A few years ago, a team of executives at a New Zealand
dairy company, sat in a room with a group of innovation consultants and talked,
among other things, about the future of ice cream.
The team needed to decide which new product innovation
would give them the best bang for their R&D buck.
At the time, there was a big move towards healthier,
lower fat ice creams. New ice cream brands were popping up every week promising
99% fat-free and anything else they could claim to take the guilt factor out of
buying ice cream. It was a tempting bandwagon to jump on.
But this company did the exact opposite.
They created the fattiest, most sinful ice cream known
to mankind. It was 99% buttermilk - almost pure fat. A heart attack in a tub.
It came in a box shaped like a coffin, and consumers had to sign a health
waiver before purchasing it. The brand was called 'Saturday Ice Cream' because
you should only eat it on a Saturday, and it sold in supermarkets in the Middle
East and Asia for double the price of a standard tub.
And boy did it sell.
By doing the exact opposite of its competitors, the
little dairy company that could, found an opportunity no one knew existed and
liberated tub-loads of cash from consumers.
Look at any market and you'll see the same phenomenon.
Mobile phones? Take the iPhone's wizzy gadgetry at one
end, and the Bic Phone at the other - a cheap, disposable phone that makes
calls and not much else.
The fastest growing electronics retailer in Australia,
JB Hi-Fi, merchandises its stores like a suburban garage sale. While its
competitors try to 'out-slick' each other, JB Hi-Fi crams its stores like a
hoarder and marks the prices in permanent pen on cheap bits of cardboard.
In the US car market, you've got gas guzzling SUV's
selling at one end and small and eco-friendly at the other.
With books, Dave Eggers' ornate and expensive
hardcovers are flying off the shelves, and so are $9 e-books on Kindle.
So next time you sit down to talk about the future of
ice cream or the future of mobile or the future of banking, remember there is
probably a powerful counter trend waiting to be exploited.