Introduction

Cannect is a strategic direction for Brabantia, a company which manufactures items for home like trash bins, laundry bags, food storage and other products for indoor purposes. Brabantia is popular for the trash bins they manufacture but the other products developed by Brabantia do not enjoy the same popularity. The direction developed focuses on the other products also to help Brabantia exploit full potential of their product portfolio. A product range connected to each other and automated to help consumers have a better life by letting them concentrate on things that matter the most in life is proposed as a solution.

Approach

Research

Brabantia is a more than 100 years old company which has a wide product portfolio of 1500 household products worldwide. The trust and the loyalty of consumers obtained during the years, through quality manufacturing, has given the Company a good brand image. Despite having a wide household product portfolio the popularity for waste management products has grown exponentially making the Company a leader in that sector. All these years Brabantia has called itself a“Solid Company” until 2014 when it revamped its design proposition to “Design for living” because wants to become an inspiring interior design brand.

“Designed for living is an amazing opportunity to really make a difference. Enriching the quality of life and living for all our consumers, making sure that no matter what they’re doing around the home, they’ll love doing it even more with our smart designed products!”

DEPEST

The DEPEST is a two-step process for identifying relevant trends that generate opportunities and threats. A trend is a persisting change in our surroundings, which affect/modify consumer’s intentions and behaviors.

SWOT

The SWOT is a framework used to evaluate a Company’s competitive position by identifying its Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. SWOT combined with DEPEST gives the opportunities and threats in the SWOT analysis.

VRIO

VRIO analysis helps to identify core strengths of a company by comparing strengths of a company on a criteria. In VRIO, V stands for Valuable, R stands for Rareness, I stands for Inimitable and O stands for Organization.

Search field mapping

Search field mapping is identification of possible opportunities for Brabantia to enter into. The intersection of opportunities from SWOT and strengths of a company can give possible search fields.

Search field extraction

The intersection of strengths and opportunities shows a possible direction for Brabantia to explore. Such ideas were created and clustered to come up with 4 main directions.

ANSOFF matrix

The Ansoff matrix is a tool used for understanding the risk of different strategic options.

Concept development and evaluation

The solution is a new strategy that involves the use of Brabantia’s wide portfolio to allow users spend as less time as possible on household chores so that they have enough time to dedicate on activities like socialization and hobbies.

To evaluate the 3 concepts, Harris profile method and DATUM method were used. The 2 methods showed the most suitable solution to go ahead with. A Program of Criteria was devised to objectify various parameters to be compared.

Harris Profile is a visual tool which helps compare multiple concepts and get an idea of which concept(s) is more favorable based on the POC and Harris Key.

The datum method is used to evaluate between concepts. In this method, one concept is considered as a datum and other concepts are compared with the datum on different criteria.

The final concept selected was development of new smart products for kitchen. The smart products are connected to the internet as well as are fitted with suitable sensors to help the user. Accordingly, the products, through IoT, will be able to measure, suggest and recommend the user about the state of ingredient in it. The focus is to make the life of user efficient by allowing him to reduce the time spent on relatively unnecessary things and thoughts.