced.

In India, we speak about designer dresses or sunglasses to distinguish these from overproduced banality. Design here defines consumer life style. design makes the products desirable.

Sholay : Harbinger of Change in Hindi Movies

In 1975, Sholay  of Ramesh Sippy gave a western look to the Indian product. It was a risk taken by the Sippys. Had they not risked by the launch of an ambitious film, they would have faced a financial crisis. However, the risk taking was abandoned later, except a few movies such as Shekhar Kapur’s Mr. India and some films by Bonney Kapoor. Hindi films have confined themselves to three or four genres—comedy, crime, romance and family, and a mix of these — comic-crime, family-romance, violent-love-story etc.

There are no war films, science fiction, fantasy and espionage except a few notable examples. The Sholay’s  bold risk taking move is conspicuous by its absence. Even TV and documentations are no competition to films. Hindi films thus could afford to be lacklustre. Indian movies mainly reflect the small-town North India. Indian movies must now focus on story and spectacle on a variety of genres.

BlackBerry’s Failure

BlackBerry reported losses and laid off people. RIM failed to keep pace with Apple and Google. There were problems on three fronts.

*  It fails to anticipate that customers (not business customers ) would drive the smart phones market

* it ignored app economy which led to the adoption of the rival device.

*  could not foresee smart phones as mobile entertainment. It produced phones with full keyboards, though users preferred touch screen.This allows better video viewing and touch-swipe navigation. When Blackberry finally puts a touch screen phone, it is considered a copy of iPhone.

In short, it is a failure of vision.

Regular Movies vs Animation Movies

The focus in animated films is more on technology. That takes over the art of storytelling. There is no animation market in India. TV budgets are way too low to support good quality animation. Quality animation movies cost between Rs.20 crore and Rs. 40 crore, and at least a quarter of that in TV. Animation movie budgets in India are often less than Rs. 5 crore.

Every minute in an animation film adds 5400 frames ( going by the rate of 24 frames per  second ). A 90-minute film will have 130,000 frames in all—or 130,000 unique images that need to be rendered.

In India, most of the successful feature films, from a financial stand point, are formula films. It is safe for a producer to launch a formula film. We do not have much experimentation in different genres—sci-fi, extreme action or adventure. Animation here is thought of as a product essentially for children. We hope this attitude changes. In the US. too, this did not happen overnight.

Pulp Fiction

Meerut is Hindi pulp fiction country. The people who top the charts here are Surendra Mohan Pathaks, Ved Prakash Sharmas and Amit Khans. Desi pulp is India’s answer to the West’s airport novel. The plots are outlandish, the characters are over-the-top and the titles arrest your attention. Meerut, a cantonment town, is the hub of jasoosi upanyas. It is at railway stations and bus terminus that a chunk of Hindi crime fiction books sell. They are priced between Rs.50—100. They are printed on coarse paper from cheap wood pulp, and hence the name lugdi sahitya  or pulp fiction. Today the margins have declined to just 15 per cent, a huge drop from almost 100 per cent a few decades ago. The nucleus of publishing shifted to Allahabad in the 1970s. Ved Prakash Sharma ( 58 ) stays at Kavi Nagar, Meerut. He is the highest selling author of pulp fiction. He has written more than 150 books and churns out four novels a year, that sell more than one lac copies each. His Vardi  Wala Gunda sold more than 15 lac copies.

The 1960s spawned a crop of good writers – Rajhans, Ibne Safi, Gulshan Nanda and Ved Prakash Kamboj. In the 70s Nanda’s books were adapted for Hindi movies – Kati Patang, Khilona and Daag.

Surendra Mohan Pathak ( 75 ) writes intelligent stories. He does not spell out every detail from scratch. Vimal is his popular character.

Veena Sharma has created Reema Bharti, a woman spy. Amit Khan has created Karan Saxena, a RAW agent.

TV Debates vs  Original News

Media business today is less about delivering the news, and more about live TV debate. Generating original news content is expensive. Comparatively, live debates are economical. They also provide the elements of drama and tension. These are hard times for TV reporters.

ANI is the TV news agency that provides bytes across channels, and deprives the reporters of the chance to do ambush journalism. As social media is more speedy, the TV reports have also been deprived of the big advantage of speed over print.

The guests in live TV debates are now managed by Guest Coordinators ( GCs ). Politicians who wish to get on air now stay in touch with GCs.

Online and Mobile Video Content

More and more Indians are consuming content online, on cell phones and tablets. India has 125 million Internet users, of which 35 million consume video content online. There are 30 million smart phone users and 66 per cent of the data consumed by them on their 3G devices is video. By 2014, there will be 100 million smart phone users. The consumption of video over smart phones is expected to grow by 60 per cent. Star India has launched Starsports.com in 2013 and it is a paid platform right since its launch. Sony has launched Sony Liv. The cost of one-minute ad spot on Sony Liv or any broadcast platform ranges from Rs. 400 to 600 per minute. For high TRP programmes, the rate could be even Rs. 800 to 1000 per minute. By 2020, almost 70 per cent of video content consumption will happen on mobile and tablets.

Rural Marketing with Video on Wheels

Rural India constitutes a substantial percentage of market for automakers, e.g. Hyundai gets 32% sales from the non-urban markets. Maruti sells its fast moving car brands to orange farmers in Nagpur, turmeric growers in Tamil Nadu, granite polishers in Hyderabad, pottery makers in Jaipur, Madhubani painters Bihar, potato growers in West Bengal, apple and fruit growers in HP, fishermen in Howrah and alphonso mango growers in Ratnagiri.

Maruti has converted a Tata truck into an 18-seater mobile theatre. It takes the vehicle to project promotional films to different non-urban areas. Maruti Alto, its entry level car, fetches 36 per cent sales from rural areas. The truck has a big LCD TV, a split AC and push-back chairs. The projected film is aspirational. The quiz questions based on the film are asked  after the projection. The winners take home prizes such as caps, pens and wall clocks, with Maruti Suzuki branding. The opinion makers in rural society are wooed. They are invited for a factory visit.

Maruti has created a force of resident dealer sales executive ( RDSEs ) who do the profiling of villages to assess their potential and then target them.

Advertising : New Frontiers

Of the 7 billion people on the earth, 5.6 billion are connected by cell phone and more than half of those accessing the internet do so without a laptop, desktop or a landline. Advertising against this scenario has become more valuable than ever and more consequential. In essence, it is an educative force. Advertising has always been an engine for economic stimulation and social charge. Its purpose is to make a world a better place to live in.

The growth in advertising will come from India, China, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Mekong sub-region. Since the World Cup took place in South Africa, the Sub-Saharan Africa has come a long way. There are 800 million people in that region. Advertising will continue to improve lives in ‘always developing markets ‘ like Japan, the US, Western Europe, Brazil, Russia and the Middle East.