With the advent of new parking meters in my home city, one of the last bastions of cash has gone. I can now pay for parking by using my credit card or by text message. The slow but inescapable death of cash has been coming for a while, especially in New Zealand where debit card payments – even for the smallest transactions – has been common place for at least 15 years.

I can remember walking into a local burger bar in the early 90’s and getting some chips (or fries) and $20 cash. About the same time I started to go to bank branches less and less.

At the other end of the spectrum mortgage brokers are now the preferred contact point for larger transactions, and people would rather spend time getting impartial advice from them and not their customer banking service rep.

These two trends would be worrying for any business on their own, but couple that with the internet creating perfectly informed customers – who, if they like, can find out just competitive their bank isn’t – and banks have a real problem.

Traditionally they have relied on branches as the touchpoint where their staff could press the flesh of their customers, not to mention feel the width of their wallets. But now they have to be very clever with how they deal with their customers, especially online and on the phone.

In New Zealand at my bank I’m told I’m a valued customer, and that comes complete with a personal banking contact and a special customer service number. It also means I get monthly printed ‘personalised updates’ from ‘the desk of my manager’ which aren’t worth their weight in recycling. The underwhelming effect of these initiatives makes me wonder what the ‘normal’ customer experience is like. Also, bear in mind that my bank is consistently voted as having the best service and best offerings in New Zealand.

Some organisations around the world have risen to the challenge. Zopa in the UK and Washington Mutual in the States are two examples that spring to mind. However in general ‘banking’ and ‘innovation’ are usually found in the same sentences with the frequency of the words ‘chocolate’ and ‘teapot’ appearing side by side.

I’d love to be proved wrong.

Bugaboo is getting a lot of media attention about it’s stroller. If you are not familiar with it, then you might have seen it referenced in articles about how much money people spend on their children. Or what things celebrities buy for their babies. Or in a photo shoot with Gwyneth Paltrow.

That’s because it’s one of the most expensive prams on the market. The safe money says that this also means that it has seriously good profit margins for Bugaboo.

Now it’s confession time. My wife and I bought one for our child.

At first it was a hard decision, but the more we looked at the design, the easier the decision became. New Zealand has a couple of great pram manufacturers (Phil and Teds, Mountain Buggy) and I really wanted to support them. In London these prams are almost as expensive as Bugaboo.

However what won in the end came down to one thing. The innovative design. It’s important to note that I’m not using the word “innovative” lightly. Once you start using a Bugaboo pram it’s immediately clear that someone spent a hell of a lot of time doing some serious thinking about how people use prams.

And once you start talking to people who have purchased a Bugaboo pram, it’s clear that this thinking paid off.

I have rarely encountered such a rabid group of fans in such an unlikely arena. When we were looking at a Bugaboo in the store, complete strangers would appear out of the blue and start raving about how good they were.

One guy told me that the cost made his eyes water, but he did not regret it. He came from a large extended family which meant that he had personally road tested over twenty prams in actual use, and the Bugaboo won hands down.

After eighteen months of use in towns, parks, cafes and on the beach, the Bugaboo is still one of the best things we bought for our voyage into parenthood. The design not only means that it’s great to use, but also that I’d buy one again in a flash. What’s more, I’ve become one of those rabid fans.

Advertising cannot buy you that sort of loyalty. But good innovative design can.

It’s almost a riddle – what has the feel of a blog, the design of graphic art site and a slick interface that would make Apple proud? It’s called Etsy and it’s an extraordinary marketplace place to buy handmade items from around the world.

Browse by country, by category, by almost anything.

It enables individuals who handmake products to put up a very slick site and link into a global market to source unique products. My litmus test for the word ‘global’ is very simple – are there any New Zealand shops? In this case the the answer is yes.

The interface is almost game like, and with nods to Google Earth it begs you to go searching around the world for shops. Or, if you prefer, search by colour. Now here’s the interesting bit – what would the bricks and motar equivalent of an Etsy shop look like?

Google has launched a service which tracks the popularity of various search words over time. It acknowledges that it’s only a snapshot of it’s full search traffic, but it’s an interesting tool nonetheless.

If the magazines are to be believed, then innovation is the next big thing in management. If that is true you would expect that searching for innovation on Google would increase dramatically over the last couple of years. Not so. Take a look at this graph which tracks the volume of searches for the word ‘innovation’ over the last couple of years :

While the values of the axis are unknown, and bearing in mind the cliche about statistics and damn lies, it appears that the level of searching for the word innovation has not seen the massive jump that the hype would have you believe. Infact, it has taken a bit of a dip. Of course without seeing what the graph was like in 2000 it’s hard to tell.

However if you look at the number of incidences tracked by the ‘news’ part of the graph, you can clearly see the level of hype increasing.

Sanyo is about to disrupt a market with a waterless washing maching.

Although the first product will no doubt have a few bugs, watch as other manufacturers leap on the bandwagon, free from the mental shackes that dictate that H2O is a necessity to clean clothes.

When someone neatly encapsulates the cycle organisations pass through, there’s not much more you can add…

From the Fast Company Now blog :

First, he said, you concentrate on making something cheaper than anybody else. And when you can no longer make something cheaper than anybody else, you concentrate on making something better than anybody else. And when you can no longer make something better than anybody else, you concentrate on making something different than anybody else.

Designing new products that incorporate a high degree of usability is always problematic. Inevitably feature creep invades the design, and you end up with the VCR – a product that 90% of the population simply uses to record and view programmes. They never use the myriad of other features because the usability has not been factored into the product design.

The same design philosophy is seeping into DVD recorders – engineers packing a product with features that will never be used.

At the risk of sounding cliche, Apple is one company that bucks the trend by taking the complexity out of potentially complex products.

In a different sphere altogether is the grobag egg.

This is a digital thermometer designed for baby rooms which glows different colours depending on the temperature – from blue for cold through to red for hot (with two more gradients on the way).

Products with interfaces which are understood at-a-glance have a significantly better chance of success in the market.

New Zealand company Bloomsberry has linked gourmet chocolate with cheeky original design to create a product with instant appeal.

Forget all the branding of chocolate as creamy, dark or tasty – these guys cut to the chase with images of chocolate as medicine, an antidode to PMT… the list goes on.

Such is the appeal of the brand that it has attracted worldwide attention.

Purple cow anyone?

Continue reading →

New Zealand manufacturer Design Mobel has come out with the worlds first iPod compatible bed.

I bought a Design Mobel bed a year ago based on the asthetics – in a world of bland beds the design was outstanding. It was only after we got it home that I noticed the other things about the company – for example its programme to replant native trees and its environmental policy.

The new Pause bed obviously raises the profile of the company in the market. Even if they only shift a few units, people will start to recognise them internationally for their great design.

It’s a pity they used Bose speakers for the playback. An audiophile I met a while back praised Bose as the only company in the world that can sell a $99 speaker for $999.

However the bed is interesting and signals the move of the little white devices into yet another part of peoples lives. Storing music – and lots of music – on small devices is disrupting more than just the personal stereo/walkman market. First BMW integrates iPod docking (another way to amplify the shortcomings of low quality MP3 via expensive stereos), then it comes to the bed. Where next – the toilet?

After all, it would colour match.