I’m not the primary shopper in our household but I love wandering the grocery store aisles when I get the chance. Even if I take my marketer hat off, I am mesmerized by the colors, images, and words of the hundreds of products on the shelves (okay, I don’t get out much). What never catches my eye, however, are the refrigerated cases that hold the milk, yogurt, chicken, and ice cream I’m grabbing.
That changed recently when I spent time visiting with marketers at Ingersoll-Rand, makers of Hussmann refrigerated cases. In this day and age, I couldn’t imagine there was a lot of innovation in the design of refrigerated cases. Their job is pretty simple – keep stuff cold while maximizing shelf space and minimizing energy use – and people have been building them for decades. I mean really, what’s left to do with commercial refrigerators?!? Apparently a ton.
As I talk to marketers across industries and categories, most would do cartwheels to have the right insights that result in a handful of commercially-viable innovations. Yet filling the top of the innovation funnel and then knowing how to filter those ideas is proving far more difficult.
Working with Strategyn and using one of the Council’s favorite frameworks, jobs and outcomes, Hussman identified fistfuls of under-served customer opportunities for their products. In other words, among the dozens and dozens of potential innovation plays, Hussman found more than enough actionable opportunities where the customer has low satisfaction for a highly important job.
Members, if you’d like to learn more about Ingersoll-Rand’s approach, consider joining Manlio Valdes, Vice President of Global Product Management for the Industrial Technologies Division at Ingersoll-Rand at our next Innovation Summit on July 22. The session is hosted by W.L. Gore and includes a tour of their world-class Innovation Center.
Related posts:
- Where Will the Next Wave of Innovation Come From?
- Reorient Innovation to the “New Normal” Customer
- 10 Nuggets from The Economist’s Special Report on Innovation in Emerging Markets
- Something’s Wrong When Innovation Doesn’t Equate to Growth
- Is Your Innovation Approach Cutting Against the Economic Grain?
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