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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS196

potential customers also helps shift your focus from ‘Can it be made?’
to ‘Will it add value to the customer when used?’.

There is no excuse not to use prototypes. Take the arts industry as an
example. Before committing to full creative production, musicians
routinely prepare demo tapes, while authors develop plot outlines and
sample chapters. Film studios regularly make a mockery of artistic
integrity by previewing films with different versions of the ending to
judge from real-life feedback which of the endings plays best with the
audience.

prototyping for services Prototypes are as relevant to services

as they are to products. In the late 1990s when the internet was still in
its infancy, the Prudential bank was considering the launch of a
telephone- and internet-based banking venture. The bank considered
that while using a name such as pru.com would allow the bank to
capitalise on the brand’s equity, the stretch between the image of
Prudential and the new brand was too big. The brand name of Egg made
its way on to the shortlist by virtue of breaking all known rules of the
stuffy banking world, as well as being simple and easy to remember.

But would it work? The agency team mocked up the brand as it would
look after the launch, with a complete suite of Egg credit cards,
chequebooks and advertising. Significantly, prospective customers were
shown the mock-ups but were not explicitly asked whether they liked
the name. Prototypes allowed the agency team to concentrate on noting
actual customer reactions to the concept and brand name in practice
rather than having to solicit feedback to the service proposition and the
brand name either in isolation or in the abstract. The rest is history.148

quick and dirty By the same token, Bill Gross of Idealab!

prototyped his Dell Computers-inspired notion of selling cars directly
to end-customers online, not by following the convention of creating a
complex temporary website but by posting an extremely simple website
intended merely to validate the idea.

Gross hired a chief executive with the brief to sell just one car – this car
would be bought from a dealer and sold on as a loss-making one-off, the
cost being justified by the value of vindicating the concept. To Gross’s
surprise, the site received over 1,000 hits on its first day, resulting in
the sale of four cars. That quick-and-dirty prototyping exercise led to