Category: IN THE NEWS

Lextant, the human experience firm, today announced the hire of Jon Denham as vice president of its strategic account services team. Denham brings nearly 30 years of design and strategy experience in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry to his new leadership role. Denham will also head Lextant’s first regional office beyond its headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, expanding the firm’s presence to Chicago.

As a member of Lextant’s senior team, Denham will evolve the company’s client service and strategy capabilities, focusing first on the promotion of Lextant’s innovative Desirability offering – a proven approach helping companies link consumer behaviors and ideals to the design of new products and services.

“Lextant has been the secret behind some of the most successful brands in the CPG industry,” said Denham. “To create great experiences, a company needs to align its teams with a clear understanding of the consumer. As a former client, I’ve seen first-hand how unique and impactful Lextant’s approach is. There really isn’t anything like it in the industry. I look forward to bringing the strategic Desirability offer to a wider market and working closely with the diverse client base Lextant serves.”

Prior to joining Lextant, Denham served as the vice president of disruptive design and innovation at ConAgra Brands, and held various design leadership roles at Procter & Gamble and Kraft Foods.

“I‘m very pleased to have Jon on the team,” said Lextant CEO and founder, Chris Rockwell. “He has a proven ability to connect consumer insights to effective market innovation. He understands how large organizations work and the challenges our clients face, allowing us to be more strategic and have an even stronger impact on their bottom line.”

The Chicago office is the first to open outside of Ohio. Recent growth in Lextant’s transportation, financial services, healthcare, and CPG businesses are driving a need for an increased presence in key markets. The company foresees additional expansion locations in the coming years.

The number of beauty and fragrance products in the market today has grown almost indefinitely. Store aisles are oversaturated with brands, messages and choices available. It’s more important than ever for brands to stand out on these crowded shelves.

The sheer volume of product choices is overwhelming, but brands can cut through the clutter by using sensory cues to communicate specific benefits that resonate with consumers. Sensory cues are found in products across industries. These cues are key to delivering messages by viscerally communicating what consumers desire in these products, which leads to the “moment of truth” when shoppers become customers.

Sensory cues need to deliver on three universal customer desires that have stood the test of time and transcend geographic boundaries. Through state of the art research techniques, we know that consumers desire a product that is effective, is easy to use and provides an enjoyable experience:

1. Effective

Packaging features like shape and colors help shoppers recognize what a product is for. They can help provide certainty that a product will deliver what they want. Packaging sensory cues should reveal what’s inside and can help brands communicate certain benefits without making claims. If a shopper is looking for a natural and humane product, light colors offer a cue that reflects healthy or medicinal ingredients without using words.

2. Easy to Use

Sensory cues should convey that a product will be straight-forward in functionality. Shoppers want to clearly understand functionality by looking at the packaging. It’s also critical to clearly demonstrate how to open, apply and transport a product. For example, design cues can help communicate that a product is portable by signaling it is small, compact and won’t spill on the go.

3. Enjoyable

Today, consumers also expect an enjoyable experience with a beauty or fragrance product. Packaging is part of the consumer experience with that product and brand. For example, sensory cues like glitter, pastel colors and curvy shapes visually communicate femininity. A silver, chrome or gold finish can illustrate a luxurious or lavish experience.

Sensory cues are delivered at every touchpoint between a product and a consumer. Product packaging must be intentionally designed with these three universal desires in mind. Brands should use sensory cues to discover what to deliver and then communicate these messages in a way that consumers understand, ultimately leading to the moment-of-truth interaction and hopefully resulting in a purchase.

To read the full article, visit Beauty Packaging Magazine.

After a number of technical delays, Amazon Go finally pulled back the curtain on its much-touted cashier-less store at the end of January. Now a month in, consumers and members of the media alike are singing praises, calling the store “flawless,” “not beta” and “absolutely fascinating.” And that positive energy may help fuel an early expansion.

While some may look at the store concept as a novelty, Amazon rarely opens anything to the public unless it knows it has a home run, Christopher Walton, an independent consultant and former vice president of Target Store of the Future, wrote in an op-ed for Retail Dive.

“If Amazon begins to open more Amazon Go stores within the year, it likely portends that Amazon does not care how expensive these stores are and that it will stop at nothing to flood the market with them – competitor grocery and drug stores be damned!” he wrote.

Amazon also has the luxury of taking a profit loss in order to get the concept off the ground — something nearly no other retailer can afford. But other retailers are tackling the same problem in different ways. Walmart, Sam’s Club and Kroger have all recently made a big push for “scan and go” technology that uses mobile apps to reduce or eliminate the time spent in lines.

Kroger’s Scan Bag Go stores represent a tech-based convenience play that may surprise many observers who expected such advancements to come out of Amazon or Walmart. Walmart’s subsidiary Code Eight, for example, is reportedly developing a technology-heavy store that uses computer vision and cashier-free checkout, led by Mike Hanrahan, Jet co-founder and former chief technology officer. Walmart’s more fully developed Scan & Go checkout is now in place at about a dozen stores in several states.

Chris Rockwell, CEO of Lextant, told Retail Dive in an email that the Amazon Go concept is a “powerful response to the value of time.”

“Other grocery entities have also launched curb side/pre-ordering like offers like Kroger’s ClickList or Walmart’s Grocery home delivery service,” he said. “These are a meaningful offer for a type of shopper, but (of course) the extreme couponer and essential browser will have other needs that Amazon will have to meet through its Whole Foods subsidiary where experience can be created, instead of expedited. The Amazon Go store may be more of a threat to every convenience store than traditional grocery.”

For the full article, visit Retail Dive Magazine.

Building relationships with millennials is extremely important to the future of financial institutions.  However, many of them are still having a hard time connecting with this generation.

How do financial institutions connect with millennials? Rockwell suggests three major thoughts, syncing with the millennial lifestyle, embracing the millennial mindset, and aligning organizations with millennial values.  Each of these major tenets can be implemented in different ways.

To read more, click here.

How do you learn to trust a machine?  With autonomous cars being tested all over the United States, automotive manufacturers are trying to figure out what it will take to get people to feel comfortable in and around cars that aren’t being driven by a person.

“People will forgive other humans much more quickly then they will technologies when they fail” Chris Rockwell, said to the New Yorker. This makes the stakes much bigger, because only a few incidents could result in life-long distrust of autonomous vehicles.

The way each manufacturer is dealing with these issues is different.  Some are trying to patent new technologies that will protect people from further injury if they are struck by an autonomous car, others are equipping the outside of cars with lights that can “communicate” to pedestrians.

The read more about how car makers are trying to gain the public’s trust when it comes to self-driving vehicles, click here.