In model year 1999, Honda Motors introduced the Insight, the first electric and gas powered vehicle in the US Market. The Insight is based on the very popular Honda Civic platform. Over the years, it has won a number of prestigous awards including 3 International Engine of the Year awards, 2 Best Fuel Economy awards, and, in 2006, the redesigned Civic line won the very influential Motor Trend Car of the Year award. The Honda Insight has always has been the most efficient gasoline-powered vehicle available in the US.
The Insight has the features, look and feel of one of the most popular cars in America; it impresses automotive experts and it excels at fuel efficiency – the entire purpose of its differentiation. Yet, it got rammed in the tailpipe by the Toyota Prius since the Prius' introduction to the market in 2000.
The Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight sell for about the same price. They use a different hybrid technology. (Honda’s is arguably better. It certainly gets better efficiency ratings.) They’re both family vehicles. They both have very long warranties to reassure the cautious buyer.
So what accounts for the fact that Toyota sells 5 Prius’ for every Insight sold? Apparently, it’s that the Honda Insight looks like a Honda Civic while the Toyota Prius looks like nothing else on the road. When you see a Prius, you know it’s a Prius.
Toyota realized – or lucked into the fact – that the hybrid users/buyers want the world to know that they care about the future of our planet (maybe more than the rest of us) and hope you will consider the joining them in being responsible.
For example, remember Brad Pitt driving up to the Oscar’s in his Prius? He eagerly talked about the car with the reporters. Sure, Brad cares about saving the world. Does that mean he curtails his airline travel? Only purchases food made locally? Makes sure all the materials used on his movie sets are recycled? I doubt that. But the Prius gives him the badge of doing good, enables him to encourage others to do good, and actually does some good (so he won’t be mocked later).
To digress slightly, I remember yeeeaaarrrs ago talking to a friend who worked in the creation of paper products. He told me that recycling equipment was so good that it could produce premium quality recycled white paper that was essentially indistinguishable from the non-recycled white paper. But it turned out, no one would buy the perfect recycled white because it was too white and they wouldn’t get credit for doing the right thing. So, to fix their marketing/product problem, someone would dump a box of dirt into the paper goo near the end of the production process so that the final paper product had subtle but obvious dirt specs within it. Now the paper looked good, and it also looked recycled.
This ego/bragging rights quality of the hybrid buyer seems to have been the critical factor in the Prius’ success and the Insight’s failure. While the Honda business people and engineers made good decisions when creating the Insight (it's arguably the better car - or based on quality and price should at least have a significant market share), it was the Toyota business people and engineers who had the insight (or the luck) to understand their users/buyers well enough to make "the right" strategic and design decisions such as making the car distinct and recognizable, fuel efficient enough, and price effective.
I write this tome as means of explaining why personas are not just for fine-tuning a design, but may be critical to the high-level decision making and long term vision for a product.
You are so right! People want their brownie points now--if they are going to do good, they want everyone to know about it. An MIT study confirmed this (see 8/31 WSJ article called Subsidize Water Heaters, Not Hybrids). And frankly, I'm okay with this on all levels including marketers who gain competitive advantage by clearly accentuating their goodness or greenness in the case of the Prius. It's all good.
Posted by: Drew Neisser | September 11, 2007 at 11:45 AM