They are running a competition whereby you design either the whole tractor or elements of it, and the winner gets to go to the Valtra factory, meet the designers, and take part in a customer clinic to help develop the next generation of tractors.
You could take this one of two ways, the Agco designers are all out of ideas, or it is a very clever way of inviting the end user to offer up ideas that they would pay extra for.
I am not so sure we could do the same for steering. I wonder how often our customers (vehicle builders), talk to the end users about what they would like to see. What if we were to ask Bus drivers what they find most infuriating about the steering on the buses they drive every day, or tractor drivers what adjustments they would like to see on the steering column to make their life easier, then design products around those requirements, instead of those that our direct customers tell they want. I guess a lot of businesses just assume that their customers will do that work, but what if they did it instead?
The Chartered Institute of Marketers will tell you that the most successful companies are those that make and sell what the customer wants. B2B companies regard their customers as other companies, because that is who they sell to. But at the end of the day, they are not the end user. Someone told me once that if Henry Ford had asked his potential customers what they wanted, they may well have told him, a faster horse that doesn't need to eat, sleep or go to the toilet. Not that they wanted a car. His solution was to develop a way to make cars as cheap as horses to own, with all the benefits outlined above. For B2B companies, the hard bit would be to sell the fact that the customer is willing to pay more for the benefits. I think that this is a great way of testing the market to gain competitive advantage. Does anyone know of any other such schemes where companies are asking their customers to design their products, or know of any in the past that were successful?
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