Skateboard dad – what the John Lewis Christmas ad has to do with your big ideas for new product development

There are two types of people in this world: those whose eyes light up when John Lewis emails to say “it’s out”, and those who, well, don’t.

The latest JL Christmas ad caused a stir in our office last week – and not just because I initially refused to watch it (please, there’s still bonfire smoke hanging in the air!).

In case you’re in the same camp as I was and you haven’t already watched this year’s ad, “The Beginner” is all about a middle-aged chap trying his damned hardest to learn to skateboard.

Watching YouTube videos on his lunchbreak, skating in the park at night, zooming down hills completely out of control.

Then you get to the final scene where our man opens the door, wrist in a cast, to welcome a shy-looking teenager who’s clasping her own skateboard. And the poignant words appear on the screen:

“Over 108,000 children in the UK are in the care system. We’re making a long-term commitment to support the futures of young people from care.”

Now that’s a message I can get on board with.

And that’s also why the ad got so much attention in the Smallfry office – you see, we’ve been collaborating on a crucial project within the care sector over the last couple of years.

Smallfry’s work in the care sector

Keys Group are a leading provider of innovative care and education to children with complex needs in the UK.

Three years ago, they started work to improve the aftercare service for children and young adults coming out of the care system. Soon after, they approached Smallfry for help – for three reasons:

1 – They needed some serious problem solving doing

2 – They needed clarity on what their offering actually was

3 – And they needed to make their new service saleable to Local Authorities

Keys’ big issue was like so many we’ve seen with other clients in the past.

They were too “in” their situation to see the wood for the trees.

They had countless ideas but no clear step-by-step processes to follow. Their ideas came from their own experiences, rather than being genuinely based on their customers’ experiences. And they had no idea what their service should really look like.

As you can imagine, we were keen to get involved with such a worthy cause, and we knew we could apply our strategic design approach to turn their confused ideas about what their service should and could be into something that really made a difference in the world.

Being highly regulated, Keys felt an outside body might struggle to get up to speed. So we did what we do best, broke everything down into its simplest form and got busy on the research side before coming up with any ideas.

Research before ideas always wins

In our fifty years’ experience, it doesn’t make a difference whether it’s a new product or a new service you’re developing – you HAVE to glean thorough consumer insights before you can possibly make decisions about what your product or service should do, let alone how it might look.

If you don’t know what your customers actually want, it’s impossible to guarantee your service or product will be profitable or even commercially viable.

So we applied this crucial principle to Keys’ problem.

We conducted endless research, speaking to case workers to understand exactly what they needed to help them move their children on from care safely.

We got hordes of feedback from the children themselves, and even here we had to think outside the box as privacy laws meant we couldn’t talk to them ourselves.

And only when we were confident we truly understood the entire situation did we sit down and say: HERE’s what your service needs to deliver, now let’s break it down into practical steps that make that happen.  

We created a chart a bit like the London Tube map, making all the processes that care workers needed to go through completely transparent, and simplifying exactly what needed to happen when and where to take a child through the care system successfully.

And it’s happening! With clarity on their offering, Keys have been able to take the service to stakeholders commissioning care and it’s turning the UK’s aftercare system around. Wow! We’re delighted to have been involved in the process.

In the end, human centred design always wins.

If you’ve got lots of ideas for a new product or service and you need a bunch of strategic designers looking at everything from an agenda-free, outside view, email Kelly for more info Design@Smallfry.com