GAGGENAU
The Future of Luxury
VISIONEERING
VALUE PROPOSITION
DESIGN
THINKING
Visioneering Business Innovation
Gaggenau is a world-renowned German manufacturer of luxury appliances. They are particularly well known for their high-end ovens that represent state of the art in high-end consumer ovens which has made them the “architects choice” for equipping high-end kitchens the world over. Gaggenau wanted to push ahead in defining its roadmap of customer-centric products.
The Challenge
The level of innovation and quality that Gaggenau products demand require a high level of investment. In particular the dishwashers and ovens are some of the most expensive-to-develop appliances. This meant that any future product’s innovations, features and positioning had to be carefully planned and validated. At the same time, Gaggenau wanted to be more visible to their key-audience: real-estate developers, architects and architectural planners. It was our job to ensure that a future-products-roadmap was to be highly relevant to the customer and enabled by the right technologies and features.
Our Approach
To plot Gaggenau’s roadmap into the future, we applied “Visioneering”: an immersive projection into the future of consumer-cooking and the kitchen. Applying forecasting, backcasting and design-thinking, we based our scenarios on the key-emerging trends in food production & agriculture, in the kitchen, in cooking and enjoying food, envisioning a plausible future of their business 20 years down the line.
Impact: thinking outside of 'the box'
What Gaggenau got very excited about: we helped them form a vision and plot a path into the future that they were previously highly uncertain about and could not see. Being obsessed with the “metal box” that most of their products consisted of, we helped them re-consider their brands future proposition as one that was more customer-centric compared to the highly incremental and efficiency-focussed projections they had used before. For the first time, they were able to imagine Gaggenau as a service rather than a physical product. And rather than pledging to build "a better machine", they could now see themselves becoming relevant in a dematerialized way: Gaggenau as a quality standard for food or an equivalence to exceptional experiences. Within only a few days, we had helped them articulate their longterm-vision and align it with their company's purpose.
Tangible Outcomes:
One of the finest and first results of our Visioneering process with Gaggenau is “1683” a series of award winning temporary (1 year lifespan) “PopUp” restaurants and bistros. Another result sparked by our Visioneering project is the new 'Respected by Gaggenau' Initiative, a series of partnerships with artisan producers of traditional high end foods and wines.
For more information on our Visioneering format, visit our Visioneering Service Page or contact us to discuss how we might be able to support your future innovation strategy.