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Marketers are periodically accused of allowing their zest for 'form' overtake their concern for 'function'. A justified accusation? "Uff, of course!" If that's how you respond, you're probably an Indian consumer of FMCG products. If you're scratching your head, you're probably an Indian marketer of, well, whatever you sell. Interesting things happen when you don't actually respond as a conventional representative of the category you're placed in. If you're a 'marketer', for instance, but prefer to play the 'consumer' now and then. At an elementary level, that's what constitutes a 'creative' response. So if you've been looking at the bars of soap walling up the shelves at your local supermarket, and thinking about your 'needs' from a consumption perspective, you might want to ask some good functional questions that could make for 'customer insights' for marketers to use.
These are good questions, and spring from thoughts on bathing as a functional activity, and on the primary need for 'freshness'. Put them together with the cardinal rule of product design---form follows function----and you could have an innovation brewing. Isn't that how marketers should be thinking? Function, function, function---and then form? If the consumer were 'King' (or 'Queen' in this case), the unequivocal answer would be 'yes'. But marketers in some parts of the world are known to have turned revolutionary. They don't walk around with guillotines----they must still convince the consumer into a relationship---but they think of the brand-consumer interchange as more of a one-on-one thing. No dictating, and no getting dictated to. That complicates everything just a little. As Jean-Marie Dru, the chief of TBWA and eloquent protestor against the 'tyranny of either-or', once put it, you go out of business if you don't give the customer what she wants... but hey, you also go out of business if all you give the customer is what she wants. The simple point being made is the criticality of differentiation. Sure, a technical breakthrough on function could set the brand apart from competitors. But for how long? Technological differentiation follows an obsolescence curve that long-visioned brands hope to transcend and eventually escape. For some seriously customer-engaging differentiation, you need something else. It needn't, of course, be a 'thing' in any conventional sense; it could be a thought. Or even an artistic idea. And that could take some serious brainstorming on the product's 'form'---as seen to include everything about the brand, including its so-called 'character' and the way it vibes with its customer. This could take you far from all traditional notions of functionality, and perhaps even into the rarefied realm of fantasy. Is that what the consumer wants? Ask her. Do 'market research'. Try qualitative 'focus group' discussions. What answer do you get? Bars are bars, and a bath a bath. Functionally so. Those needs must be met. But are those all the needs that can imaginably be met?
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