Decoding a holistic laundry product experience to envision the future product innovation

Abstract

The graduation project is performed in collaboration with Henkel Laundry & Home Care business unit. This consumer goods business has flourished into a globally active unit with a broad product portfolio.To succeed in the highly competitive consumer goods environment, it is essential to shifting from price and product superiority to privileged insights and customer experience. It is the overall consumer behavioural, experiential, and emotional responses formulate the outcome of a commodity. But the current product development is mainly performance-driven. A holistic and well-defined product experience can help Henkel innovation teams to broaden their development goals to think beyond feasibility, functionality, and usability.The consumer research found that people experience laundry activity as a unified whole, not just the detergent itself. The detergent product experience is embedded in the laundry experience, and their interrelationship sometimes conflicts but remain mutually exclusive. In a broader sense, the laundry activity is highly integrated into daily life. Thus, the meanings people assigned to a laundry product are co-shaping by the other actors within the laundry systems. They are washing machine manufacture, textile and fabric manufacture, laundry services providers. Their interrelationships with the consumer in meaning creating are depicted in the figure above.From the organization side, Henkel current innovation follows the traditional stage-gate process in which marketing will identify the consumer insights and transfer to R&D as a development brief. The key challenge here is the misalignment between these functions in the business case building stage, which leads to the product offering that cannot serve the initial product promise.The design proposal was built on the innovation process, enhance the marketing and R&D integration by resourceful sense-making-ex- pose, co-opt, and repurposing. The original brand-fit gate was replaced by brand-technology gate, brand-meaning gate, and resource gate to adapt to more radical innovation. It also suggests the organization to open its problem finding space with external interpreters.