Creativity: utility+novelty=book+bottle

When I first read the topic of this post I thought it would have been very difficult to come up with creative solutions to combine two inanimate objects, but after some time of brainstorming, ideas started to come up on their own. Here is the outcome:

First word: BOOK

 Pages, cover, study, homework, school, desk, pen, words, characters, plot, author, pictures, scrapbook,  novel, literature, history, relax, time, boring, exciting, library, title, hobby, collection, paper, shelf, bookcase, e-book, newspaper, magazine, journal, print, ink, writing, computer, thick, encyclopedia, detective story, children, Feltrinelli, Mondadori, Barnes & Noble…

The word “book” makes me immediately think about school. Reading has never been my favorite hobby unfortunately, then many of the books I read when I was a child or a teenager had been suggested by my teachers for specific school subjects. Maybe that’s the reason of my negative bias against books. Every time that I’ve to start a new one, I look at the number of pages to calculate how much time I need to finish it.

Although I’ve always preferred to hang out with friends than to lay on the bed and read a book, I’m fascinated by libraries. The amount of different books that you can find there, the smell that you perceive when you go inside, the faces of people concentrated on the reading activity…has an indescribable effect on me.

The same happens when you enter a bookstore: you feel it! You feel the wooden shelves, the bright colors of hundred different book covers, the soft music in the background, the signs indicating the sections (children, novels, best-sellers…), it can be defined a customer experience and personally I don’t think that the modern e-book would replace it so fast.

Second word: BOTTLE

 Water, full, empty, wine, shape, caps, cork, glass, plastic, container, recycling, beverage, supermarket, shelves, lunch, sport, thirsty, hot, ice, mountain, perfume, sugar, cellar, alcohol, vending machine, bottle neck, jar, liquid, sodium, pieces of glass, drinking, eating, family, friend, fun, coca cola…

A bottle is something that we bring with us without even realize it: when we have breakfast, there is the bottle of milk or juice on the table, when we go to university, we take a bottle of water with us, at lunch we need a bottle of coke and when we work out, a bottle of water is necessary.

Each product has a different shape: water, wine, milk and some of them are the symbol of specific brands (Coca Cola, Dasani, Absolut Vodka…).

A bottle can serve several functions: it can be used to satisfy a basic need (I’m thirsty and I drink something), but can also be a design object (a particular uncommon shape can be used as fancy ornament).

Combination Ideas of the Two Objects:

1. A book about bottles
2. A bottle with a book inside, like a kaleidoscope, you can read it from the hole
3. A lamp with a book as base and a bottle as support for the light bulb
4. Light bulb with the shape of a bottle and a book as lampshade
5. Book used as saucer to gather the water that ooze with when the bottle is ice-cold
6. Pages of a book used to wrap a bottle (intsead of normal wrapping paper for gifts) or wrapping paper decorated with bottles for a book to be given as a gift
7. Box shaped as book with a bottle inside (usually wine bottles of value have fancy boxes that reflect the quality of what they contain)
8. Rigid cover of a book used to hid the flask of alcoholics
9. Book with the shape of a bottle (i.e. for a wine guide)
10. Bottle print on the cover of the book
11. Bookcase made of books and bottles: many books glued together form the shelf, glass bottles glued together form the support (I watched a tv show in the US where a man made a coffee table gluing together some of books and a wooden base, then I guess it's possible to build a bookcase in the same way, but in that case I don’t want to be the mover!)
12. Weight for weight-lifting: it can be made gluing together 2 books at the ends of a bottle
13. Books vending machine… instead of bottles!
14. Bottle used as book end on a shelf
15. Bottle caps used as bookmarks
16. Bottle used as lower vase with book at the base
17. Percentage of the water price used to buy books to people in developing countries
18. Book made of plastic bottles
19. Book-bottle necklace
20. Bug Book and Bottle (looking for pictures to insert in this post I discovered that a thing called “Bug Book & Bottle” exists: http://www.overstock.com/Books-Movies-Music-Games/Bug-Book-and-Bottle/2735312/product.html?cid=123620&fp=F&mr:trackingCode=24F98E2D-52C1-DF11-98FF-0019B9C043EB&mr:referralID=NA)

Reading this post again it seems that I’m crazy and that most of these products are simply unuseful, but some of them could be viable.

-          A glass bottle used as flower vase can be a fashionable ornament if designed with a particular shape or materials.

-          A lamp with the book as base and a bottle as light bulb support can function as ornament too

-          A book-bottle necklace exists already: http://blujay.com/?page=ad&adid=3358513&cat=20060000

-         A percentage of the price of water bottles used to buy books for the developing countries isn’t exactly a product but maybe can be a good idea too..

If creativity means to combine utility and novelty, well, some of these products could be viable, appropriate and original innovations.

Chocolate: From Mass Production to Custom-Made Bars

There is something that everybody likes, a temptation that nobody can resist to, a pleasure that involves all senses: Chocolate! 

It probably seems weird to choose this topic for my report; the reason is not only that  I am a chocolate Enthusiast (with capital E of course!), but also because chocolate offers different kinds of experiences, it evokes several feelings and reveals insights.

I don’t think people realize how much chocolate can effect emotions. I love chocolate because every time I eat my favourite piece of chocolate it’s like returning back to my childhood, it’s connected with carelessness and happiness.

The taste of chocolate is amazing, and so are things you can do with it. The purpose of this paper is to discover why people love it, what makes them so satisfied when eating and why we can speak about customer experience in this field. Chocobars, chocosweets, chocofestivals and chocoevents are not only products or services, but have been cleverly transformed into more involving goods.

More precisely I want to structure this report in a singular way trying to compare how customer behaviors and their responses change in different contests, from the big industry to the single person who likes to cook for him/herself.

The purpose is to observe the various attitudes when:

• a big company produces bars or candies and consumers purchase at the grocery store (all produce for all); 
• a medium company enters the market with a chain of stores (many people working for many customers);
• candy makers, who transform the simple ingredients into delicious pastries and sell them in small pastry-stores, where the customer can perceive the taste of an hand-made product (small group of workers produces for a restricted elite of consumers);
•  the individual as protagonist of an experiential environment (one to one);

In the first category I’d like to analyze companies like Hershey, Nestlé, Lindt. These are multinationals that produce a large amount of products, all with the same characteristics: ingredients, shape, taste and package. When a consumer decides to buy Hershey’s milk chocolate KitKat or Lindt’s Goldbunny he/she is already aware of what he is going to taste.

Of course quality and innovation are the number one priorities and the commitment to consumers.

Chocolate taste of  Lindt’s products for example, is beyond description, it’s my favorite, but what about the customer experience? Consumers perceive the same feeling every time they eat it and maybe the act of purchasing is mechanical, it has become habit.

Big corporations exploit ExPros to create ads that include communications, visual and verbal identity and specific features to differentiate their products from competitors’ ones. 

Going through the second group we find companies like Venchi, Valrhona, Cioccolati Italiani who detected an innovative format to attract clients, adding creativity to the common concept of palate satisfaction. Venchi for example opened “Cioccogelaterias” different from usual ice-cream shops: the idea was to make the company less “Company” and more within the reach of the public and the consumer. 

Candy makers are those people whose success is determined by customer loyalty: they cannot trust on “magic ingredients” and scale economies of a big company, therefore they have to be able to maximize the pleasure derived by enjoying a chocolate cake, while relaxing in a suggestive environment. It’s interesting to pinpoint how they segment consumers to fulfill them in the best way.

The last category is focused on the individual attitude when attending to events which involve the entire sensory system: the single person becomes the protagonist and the maker of his own experience. Some example can be the “Eurochocolate” in Perugia (famous for its Baci Perugina), where people can taste chocolate from all over the world, make sculptures and buy samples, or the School of Chocolate, where housewives can learn how to make chocolates.

The SEMS model is useful to identify the levels of consumer’s involvement in these situations.

Consumers’ involvement is also the matter in hand in the article “Jobless Grads Bet on Custom-Made Chocolate”, which tells the story of three guys, who decided to found “Chocomize”.

Chocomize is an online shop that allows chocolate lovers to customize their candy bars with several ingredients ranging from dried raspberries to bacon.

The idea came from a chocolate bar left in the back seat of the car, which melted with gummy bears and brought the company to produce around 4,000 bars a week.

What makes Chocomize different from competitors is their customized product, that can't go into" supermarkets or stores where consumers might pick up a bar while they're waiting in the checkout line”.

That’s exactly what I want to analyze in my paper: how do big and small companies reach the customers? Which means do they use? Which results do they obtain in terms of customer experience, involvement and attitude?

Click here to read the article: “Jobless Grads Bet on Custom-Made Chocolate” by Zachary Tracer