If you’re a homeowner, there’s a good chance you have one lurking in some dusty corner of your basement or garage. A caulking gun, with a partially-used tube of goo. Love it? Doubtful. But until fairly recently you had no other option if you needed to patch the caulking in your shower or elsewhere.
As Colin Raney, Business Designer at IDEO explained at a recent conference (Design Means Business), the caulking market was aimed at contractors. These are folk who love those guns and tubes —and they know what to do with them.
A couple of years ago GE wanted to grow its silicone caulk business (apparently 70% of the market wasn’t quite enough), and they came to IDEO for help. IDEO steered them away from yet another flavor of the current same-old. Instead, they helped GE understand what real people have known for a long time: the current offering was a messy, wasteful, expensive pain.
Their solution is a thing of beauty: GE Caulk Singles, a single-use disposable packet that can be used without caulking armaments. By looking at real people in their everyday lives, they reframed the user as a homeowner. In so doing, they rescued countless homeowners from dismal struggles with unwieldy goop guns. And in the process GE created bountiful topline growth through a new high-margin business.
See more on the IDEO site.
