The Art of Innovation

Black, blue, brown, green, orange, red, violet and yellow -- what do these colors have in common? Give up? They are the eight original shades of crayons offered under the Crayola brand by what was then known as Binney & Smith. Today, the company officially dons the Crayola name and is a subsidiary of Hallmark.

 

Innovative from the start, it's hard to know where to start talking about innovation when it comes to Crayola. Crayons now come in 120 colors, and as every kid or former kid knows, the names alone are imaginative; classics such as "burnt sienna" and "maize" to the modern day "mango tango" and "wild blue yonder." The company's product portfolio goes way beyond just crayons to include a range of markers, pencils, paint, art tools, papers, books and more. Product attributes have also been innovated over the years to include, washable, erasable, twistable, moldable, magical and even explosive - "Color Explosion" that is.

 

DEFINING INNOVATION
So what's Crayola's secret? "It's important that innovation be a corporate initiative on which everyone's aligned including senior management. You have to start from a solid understanding of your brand and your consumer and find the premise that works for you and your company. It's different in different companies - Crayola is based in creativity and our brand," says Sharon DiFelice, innovation and consumer insights leader, Crayola. In fact, her relatively new role was born out of a corporate initiative that restructured Crayola's innovation process.

 

Jeff Rogers, director of portfolio marketing for Crayola, elaborates, "We have always been very comfortable with creativity; we also knew we had an incredible brand and began to recognize that we could leverage it in more ways."

 

This realization, he states, was what "unleashed the full potential of the brand." The great "marriage" between innovation and creativity hearkened back to the company founders who were all about using color to create innovative products for children and teachers. Rogers says, "What we needed to think about in terms of innovation was not only applying it to product, but to virtually everything we do."

 

During the last four years, the major effort to drive innovation at Crayola was focused around product. Now it touches everything in every area of the company. Its approach to developing innovative products is to "flip" ideas around and look at them from a very different perspective. Rogers explains, "Often when you're looking at a problem you want to go head-on to solve it - this is a very traditional approach. However, in product creation we would stop and look at it backwards or consider it from someone else's view. The result is often a much better perspective, or a different idea which ultimately leads to more success."

 

By sharing tools and processes such as this with other functions, innovation is being driven throughout the entire organization. Rogers calls it "a very simple process," but he points out that if you are not trained to think this way, it's not an everyday part of your process approach.

 

ORGANIZED FOR INNOVATION
Historically, Crayola was organized like a traditional consumer products organization. There was a product manager who was responsible for crayons, for example. Every year Crayola would ask the product manager, "what's new in the world of crayons?" Obviously, this method could present quite challenge, especially considering the company was manufacturing crayons for 104 years. It was hard to inspire innovative thinking by simply asking a straightforward question.

 

Now, people are members of teams focused on developing products that meet a particular consumer need. For example, one team might be responsible for developing products that help ensure the success of the child in school and at home. If one of the products is the crayon, the team is not just thinking about a new color or format, they now consider what about a crayon would help them reach their objective of ensuring the success of a child at home and in school.

 

"Suddenly your universe goes from crayons to "there are so many possibilities, where do I start?' And all we did was broaden the perspective," notes Rogers.

 

This change now drives consumer insights and everything the company does around quantifiable consumer benefits. The marketing group was first to realign; five teams were identified and populated with marketers to focus on specific consumer needs, like removing the barriers to creative expression such as mess, and building a child's artistic confidence, All of the functional disciplines followed within those teams. Rogers calls this "one of the biggest structural changes we went through when we started our innovation work."

 

Essentially, DiFelice's position was created to facilitate this mission, and her role combines the innovation process role with that of consumer insights. As innovation touches everything the company does, "everything" is also saturated with consumer benefits and insights. She explains, "While I'm responsible for ensuring that innovation is part of the culture throughout the organization, in my group we also have the market research function and consumer insights. This allows our innovation to not only look forward in terms of where we want to be, but also look at our consumer and their needs and where they're headed."

 

DiFelice's role is situated within the marketing group that Rogers heads, and she says this enables better collaboration: "The advantage of being part of the marketing group is that it puts so much consumer information in one spot. Rather than having to go to three different places to answer three different questions about, for example, what the consumer is saying about a product or how we are doing in market, we can be the strategic partner who pulls all the data together and acts as a resource," she says. "As part of the marketing group, we work with all different functions and this addresses what I believe is the hardest thing to understand about innovation - it isn't just about product development; it's in all parts of the organization."

 

The certainty that people are thinking innovatively about everything around business processes, including those that that have nothing to do with new product development, comes from having an innovative culture. She notes, "One of our challenges as we move forward is to ensure we retain this point of view." The answer to this challenge goes back to how the company defines innovation. By being aligned as an organization with senior management and the marketing group agreeing on how the company innovates, it becomes part of the culture.

 

THE CONSUMER
Gaining consumer insight, of course, means knowing your consumer, and for Crayola that is a bit complex: There is the child, the parent, the student and the teacher. Rogers says they think about all these "different constituencies," though at the "end of the day, the child is most important since they are the ultimate users of the product."

 

Insights, on top of point-of-sale and syndicated data, come froma variety of sources. Rogers explains, "We observe the mother and child, and spend an enormous amount of time garnering insights into moms' needs, and couple those needs with things we can do to help children learn and create."

 

One of the top examples of this is Crayola's Color Wonder line that leaves no mess. Rogers explains that some moms didn't even want to think about having finger paint in the house at all. This product solved a problem for mom and with its "magical" qualities is fun and engaging for the child.

 

DiFelice provides more details: "Sometimes we use The Crayola Factory [a "hands-on discovery center' open to the public] to obtain insights, but we have an in-house panel we use a lot more."

 

The in-house panel consists of people who live in the vicinity of Crayola (Easton, Penn.), which the company can show new ideas from the initial concept. The panel is sometimes moms, sometimes kids and sometimes both, and Crayola gets input all the way through proof of final product.

 

Kids in particular are very vocal. "They don't usually hold back, which is great because we really want to know what they think. You don't want kids to come in and say they like everything just because they want to please you; you really want to hear the good and the bad," she explains.

 

Part of the organization also is dedicated to exploring opportunities within schools, which is actually one of Crayola's key channels. Teachers have their own definitive product needs, and the company takes some of the products it sells through the traditional retail channel and crafts them to make them appropriate for classroom use. Rogers says, "They [teachers] provide us with very valuable insight because they are so acutely aware of what is right for the child in terms of how they learn to create."

 

Crayola.com is another vehicle through which insights flow. In addition, the company is starting to do more in-home testing, sending products out at an early stage and allowing them to be used. Feedback on the overall experience is provided and utilized for continuous improvement of products before launch. DiFelice says, "We're trying to do as much qualitative - really talking to the consumer - as well as quantitative work down the line. We do quantitative concept screening to narrow down the number of concepts, but are more focused on spending time with the consumers and really listening and learning from them."

 

FROM INSIGHT TO ACTION
Marketing is responsible for creating the strategic development strategy and the R&D and product design groups are primarily responsible for coming up with the ideas that are then used to fill the slots the marketing group has identified. Once through iterations and proofs of concept, engineering takes over. Rogers says, "Years ago we called that process "throwing it over the wall.' It went from the R&D and design group to the engineering group, and there wasn't a lot of ownership either beforehand by engineering or after the fact by the design group. We've changed that. Now, when a team is looking at a new business opportunity, the entire cross-functional team, regardless of whether they are solely responsible for the entire process, is on hand. It's important to have everyone's buy-in from the very beginning to the very end."

 

Rogers adds that he believes this process has helped increase speed to market - engineering knows what's coming down the pipe and they have a lot more time to plan and prepare.

 

Part of this improved process also helps maintain price points. After all, considering the amount of innovation involved in creating Crayola's products, they are reasonably priced. Product development involves an 11-step process and Rogers says one of the most important factors in the entire process is product selection.

 

He goes on to say that the day an idea officially becomes a product is also about the same time the idea leaves the R&D and design teams and goes to the engineering team. Yet, before that moment happens, engineering has already committed to supporting the concept, the price point and the ship date; they had already been working on it.

 

"So because of that early buy-in and involvement by engineering, we are able to ensure we meet our margins, our ship dates and retail price points from the day we start to the day we ship," Rogers explains. This is especially critical during high-demand shopping events like back to school and the holiday season.

 

Speaking of R&D and design, interestingly enough, open innovation is not a huge part of Crayola's strategy. Although Rogers says "we keep our ears and eyes open," innovation is predominantly driven out of Crayola - particularly through its expertise in color chemistry innovation.

 

He says there are people within chemical technology industry that the company consults and who occasionally bring in a technology the company repurposes or applies differently than may have originally been intended. There is also a group of inventors - quite common in the children's product space - who call on the company. "So we listen to them, but it's the marriage of mechanical product design and chemistry that has allowed us to create very unique and new to the world products," Roger concludes.

 

So as an insider, what is one of the best examples of new product innovation? "That's a tough one," says Rogers. "We just introduced a new line called Crayola Beginnings, which are art tools designed for toddlers. A tremendous amount of focus was needed to create this line."

 

To deliver a creative experience for a toddler, Crayola started by considering the ergonomics. Rogers points out that the product had to be the right shape and it had to be no or very little mess. "We launched Crayola Beginnings this last holiday season and it was incredibly successful. We are thrilled about its potential."

 

FUTURE IS BRIGHT
And now for a sneak peek . . . Rogers agreed to give a few details about an upcoming product launch. This spring, watch for Crayola Color Surge (see "Crayola Color Surge" box above). He explains: "If you were to take a yellow marker and put it on a brown piece of construction paper that yellow highlighter is going to look like a different shade of brown. You can't use traditional markers on colored paper and get vibrant colors so we've created a whole new system where you can take any one of our Color Surge markers coupled with our colored paper and the color virtually glows off the page. Now, kids can do things with colored paper that they could never do before."

 

Rogers says, "It's been really interesting to see our own expectations of what a Crayola product should be rise over the years. It's quite exciting. We really are culturally living innovation. We have a lot of different people who aren't literally responsible for innovation everyday, nevertheless they have the same expectations." DiFelice sums it up, "Innovation can't be just one person's job or even a team's job, it just doesn't happen that way." CG