TOTAL EXPERIENCE explores designing for experience: its theory, its practice, and how designing for experiences affects us socially and in our personal lives.
CO-AUTHORS
BOB JACOBSON is fascinated by the experience of experience. A planner and technologist, Bob has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning & Design from UCLA. He's been a policy researcher, technology CEO, science writer, and consultant. As a Fulbright Scholar, he studied cellular telephony's impacts on transborder communities in the Nordic Arctic Circle. Bob edited Information Design (MIT Press 2000) and is now writing a book on the theory and practice of creating edifying, transformative experiences.
PAULA THORNTON says, "Understanding human behavior (economics), optimizing interactions (design) and facilitating conversations (markets), are the means to achieve strategic differentiation. This is the focus of our discipline. It is not a 'nice to have'‚ and is not, like documentation once was, an afterthought. It is the means by which to start a strategic discussion and the means by which to drive a tactical initiative. All design should be evidence-based."
Brondell takes on a formidable design-and-marketing challenge - getting Americans to change their product interactions in the bathroom.
You walk into your bathroom and sit down on your Swash contoured and comfortably heated toilet seat. When finished, you simply press a button for a posterior or feminine wash and you are met with a warm, aerated water spray. You can dry yourself with the warm air dryer or pat-dry with a small amount of toilet paper. You leave your bathroom shower-fresh as the gentle-closing lid slowly lowers behind you. Swash-like products are providing over 20 million men, women, and children around the world a healthier, more hygienic lifestyle. The bidet is recognized for its superior cleansing qualities accomplished by using water rather than irritating, ineffective dry toilet paper.
No doubt it's comfortable, perhaps pleasurable, more hygienic and whatever other benefits you can imagine. And hey, the Japanese all use it (or a similar product). But something is badly missing in order to get this marketplace to use it. As their CEO says ''Once someone experiences one of our warm toilet seats and the warm-water bidet, there's no going back to the cold porcelain toilet." (article here)
There's nothing in their product or their website that begins to address the challenge of creating a new use model for a private, semi-shameful habitual activity that we can't even talk about. A PR foray gets them exposure today, but what will we see from them in 2 months or 6 months?
If this was every other blog that touches on marketing or advertising, you'd see my list of recommendations for Blondell. But please, isn't that a bit silly? I can see the challenges they have, but without understanding their company, and most importantly, the perceptions of their target customers (not my personal opinions) around the barriers to adoption, it's ridiculous to offer advice. Except to learn about the customers and find ways to reframe the offering to induce a change of behavior. Abstract as anything, I guess.
Any readers have any ideas, in the spirit of brainstorming, not expertise?
Okay, I'll throw one or two out to see if we might get some brainstorming started.
Create opportunities to try the "new" way of using the toilet. Isn't that standard practice for consumer products? "Heavy sampling" was the phrase I saw used in a Stuart Elliott email column yesterday about a new gravy that goes on top of pet food (yeah, I know). Give it away, give people a chance to try it so they can understand the experience.
I'd suggest that the Swash people set up shop (if you will) at a summer concert tour - if there was a Lollapalooza-like thing that would be perfect. Don't heavily promote it, allow people to use the toilets as they traditionally do, but provide the new lids with some minimal instruction or motivational posters. Catch people in a "fun" situation when they might be willing to try something different - maybe there's some drinking going on and inhibitions are down. Maybe the conviviality will allow people to talk about it - you want someone to say "Hey, I didn't use toilet paper to wipe!" to another. Will the women's bathroom provide more opportunity for dialog?
Set up free public toilets in Times Square or another tourist center - get people when they are in need of a bathroom and in an adventurous point and give them the opportunity to do something new. Go easy on the branding, give them some...privacy...if you will in making their choice to do something new.
The device of course won't survive the rigors of public use, but that's not the point. Put the labor in to keep 'em working and clean and replaced, and get people trying it and find a way to get them talking about it.
Permalink to CommentJust brainstorming, not informed idea but if you could prove a significant hygeine and wellness benefit, maybe it could be sold to institutions to roll-out across the country. Grade schools would be an ideal way to train your future market.
Building from that, what about targeting nurses and doctors to persuade them to adopt this new improved hygeine product. Nursing homes, home care proffesionals for handicapped and the elderly.
Would you make any changes to the product to make it look "hygienic"? I suspect that the medical-supply-house aesthetic isn't exactly desirable.
I had thought about schools as well - but not with the same emphasis you suggest. That's interesting - create a cultural story of protection that necessitates this.
I hadn't even thought of that - I was thinking about the comfort or something - but jeez - you could do some pretty nasty fear-sell stuff. A few years ago there was some ad for hand-sanitation that had a shot of the bathroom that showed in one end the toilet and the toothbrush in the other. It gave you the "ick" reaction - this can't be good for us!
I wonder for those that don't wash their hands - if this is something that makes it less necessary. "Hands free" - it's healthier for you since you don't touch anything germy, and hey, it's healthier for the rest of us because other people don't wash their hands anyway...
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