Martha Manyformer director of innovation at Lego and founder of the consulting firm Marsenda Innovation, defends the need to interact with customers to discover what their needs are. Many, born in the Navarran town of Tudela in 1972, insists that it is essential to learn from consumers to improve their experiences and find products that are useful to them in their lives and for which they are willing to pay. “We must continually ask ourselves why we do what we do,” she warns.
In her 25 years as senior director of innovation at Lego, she was clear that technology was the basis, but she soon discovered that to understand the customer they had to “go further, analyze the culture, the context of society, know how it affected the world of the technology in their life or what kind of entertainment they had access to. “In Lego, qualitative research was carried out, we visited schools in different countries, we talked to experts and we lived with the children,” she reveals. The investigation led to the release of a new product, Lego Friends, which increased sales in girls that same year. “It was the gateway for them to discover that they could use our pieces to foster their creativity,” she says.
Marta Tantos attends Activos minutes before participating as a speaker at the Collaborate People & Data 2022 event (organized by Atlas Tecnológico) which this week has brought together more than 200 managers from the industry 4.0 ecosystem at the Marina de València.
The innovation expert worked at the Lego headquarters in Denmark and left the company a few months ago to return to live in Spain. She has just launched the consulting firm Marsenda to advise companies and institutions.
What did you learn in your 25 years at Lego?
I learned everything. It has been my professional life. There I discovered an important thing and that is that the entire company has to believe in innovation. I also realized how important people are. At Lego I learned that the better you know your customers, the better. That has given me a fantastic experience as I visit families in the United States, Germany, Denmark and Spain.
Do companies know their customers?
not all
How can a company function without knowing its customers?
It’s complicated. There was a toothpaste company that decided to make lasagna with the same brand [no la identifica, pero fue Colgate]. Consumers did not accept the idea of buying a lasagna with the toothpaste brand. It was a bust. There are companies that have launched services or products that have not met expectations because either there were no interested customers or they were too expensive or they did not cover people’s real needs.
You came to live with families to see the interests of the children. How did you interact with them?
That takes a lot of preparation ahead. It is not showing up there to see what comes up. We organized many activities to understand families and children. It could be, for example, playing whatever they wanted. We also went out to play the slides or accompanied them to a friend’s birthday or to skating class. We did it to understand their day to day. We had activities with the children alone or with families. It was a lot of fun because sometimes we found that the parents wanted something and the children did not.
How many families were you with?
With many. More than two hundred.
“Good products are those that cover a need, although sometimes the customer doesn’t even know he has it”
How did they transfer that experience to the toys?
That’s where the innovation process came in. We used a methodology to understand customers and obtain data that allowed us to draw conclusions to get ideas. There we saw the needs of the users and we could generate areas of opportunity.
What toy came out like this?
One of the most iconic was Lego Friends, which came out in 2012. It came out because we did a big study on girls to find out why a lot of girls weren’t interested in playing with Legos to be creative.
Did Lego Friends bring you something?
Yes. We verified that something attracted them. Lego Friends is a world where you make (real-life) role-playing games with pieces that are the same as the rest of Lego. We propose games like going to the market to do the shopping.
Is it difficult to understand the mind of a child?
Yes. We get dumber as we become adults. Children’s minds are much freer to be creative and to think. They have to try everything to see if it works or not. That is why it is not easy to understand him and you have to put yourself at his height. You have to play with them on the floor. We worked with children from babies to 14 years old.
And in the case of adults, is it difficult for companies to get into the minds of customers?
Yes, but it happens to companies and organizations with their workers. For example, for a human resources team, their clients are the workers or the future employees. There are people who are experts in that. You have to learn a minimum of fundamental codes when you are going to interact with people. What we have seen, and it has happened to me sometimes, is that conclusions are drawn too quickly. Then you yourself have to stop to continue observing until you get tired. Is not easy. What it is about is putting yourself in the person’s shoes, not just accompanying them to see how they are doing. It’s complicated, but you have to try.
What is important when innovating?
The first thing is to have the vision that you want to do something different. If you have the mentality of wanting to do things as they have always been done, it makes no sense. And not only does there have to be an innovation team that creates it. It needs to be internalized by all layers of the company and from the top. Innovation is not free. It is hard and takes a lot of work. You have to repeat the process many times. Many people think that there is a magic wand, you have a brainstorming session and you already have something. It does not work like this. That is part of the process. We must try to speed it up so that they see short-term and long-term achievements.
During his 25 years at Lego, the company reinvented itself and went from accumulating losses to becoming the world’s leading toy company in 2015. How did innovation influence this reinvention process?
It was essential. I went through three crises at Lego. In one of them, innovation began by taking a step back. What it was about was eliminating a lot of products and services that really didn’t make sense at the time. The company had spread (with excessive product lines) and it was decided to go back to what was really good and start innovating from there.
The good thing was the construction games.
Yes. The company went back to see what made sense and what Lego did well.
Where is the key to get good products?
Good products are made when you bring something to market for which there is a need. There are times when not even the clients themselves know they have a need. However, customers also have to be willing to pay for the service or product you offer. If it’s too expensive they still don’t want to pay it and if it’s too cheap they think it’s not worth much. In addition, it must be profitable for the company so that it can continue to innovate. I would go further. Today, if we don’t think about how to make a positive impact on people, on society and on the planet, we are not doing well.
Lego has its headquarters in Billund, how do you innovate from a city of 28,000 inhabitants in the center of Denmark?
The first thing to keep in mind is that this is a company that believes in innovation. If that does not exist, there is no innovation. A second trait is constancy. In the case of Lego, it has helped that it is a family business with long-term goals. Not just in the next three months, because shareholders need to have positive numbers. The innovation team has also helped. There we strongly promote professionalize the team and internationalize it. At one point I went abroad with a colleague to attract design talent to come to a small town in Denmark to innovate. Obviously, the brand name has been brutal in attracting people.
When you went out to recruit talent there were four foreigners, how many are there now?
The design team now numbers 400 people from 40 nationalities.
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How do you see the level of innovation in Spain?
There are data that confirm that we are still very far from other countries like Denmark. Much more is invested there in innovation. Many companies have been doing this for years. They have leading companies thanks to innovation. They have always invested a lot. I think that here we want to help a lot, but I don’t know if it is done in the best way. Innovation is very important because on many occasions you either innovate or you die. It also has to do with the industrial fabric and the number of very small companies that have fewer resources to innovate.