I had the opportunity to address the students of Manipal Institute of Communication last week. Considering this was my first time to Manipal (as well as Mangalore, from where you travel to Manipal by road), I was quite excited.
I spoke at their annual event, Article 19, on brand (communication) in the social media era.
Plus, I was also asked to judge their product launch competition. In the competition, the students formed 3-member teams, created a product/service, articulated how to pitch the product/service and pitched it! I was pleasantly amazed at the range of product ideas presented, and thought some of the ideas deserved a wider audience.
Of the 10 teams that pitched, a few really stood out for me.
Team G1, consisting of Banani, Sristhi and Maria:
A very simple, purposeful and might obvious idea that left me wondering why this isn’t the norm yet! The idea was literally ‘Grocery on tap’. We buy groceries from stores, or order them online, and we always get them in plastic pouches! But we also transfer those from plastic pouches to containers at our homes (stainless steel, glass or plastic). So, why not eliminate the need for plastic pouches in the middle?
This was anyway how milk used to be sold quite some time ago (and perhaps even now, in the villages at least). I remember buying milk like this while growing up in Coimbatore – the milkman used to arrive with a steel container and we used to collect our 2 litres of milk in our stainless steel container directly. We used to also pour the mandatory few sips for the cat too, during this process 🙂
Team G1’s idea was to use e-commerce to come how and refill our existing containers directly!
Now, can a BigBasket replicate this idea? Possibly, but they are not built for this model from the ground up. They are built around storage in plastic pouches at their facility. This model requires rethinking the middle-man level storage differently.
Plus, there would always be questions about the quality of the groceries and adulteration in this model, and that’s something the team has to manage, in terms of perception. For context, the milkman model I told you was susceptible to many, many years of jokes about water being mixed in milk, at the milkman level!
But, this is such a charming and eco-friendly idea. In a way, this is true grocery subscription.
Now, you may wonder how the delivery would happen? After all, BigBasket simply delivers the plastic pouches at our home and it is easy to stack them in vans and bring them. The delivery for the plastic-less model has to be thought differently from the ground up. Perhaps a push-cart of sorts that can fit into most lifts? And the cart has containers with the groceries? Or, bring the groceries in another kind of packaging for the same of delivery and then empty them directly into the containers of customers? There is precedence for this anyway – the gas cylinder used to be delivered directly to the kitchen, so groceries too could be delivered direct to kitchen, into the containers we own.
Team B1, consisting of Dhruv, Tarush and Ekta:
This team’s idea was slightly futuristic, but solving very present-day problems – a privacy insurance! The specific details were hazy but the thought was extremely interesting.
This is an insurance against our personal details leaking on the web. And the team had ideas in the form of dealing with online service providers (to whom we sign up with) to ensure that they do not share our private details without our permission to third parties.
I did question the team on 2 things:
- the multitude of devices we all use. Does the insurance work as a software layer (an app/extension) on the devices we use?
- in many cases, we want the data to be taken by the service provider so that we can get free services in exchange (like Gmail).
So, questions do exist. But given how privacy is being compromised rampantly these days and we haven’t seen the more creepier outcome of that yet (shortly), I felt this crux of an idea had potential if it was thought through in detail.
Team C1, consisting of Ritwika, Aaron, Sharun:
This idea was even more futuristic! The product was smart earbuds. Just as I was bracing myself to question them about the presence of such buds already in the market, they threw in the AI phrase. And added features like using AI to block specific frequencies of sounds or voices!
Now, that’s interesting.
Say, you are walking by an industrial hub. You can block the industrial noise alone, while retaining all other noises from the roads, around you. Or, you can tune out specific people’s voices – literally a ‘mute’ in real life, and not just on Twitter!! I did point to the team that they can then mute their parents asking them to study too! 😉
This is an out-there idea, but the ambition is staggering. They are almost out to replace the human ear with a more customizable and smarter hearing device. I also spoke about the battery power needed to create such always-on earbuds, but that’s probably much easily solved than the AI needed to tune out specific frequencies and voices.
Other ideas included products/services like a social network for pet owners (that includes a host of pet-related services for paying members), smart e-jewellery with features similar to the AI-enabled earbuds, among others.
A very, very engaging and eye-opening trip for me.