Bikes are the new microwaves?
Posted on 29. Mar, 2010 in Bike industry
Mark Sanders – the man who brought you the no-spill cutting board as well as some nifty folding bikes – gave this presentation at the Taipei show and it’s worth a look. Actually, skip the first 95 pages and start here:
At the most basic level, his thesis is that the bicycle industry should emulate the general consumer products industry and shift from “exclusive” to “inclusive” products. In support, he draws the following analogies:
| Bicycles | Consumer products | |
|---|---|---|
| Concentrates on | Enthusiasts | Everyone |
| Innovation at | High-price | All prices |
| High margins | Only at high prices | All prices |
| Commoditization at low-end | Accepted | Avoided |
| Ideal consumer | "like us" | "objective" |
Although his presentation compares bicycles to everything from iPods to electric shavers, Sanders himself wrote in a comment on BikeRadar that one of his preferred yardsticks is the humble microwave. That, he claims, is what the bicycle should be like: functionally simple, readily available, and designed for everyone.
In a sense, what Sanders is calling for is less about changing the product than it is about changing the culture and distribution of the bike industry. Instead of focusing innovation resources on high-end bikes sold to enthusiasts through specialty retailers, the best technologies and the brightest minds in the bike industry should be working on improving the low-cost bikes available through mass-market channels.
Some really smart, innovative people are quite taken with this idea, and I’ve had the opportunity to interview and work with a couple of them (Antonio Bertone and Rob Forbes). In those conversations, the impression that’s stuck with me is that the number of people for whom bicycles make sense represents a much, much, much bigger market than the number of people who will ever think of themselves as “real cyclists”.
Or as Sanders puts it, “There are no microwave enthusiasts.”
I find it interesting that this talk happened just as Shimano cancelled its Coasting program. http://yannigroth.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/shimano-and-associated-bicycle-manufacturers-drop-the-coasting-program/
I loved the Coasting project and Shimano’s willingness to disrupt itself. I fear they didn’t go far enough from the current system, especially in marketing and distribution but also in design (Shimano didn’t produce the bikes but left it to their bike industry friends).
The bike revolution, if it happens, will likely not be led by Shimano and Trek but by Nike or Toyota (or Puma!), and marketed not in bike shops but Target and REI.
If you’re going to bring up the iPod–and MP3 players are a great example of something that used to be geeky and is now universal–you have to note that Apple took decades to come up with its distribution strategy even though “The computer for the rest of us” has been their idea since their founding.
In the early days, just like in the bike industry, Apple relied on dealers and big box electronics stores, and that didn’t work very well. They weren’t committed to Apple’s products and it was easier to let people buy on initial price and choose PC’s. So they came up with their own stores.
Wall Street thought it was crazy for a high-tech company to go into retail, and Apple had always been averse to providing consumer-level support. (Like Google today, in fact.) But it is probably what they should have done all along. Apple gets a premium price and that still takes convincing. The Apple Store is a place to bring enthusiasts together with ordinary consumers–whether those enthusiasts are the staff Apple hires or your brother-in-law who drags you there. It symbolizes Apple’s commitment to support, too.
I think the brilliant thing Apple did was to keep the enthusiasts happy and engaged while expanding their market. Not even Mac enthusiasts quote GHz and RAM anymore now that they’ve realized that those things don’t matter to most people–including themselves.
I think we’ll know when consumerality has been achieved when people stop talking about traffic issues as cyclists vs. drivers. Almost all cyclists drive, and most drivers own bikes but don’t think of themselves as cyclists. If the discussion turns to “people riding their bikes” and “people in cars” that would be a good sign.
Some interesting points, but this is the dude who invented the Strida! Can’t take him very seriously once that became apparent…
The problem with industrial designers doing bikes is that they tend to identify a ton of little problems to solve but completely forget about the only property of a bike that truly counts, rideability. The bike industry has plenty of problems it can improve on, but with the exception of a few edge cases, pretty much everything they make is fun to ride.
From a pure design perspective, I think you’re correct that the kinds of improvements suggested by industrial designers are not always relevant to the actual riding experience. But if you look at what Mark is saying from a business perspective, it makes more sense: R&D resources should be allocated more in line with the potential size of the market for a given product. In other words, shifting budgets and brainpower from $5000 bikes to $300 bikes (or even lower). As it stands now, the strategy for most companies’ price-point bikes is simply to compete on “price vs. parts spec” with competitors, instead of trying innovate like they do at the high-end.
There is no question the bike industry is way to race oriented for their true market place and that really needs to change. But while innovate on the low end is a nice sentiment and I doubt even in microwaves is the innovation ever focused on the low (sub $300 bike) end, at that point it’s a cost cutting business, except for the rare break through techs that change the costs across the whole board.
Make bikes boring like microwaves on the other hand seems like an awful path. The obvious contrast is cars, where while things can get a bit bland people still develop very intense relationships with their objects. Car industry is of course far from perfect but they do seem to have developed a better innovation channel than the bike industry. Innovation is still concentrated towards the high end, business wise that’s often necessary as new innovations are expensive. But what they’ve done better than the bike world is develop systems in which the innovations move down the channel towards the base products smoothly and quickly.
True, although cars also have the advantage of having less variation in intended usage. A $90k car is driven on the same roads as a $15k car, unlike a 10″ travel downhill bike vs. a $300 city bike. So the trickling down of technology is maybe less relevant with bikes than it is with cars.
In some ways, the question is more about whether design is actually the way to sell more bikes. It’s possible that the answer is more about making the world a more friendly place to ride whatever kind of bike you fancy. But design is in fact the answer, when are the necessary changes so extensive that the bike stops being a bike?
Interesting topic.
For bikes to become “microwaves” or basically transportation devices, the infrastructure doesn’t exist to allow most “regular folk” to ride or commute by bike – at least here in the U.S.
Holland would be a good example of where this marketing could work – since most bikes there are “just transportation”. I’d imagine most cyclists over there don’t even consider themselves cyclists in the sense that we do.
Much of the bike culture in the U.S. revolves around (wanna-be) racing bikes and look. These folks are not going to sold “microwaves”.
In a sense, doesn’t this set up exist already?
Non-cyclist folks tend to buy their bikes at Target and department stores already. While “real” cyclists purchase at local bikes shop or perhaps online.
Dan,
The Target vs. IBD thing is the point. All the innovation resources go into the IBD-oriented bikes, while most of the sales happen at Target.
Josh,
That be true.
But most of those Target bikes are rarely ridden and become garage filler to collect dust next to the BBQ grill and mower. It seems advertsing to them would be a waste.
Then again, they sell zillions of those “bikes”. Why not a few zillon more?
Hey, now I’m catchin’ on….
Cool blog and info you have going here – nicely done.
Mark Sanders would argue that if those bike-like objects were better designed, they’d be used more frequently. On the other hand, two separate studies presented at the Bicycle Leadership Conference both concluded that traffic and weather are the two biggest factors that keep cycling enthusiasts from riding for transportation. If that’s true for people who already ride, it stands to reason that bike design alone isn’t going to be the tipping point for people who don’t.