I went to a seminar at Imperial Business School yesterday “Innocent: Building a Business through Creativity and Design“with Dan Germain who is the head of creative at Innocent. Before the event I bought the new book documenting the first 10 years of innocent so I had a lot of context for the seminar. A lot of the content was taken directly from the book but it was still a worthwhile seminar.

It was an interesting talk and it was good to see a business that places so much emphasis on creativity. The main points I found interesting were:

In-house creative team

Innocent have quite a large in-house creative team relative to their size. This means that every aspect of the brand, design and messaging go through the one department. This means that there is a lot of consistency with anything that leaves the business.

Creative team veto

Dan and his team have a veto on anything that leaves the business. That means that if they are not happy then they have the power to stop anything even if all the other departments do not agree.

Focus on the product not the brand

The product is the most important thing, branding and design do not matter if your product is not good enough. This resonates with pretty much all successful start ups. You need to obsess over the quality of your product, always listening and making it better.

Solve a need

Giving people what they want or solving a need will make it much easier to sell your product. Sounds obvious but I know a lot of people (myself included) who have built products do not have a market that can sustain growth.

Honest and listening to your customer

Use any opportunity to listen to your customers. When Innocent started they had a phone line for people to ring up and chat about the product. They used to write on their bottles, “if you are bored call us for a chat”. They also invited people to drop into fruit towers if they were in the area. The routes to communicate have increased over the last few years and Innocent take advantage of their blog, Facebook, Twitter and email newsletters, to constantly keep in contact with their customers.

As a result of all of the communication when someone attacks the brand (such as when Innocent sold a stake in the company to Coke), the community around the brand will fight Innocent’s corner and often win customers back to Innocent.

Grandma test

This is another obvious one but something that is often overlooked. If you cannot explain your business or product idea to your grandma in a sentence or two then  you need to re-think. In my opinion this is only for business to consumer businesses, there are a lot of business to business solutions that are very complicated to explain but ultimately very successful.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 7:42 pm and is filed under General.
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