CASE STUDY: HONDA ASIMO

Meet ASIMO! He is 4 feet tall, with a pleasant childish voice, and the ability to recognize and
interact with people; however, ASIMO is no child. He is the humanoid robot “brainchild” of
scientists at Honda. ASIMO’s technology includes two camera eyes to map its environment
and recognize unique faces. Its body construction is so humanlike that it can run at 3.5 mph,
toss a ball to play with a child, and use its opposable thumbs to open a bottle and serve you
a cold drink. ASIMO is the perfect household companion.
Honda has not yet made ASIMO available to purchase for home use but it is only a matter of
time until families can have their own humanoid robot. But not everyone is interested.
Consumers are a bit nervous about a robot serving them meals or sitting down and telling
them the news of the day. Why? Perhaps it is Hollywood’s influence on our perception of
robots. It might not be sweet WALL-E that comes to mind when we think about robots, but
the Terminator or another threatening machine.
If consumers are not ready for ASIMO, perhaps they are ready for some of its features.
Facial Recognition Technology (FRT), the ability for a computer to “read” your face, is seeing
strong development and application. According to some analysts, the FRT market is
expected to grow from $1.92 billion to $6.5 billion within the next 5 years. Advertisers and
big brands are taking notice of FRT. Imagine a billboard in a mall that advertises
Abercrombie to a teen girl and Target to a busy mom. Immersive Labs is one company that
has develops digital billboards that measure the age range, gender, and even attention level
of a passerby to deliver a tailored ad.
According to researchers, FRT can do more than read your face and estimate general
physical characteristics. It can map out a biometric profile that is unique as your fingerprint.
Red Pepper is a company that uses this advanced technology to develop Face deals, a
smartphone app that provides personalized offers to consumers. Here’s how it works. You
download the app, walk into a store with a Face deals camera, and are recognized. Face
deals interfaces with your Facebook information, analyzing your content for favorite brands,
relationship status, places visited, and other information. Then, Face deals presents you with
a personalized offer.
The marketing applications for FRT are numerous. Google is considering letting individuals
use a body motion, perhaps a “wink” or “eyebrow movement,” as their FRT password.
Forbes.com has unveiled an app where your webcam watches your facial responses when
you view ads to learn what products and ads you like and dislike. Many brands know one key
to successful marketing is to offer the right product to right consumer at the right time. With
FRT, marketers can achieve can achieve this goal at a whole new level.

Q1. What are the most likely market segments for ASIMO?

This type of products can target various market segments. For instance, it could be useful in a
household in order to help to the daily tasks or even in the medical industry as a robot assistant
for manufacturing drugs. The consumer characteristics in order to buy the robot are the
following: wealthy household, or if an industry wants to buy it for manufacturing purpose.

Q2. How could Honda overcome resistance to the idea of a home robot?

Ans- To insure, that they people that will want to own ASIMO and having him around the house
is to show that there is no way that anything like a virus to be inputted into ASIMO mainframe.
First most people that are scared of robots are because in most robot movies like the terminator
and I robot one day the robot comes under control and start to turn on every people that
created them. And that is always on the back of people mind when they see a robot that moves
and can talk. I feel that in order to make the public less afraid of a home robot is to once finished
with the prototype and once all the bugs and glitches are all fixed to have a public display of how
ASIMO performs in a real life situation to show that ASIMO is a robot that can be under control
that there is no chance that ASIMO can do any harm to anyone. Because a robot can only do
what they are programmed to do and that is it. The only way in order for robots to go bad is if
somehow a virus or a program telling the robot to go rogue was entered into the robot’s
mainframe.

Q3. What concern’s might consumers have regarding FRT?

Ans- With the FRT some people might be too into privacy they might feel that this app is to
invasive and to always have a camera on you when you are using your phone. Or on the other
hand what if someone hacks into the app and was able to start spying on every person that has
this app.

Bose: Better Products through Research

In a recent survey by brand strategy firm Lippincott, the most trusted brand in consumer
electronics was not Apple. Nor was it Samsung, Sony, or Microsoft. It was Bose, the still
relatively small, privately held corporation that has been making innovative audio
devices for more than 50 years. Despite putting more than 30 million new sets of
headphones alone on or in customers’ ears last year, Bose rang up only about $4 billion
in revenues versus Apple’s $234 billion. But when it comes to the passion customers feel
for their brands, the Massachusetts-based technology company outshines even Apple.
Bose forges that deep consumer connection based on the brand’s design simplicity and
brilliant functionality.
Bose adheres religiously to a set of values that have guided the company since its
origins. Most companies today focus heavily on building revenues, profits, and stock
prices. They try to outdo competitors by differentiating product lines with features and
attributes that other companies don’t have. Although Bose doesn’t ignore such factors,
its competitive advantage is rooted in its unique corporate philosophy. “We are not in it
strictly to make money,” says CEO Bob Maresca. Given the company’s focus on research
and product innovation, he points out that “the business is almost a secondary
consideration.”
The Bose Philosophy
To understand Bose the company, you must first look at Bose the man. In the 1950s,
founder Amar Bose was working on his third degree at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. He had a keen interest in research and studied various areas of electrical
engineering. He also had a strong interest in music. When he purchased his first hi-fi
system—a model that he believed had the best specifications—he was disappointed in
the system’s ability to reproduce realistic sound. So he began heavily researching the
problem to find his own solution. Thus began a stream of research that would ultimately
lead to the founding of the Bose Corporation in 1964. It also led to the development of
the long-standing Bose slogan “Better Sound through Research.”
From those early days, Amar Bose worked around certain core principles that have
guided the philosophy of the company. In conducting his first research on speakers and
sound, he did something that has since been repeated time and time again at Bose. He
ignored existing technologies and started entirely from scratch, something not common
in product development strategies.
In another departure from typical corporate strategies, Amar Bose put all of the
privately held company’s profits research and development, a practice that reflected his
avid love of research and his drive to produce the highest-quality products. In doing so,
he also bypassed the process of figuring out what customers wanted, instead keeping his
research confined to the laboratory and centered on the technical specifications of
creating a superior product.
Today, this approach is considered heresy in the innovation world. Amar pursued this
approach because he could. He often pointed out that publicly held companies have
long lists of constraints that don’t apply to privately held companies, noting that “if I
worked for another company, I would have been fired a long time ago,” For this reason,
Bose always vowed that he would never take the company public. “Going public for me
would have been the equivalent of losing the company. My real interest is research—
that’s the excitement—and I wouldn’t have been able to do long-term projects with Wall
Street breathing down my neck.”
Innovating the Bose Way
The company that started so humbly now has a breadth of product lines beyond its core
home audio line. Additional lines target a variety of applications that captured Amar
Bose’s creative attention over the years, including military, automotive,
homebuilding/remodeling, aviation, and professional and commercial sound systems. It
even has a division that markets testing equipment to research institutions, universities,
medical device companies, and engineering companies worldwide. The following are just
a few of the products that illustrate the innovative breakthroughs produced by the
company.
Speakers. Bose’s first product was a speaker introduced in 1965.Expecting to sell $1
million worth of speakers that first year, Bose made 60 but sold only 40. The original
Bose speaker evolved into the 901 Direct/Reflecting speaker system launched in 1968.
That speaker system was designed around the concept that live sound reaches the
human ear via direct as well as reflected channels (off walls, ceilings, and other objects).
The speakers featured a completely unorthodox configuration. Shaped like one-eighth of
a sphere and mounted facing into a room’s corner, the audio waves reflected off the
walls and filled the room with sound that seemed to be everywhere but some from
nowhere in particular. The speakers had no woofers or tweeters, composed instead of
eight four-and-a-half-inches mid- range drivers. The speakers were also very small
compared with the high-end speakers of the day. The design came much closer to the
essence and emotional impact of live music than anything else on the market and won
immediate industry acclaim. The reflective approach, although groundbreaking at the
time, is commonly found in home theater systems throughout the industry today.
Back then, however, Bose had a hard time convincing customer of the merits of these
innovative speakers. At a time when woofers, tweeters, and size meant everything, the
901 series initially flopped. In 1968, a retail salesperson explained to Amar Bose why the
speakers weren’t selling:
“Look, I love your speaker but I cannot sell it because it makes me lose all my credibility
as a salesman. I can’t explain to anyone why the 901 doesn’t have any woofers or
tweeters. A man came in and saw the small size, and he started looking in the drawers
for the speaker cabinets. I walked over to him, and he said, ‘Where are you hiding the
woofer?’ I said to him, ‘There is no woofer.’ So he said, ‘You’re a liar,’ and he walked
out.”
To resolve this credibility problem, Bose developed another core competency—
identifying and targeting the right customer with the products it was confident were
superior to even the best offerings. For Bose, this has generally meant targeting higher-
income customers who aren’t audio buffs but want a good product and are willing to
pay a premium price for it. For the 901, this included using innovative display and
demonstration tactics. This approach has served Bose well. Although even today
hardcore audiophiles scoff at Bose products as little more than smoke and mirrors,
customers whose expectations haven’t been shaped by preconceived specifications
perceive Bose products to be exceptional. So far as the 901 is concerned, the product
became so successful that Amar Bose was known for crediting the speaker series with
building the company.
The list of major speaker innovations at Bose is a long one. In the 1970s, the company
introduced concert-like sound in the bookshelf-size 301 Direct/Reflecting speaker
system. Fourteen years of research led to the development of acoustic waveguide
speaker technology, a technology today found in the award- winning Wave radio, Wave
music system, and Acoustic Wave music system. In the 1980s, the company again
changed conventional thinking about the relationship between speaker size and sound.
The Acoustimass system enabled palm-size speakers to produce audio quality equivalent
to that of high-end systems many times their size—a design so popular it also remains in
the current Bose portfolio of speakers. Recently, Bose again introduced the state of the
art with the Music Monitor, a pair of compact computer speakers that rival the sound of
three-piece subwoofer systems. And Bose has led the way in developing wireless
speaker systems, a move that was quickly followed by all competitors. Not only was
each of these speaker systems groundbreakings at the time it was introduced, each was
so technologically advanced that Bose still sells it today, even the original 901 series.
Headphones. Maresca recalls that “Bose invested tens of millions of dollars over 19
years developing headset technology before making a profit. Now, headsets are a major
part of the business.” Initially, Bose focused on noise reduction technologies to make
headphones for pilots that would block out the high levels of noise interference
generated by aircraft. Bose headphones didn’t just muffle noise; they electronically
canceled ambient noise so that pilots wearing them heard nothing but the intended
sound coming through the phones. Bose quickly discovered that airline passengers could
benefit as much as pilots from its headphone technology. Today, the Bose Quiet Comfort
series, used in a variety of consumer applications, sets the benchmark in noise-canceling
headphones. One journalist considers this product to be so significant that it made his
list of “101 gadgets that changed the world”—right up there with aspirin, paper, and the
light bulb.
Automotive suspensions. Since 1980, the inquisitively innovative culture at Bose has
even led the company down the path of developing automotive suspensions. Amar
Bose’s interest in suspensions dates back to the 1950s when he bought both a Citroen
and a Pontiac, each riding on unconventional air suspension systems. Thereafter, he was
obsessed with the engineering challenge of achieving good cornering capabilities
without sacrificing a smooth ride.
The system Bose developed was based on electromagnetic motors installed at each
wheel. Based on inputs from road sensing monitors, the motor could retract and extend
almost instantaneously. For a bump in the road, the suspension reacted by “jumping”
over it. For a pothole, the suspension allowed the wheel to extend downward, retracting
it quickly enough that the pothole wouldn’t be felt by passengers. In addition to these
comfort- producing capabilities, the wheel motors were designed to keep a car
completely level during an aggressive maneuver such as cornering or stopping. The
system achieved Amar Bose’s vision to provide better handling than any sports car while
simultaneously giving vehicle occupants the most comfortable ride imaginable.
Bose invested more than $100 million over 30 years in the groundbreaking suspension.
In the end, the system was simply too heavy and too expensive for use in passenger
cars. Rather than shelf the product, however, Bose did what it has often done—it found
a market where the technology could be used to provide genuine customer value. The
company now markets a smaller, lighter version of the Bose suspension as the Bose Ride
seat system for heavy-duty trucks. Surpassing current air ride and other conventional
technologies in performance, its $6,000 price tag also exceeded the going price of a
truck seat by five to ten times. Although most companies and drivers were skeptical at
first, one Texas driver’s reaction drives home the value of this product, even at the
substantial price premium: “I had back pains. I used to feel every bump in my back and
neck. The truck still bounces down the road, but I don’t. It’s almost like floating,
detached from the truck.”
Bose’s commitment to research and development has produced state-of-the-art
products that have contributed to the trust that Bose customers have in the company.
Customers know that the company cares more about their interests—about making the
best products—than about maximizing profits. But for a company not driven by the
bottom line, Bose does just fine in that department as well. In the personal headphone
market, Bose is second only to Beats (Apple) with 11 percent of the market. And with
wireless speakers now dominating speaker sales, Bose leads with a decisive 22 percent
share, a full six points ahead of number-two Sonos.
Amar Bose passed away a few years ago at the age of 83. With the passion of a genuine
scientist, he worked every day well into his 80s. “He’s got more energy than an 18-year-
old,” Maresca once said. “Every one of the naysayers only strengthens his resolve.” This
work ethic illustrates the passion of the man who shaped one of today’s most innovative
and most trusted companies. His philosophies have produced Bose’s long list of
groundbreaking innovations. Even today, the company continues to achieve success by
following another one of Amar Bose’s basic philosophies: “The potential size of the
market? We really have no idea. We just know that we have a technology that’s so
different and so much better that many people will want it.”

Q1. Based on concepts discussed in this chapter, describe the factors that have
contributed to Bose’s new product success.
Ans- That idea was under running researches for new innovations. A reference would be
“Internal Sourcing” and “Product Development”. These are the main factors led Bose’s
new product success.
The founder of Bose Amar Bose once said, “we are not in it strictly to make money”.
Thus, he rooted the DNA of Bose as a company that is focusing on its customers’ values
rather than building revenues, profits, and stock prices.
Q2. Is Bose’s product development process customer centered? Explain.
Ans- The center by finding new ways to solve customer problems, and creating more
customer-satisfying experiences Definitely yes. Bose company puts its customers in. By
that Bose is giving its customer a prominent value. Moreover, Bose’s first slogan was
“Better sound through research”.

Q3. How is Bose unique with respect to product life-cycle management?

Ans- I will describe Bose as a very stable corporation that has been around since 1964
and still keeps its reputation throughout many years.
 Bose unique with respect to product life-cycle management in a way that Bose is a
company that sees their customers’ needs before trying to build profits. The unique
relationship of trust Bose has created with its customers and the excitement in
researching makes Bose unique.

Q4. With respect to the product life cycle, what challenges does Bose face in managing
its product portfolio?
Ans- In my opinion, doing researches serves Bose in knowing their customers’ needs
better than its competitors. This also shows its customers “we are here to give you the
best product”. As I mentioned, sustaining its relationship with its customers, and keep
improving their products accordingly are the two major challenges.
The challenges Bose faces in managing its product portfolio are keeping improving their
products as they keep researching and giving their customers value.