Situation

Whirlpool and its family of brands, e.g. Maytag, KitchenAid, faced increase competition from companies such as LG and Samsung.
 

 

All of the industry players are adding more technology-driven “bells and whistles” to their products, which made selling those appliances an increasingly challenging proposition, especially as big-box sales staff have little time or incentive to learn and share the unique qualities of individual appliances. As a result, Whirlpool’s key competitors were increasingly resorting to selling incentives to gain market share, a tactic Whirlpool wanted to avoid as much as possible.

 

Task

Given Whirlpool’s strong market share, the company wanted to find ways to increase a sense of customer engagement across the lifecycle of owned appliances.

 

The company also wanted to identify entirely new ways to tackle the intensified competition to better win over new customers.

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What I did

I spearheaded quantitative and qualitative marketing research to better understand how consumers view appliances in relation to their lives, how they make purchase decisions and what hurdles need to be met to gain their trust and loyalty.

 

Those findings were shared with a broad group of Whirlpool managers and executives, along with a workshop focused on non-category innovators in customer experience to serve as a point of inspiration for what Whirlpool could achieve.

 

With that common understanding and “language,” I subsequently led a series of ideation workshops to identify and then iterate on ways Whirlpool could become ”Whirlpool 2.0” to improve the customer acquisition experience with new sales enablement tools for big-box retail sales reps, to using AI/ML to help customers get more out of their appliances as well as entirely new distribution channels to test out as a proof-of-concept.

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Winning concepts were further refined as they were developed via a series of rapid prototyping, which were then tested to inform further prototypes and accelerate in-market production.

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