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About 10 years ago we got approached by one of the
largest oral healthcare companies in America.
A company you've probably heard of called Oral-B.
And they said, "Look,
we'd like a new kid's toothbrush because ours is starting to
get commoditized. It looks like a lot of kid's toothbrushes
out there and you can't have that. We want to be special."
So we say, "OK. We'll do this. We want to go
out in the field and do some field research."
And they're kind of not sure about that,
like it's not rocket science,
we're talking about kids brushing their teeth, how hard can that be?
They would really like us to stop fooling around and start designing.
But we want to go through this process,
this observation process because we think
almost always you can spot opportunities.
And so we go out and we're on like the first day
of observations and we make a small discovery.
The small discovery we make is that every kid's toothbrush in
the history of the world has had the same implicit assumption.
It's a logical assumption it just isn't exactly right which
is the assumption always was parents have big hands.
Kids have small hands.
And so when you want to make the kid's version,
make it like the parent's brush only smaller and skinnier.
Perfectly logical - until you go out in the field,
until you actually watch humans,
little tiny humans, brushing their teeth.
And what you notice right away,
you get a five-year-old boy brushing his teeth,
he's not holding his toothbrush in his
fingertips the way mom and dad do; he's *** it.
He's holding it like this because he doesn't have the dexterity.
He doesn't have the fine motor controls that his parents
have and so he's got to hold it like this.
In fact, the other thing he does is he holds the brush
too far up very frequently and so he's punching himself
in the face as he's trying to brush his teeth.
And we solve that problem too but the main thing was,
came back from the field and said,
"Uh-oh! Kids don't need little skinny toothbrushes. Kids need big
fat toothbrushes. Let's make a big fat squishy toothbrushes."
And you may have noticed,
now every toothbrush company in the world makes these.
But our client reports that after we made that
little tiny discovery out in the field,
sitting in a bathroom watching a five-year-old boy brush his teeth,
they had the best selling kid's toothbrush
in the world for 18 months.
So when you think about power, when you think about credibility,
if you can go out in the field and do that observation
and come up with that finding and your company,
your organization was the best in its field for 18 months afterwards,
would that be worth it? I think that would be worth it.
And so that's this message about think like a traveler,
be an anthropologist. Use your powers of observation.
Have that part of your brain turned up as high as you can all along.