Dyson: Solving Customer Problems in Ways They Never Imagined

From a head-on perspective, it has a sleek, stunning stainless steel design. With wings that
extend downward at a 15-degree angle from its center, it appears ready for takeoff. The latest
aeronautic design from Boeing? No. It’s the most innovative sink faucet to hit the market in
decades. Dyson—the company famous for vacuum cleaners, hand dryers, and fans unlike
anything else on the market—is about to revolutionize the traditional sink faucet.
The Airblade Tap—a faucet that washes and dries hands with completely touch-free operation—
is the latest in a line of revolutionary Dyson products that have reinvented their categories. In
fact, Dyson was founded on a few very simple principles. First, every Dyson product must
provide real consumer benefits that make life easier. Second, each product must take a totally
unique approach to accomplishing common, everyday tasks. Finally, each Dyson product must
infuse excitement into products that are so mundane, most people never think much about them.
The Man behind the Name James Dyson was born and raised in the United Kingdom. After
studying design at the Royal College of Art, he had initially planned to design and build geodesic
structures for use as commercial space. But with no money to get his venture started, he took a
job working for an acquaintance who handed him a blow torch and challenged him to create a
prototype for an amphibious landing craft. With no welding experience, he figured things out on
his own. Before long, the company was selling 200 boats a year based on his design.
That trial-and-error approach came naturally to Dyson, who applied it to create Dyson Inc.’s first
product. In 1979, he had purchased what claimed was the most powerful vacuum cleaner on the
market. He found it to be anything but. Instead, it seemed simply to move dirt around the room.
This left Dyson wondering why no one had yet invented a decent vacuum cleaner. At that point,
he remembered something he’d seen in an industrial sawmill—a cyclonic separator that removed
dust from the air. Why wouldn’t that approach work well in vacuum cleaners? “I thought no one
was bothering to use technology in vacuum cleaners,” said Dyson. Indeed, the core technology
of
vacuum motors at the time was more than 150 years old. “I saw a great opportunity to improve.”
Dyson then did something that very few people would have the patience or the vision to do. He
spent 15 years and made 5,127 vacuum prototypes—all based on a bag-less cyclonic separator—
before he had the one that went to market. In his own words, “There were 5,126 failures. But I
learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution.”
Dyson’s all-new vacuum was far more than techno-gadgetry. Dyson had developed a completely
new motor that ran at 110,000 revolutions per minute—three times faster than any other vacuum
on the market. It provided tremendous suction that other brands simply couldn’t match. The bag-
less design was very effective at removing dirt and particles from the air, and the machine was
much easier to clean out than vacuums requiring the messy process of changing bags. The
vacuum also maneuvered more easily and could reach places other vacuums could not. Dyson’s
vacuum really worked. With a finished product in hand, Dyson pitched it to all the appliance
makers. None of them wanted it. So Dyson borrowed $900,000 and began manufacturing the
vacuum himself.
He then convinced a mail-order catalog to carry the Dyson instead of Hoover or Electrolux,
“Because your catalog is boring.”
Dyson vacuums were soon picked up by other mail order catalogs, then by small appliance
chains, and then by large department stores. By the late 1990s, Dyson’s full line of vacuums
were being distributed in multiple global markets. At that point, Dyson, the company that had
quickly become known for vacuum cleaners, was already on to its next big thing.
The Dyson Method During the development of Dyson’s vacuums, a development model began to
take shape. Take everyday products, focus on their shortcomings, and improve them to the point
of reinvention.
“I like going for unglamorous products and making them a pleasure to use,” Dyson told Fortune
magazine. By taking this route, the company finds solutions to the problems it is trying to solve.
At the same time, it sometimes finds solutions for other problems. For example, the vacuum
motor Dyson developed sucked air with unprecedented strength. But the flipside of vacuum
suction is exhaust. Why couldn’t such a motor blow air at wet hands so fast that the water would
be pressed off in a squeegeelike manner, rather than the slow, evaporative approach employed by
commercial hand dryers?
With that realization, Dyson created and launched the Airblade, a hand dryer that blows air
through a .2-millimeter slot at 420 miles per hour. It dries hands in 12 seconds, rather than the
more typical 40 seconds required by other hand dryers. Italso uses cold air—a huge departure
from the standard warm-air approach of existing commercial dryers. This not only reduced
energy consumption by 75 percent—a major bonus for commercial enterprises that pay the
electric bills—but customers were much more likely to use a product that worked fast and did the
job right.
With very observable benefits, the Airblade was rapidly adopted by commercial customers. For
example, as part of a comprehensive plan to improve its environmental impact, Los Angeles
International Airport (LAX) was looking for a solution to the financial and environmental costs
of manufacturing, distributing, and servicing the paper towel dispensers in more than 100
restrooms throughout its terminals. Switching to recycled paper towels helped, but only
minimally. The energy used by conventional hand dryers made them an unattractive alternative.
But when LAX management saw a demonstration of the Dyson Airblade, it was a no-brainer.
With Airblades installed throughout its terminals, LAX was able to significantly reduce landfill
waste as well as costs. The overwhelmingly positive feedback from travelers was icing on the
cake.
Today’s Airblades have evolved, guided by Dyson’s customer-centric approach to developing
products. With the first Airblade, it was apparent that all that high-powered air is noisy. So
Dyson spent seven years and a staggering $42 million to develop the V4 motor, one of the
smallest and quietest commercial motors available. The new Airblade is quieter and almost six
pounds lighter than the original. But even more advanced is Dyson’s new Blade V, a sleeker
design that is 60 percent thinner than the Airblade, protruding only four inches from the wall.
Assessing Real Customer Needs
Although Dyson sees itself as a technology-driven company, it develops products with the end-
user in mind. But rather than using traditional market research methods, Dyson takes a different
approach. “Dyson avoids the kind of focus group techniques that are, frankly, completely
averaging,” says Adam Rostrom, group marketing director for Dyson. “Most companies start
with the consumer and say, ‘Hey Mr. or Mrs. X, what do you want from your toothbrush
tomorrow or what do you want from your shampoo tomorrow?’ The depressing reality is that
often you won’t get many inspiring answers.”
Rather, Dyson’s uses an approach it calls “interrogating products” to develop new products that
produce real solutions to customer problems. After identifying the most obvious shortcomings
for everyday products, it finds ways to improve them. It then tests prototypes with real
consumers under heavy nondisclosure agreements. In this manner, Dyson can observe consumer
reactions in the context of real people using products in their real lives.
This approach enables Dyson to develop revolutionary products like the Air Multiplier, a fan that
moves large volumes of air around a room with no blades. In fact, the Air Multiplier looks
nothing like a fan. By using technology similar to that found in turbochargers and jet engines, the
Air Multiplier draws air in, amplifies it 18 times, and spits it back out in an uninterrupted stream
that eliminates the buffeting and direct air pressure of conventional fans. Referring to the
standard methods of assessing customer needs and wants, Rostrom explains, “If you . . . asked
people what they wanted from their fan tomorrow, they wouldn’t say ‘get rid of the blades.’ Our
approach is
about product breakthroughs rather than the approach of just running a focus group and testing a
concept.
No-Nonsense Promotion
In yet another departure from conventional marketing, Dyson claims to shun one of the core
concepts of marketing. “There is only one word that’s banned in our company: brand,” Mr.
Dyson
proclaimed at Wired magazine’s Disruption By Design conference. What Dyson seems to mean
is that the company is not about creating images and associations that do not originate with the
quality and function of the product itself. “We’re only as good as our latest product.”
With its rigid focus on product quality and its innovative approaches to common problems,
Dyson’s approach to brand building centers on simply letting its products speak for themselves.
Indeed, from the mid-1990s when it started promoting its bag-less vacuums, Dyson invested
heavily in television advertising. But unlike most creative approaches, Dyson’s ads are simple
and straightforward, explaining to viewers immediately what the product is, what it does, and
why they need one.
“It’s a really rational subject matter that we work on, so we don’t need to use white horses on
beaches or anything like that,” Rostrom says, referring to Dyson’s no-nonsense approach to
advertising. “We need only to explain the products. One thing we’re careful to avoid is resorting
to industry-standard ways of communicating—fluffy dogs and sleeping babies and so on. We
don’t want to blend in that way.”
Today, Dyson complements traditional advertising with digital efforts. Like its TV advertising,
such methods are simple, straightforward, and right to the point. For example, e-mail
communications are used sparingly, targeted to existing customers, and timed for maximum
impact. And beyond the media it buys, Dyson considers public relations as the promotional
medium that carries most of the weight. From product reviews in the mainstream media to online
reviews and tweets about its products, word of its Dyson’s products gets around fast.
The Airblade Tap sink faucet, Dyson’s most recent new product, is a microcosm of Dyson’s
marketing strategy. It took 125 engineers three years and 3,300 prototypes to develop the final
product. The Airblade Tap provides clearly communicated solutions to everyday problems—
solutions that make life easier. It solves those problems in ways that no other product has ever
attempted, claiming to “reinvent the way we wash our hands.” And it injects style into an
otherwise boring product.
Dyson sums it up this way: “Washing and drying your hands tends not to be a very pleasant
experience. Water splashes, paper is wasted, and germs are passed along. The Tap is a totally
different experience. You have your own sink, your own dryer.” And at $1,500, it illustrates
another element of the Dyson marketing mix—a high price point that communicates quality and
benefits that are worth it. If the Airblade Tap is a hit, it will serve to forward Dyson’s goal of
doubling its annual revenues of $1.5 billion “quite quickly.” The company is not only continuing
to demonstrate that it can come up with winning products again and again, it is expanding
throughout the world at a rapid pace. Dyson products are sold in over 50 global markets, selling
well in emerging economies as well as developed first-world nations. Dyson does well in both
economic good times and recessionary periods. Dyson also sees another big move in its future—
a chain of company stores (as many as 20,000 stores in the United States alone) carved in the
image of Apple’s beloved hangouts. From a single vacuum cleaner to what Dyson is today in
less than
20 years—that’s quite an evolution.
Questions for Discussion
1. Write a market-oriented mission statement for Dyson.
2. What are Dyson’s goals and objectives?
3. Does Dyson have a business portfolio? Explain.
4. Discuss Dyson’s marketing mix techniques and how they fit within the context of its business
and marketing strategy.
5. Is Dyson a customer-centered company? Explain.