Your company has been able to digitize smell, how will you launch this new service?

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Your company has been able to digitize smell, how will you launch this new service?

Your company can be a new digital startup or a cloud based service that can host these smells. Go through entire GTM srategy and things to be considered

Asked at Google over a year ago

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pmbuddha · Answer 1 · 2020-11-11T13:48:57+0000

Interesting! To answer this Google product strategy question, I'd like to understand better what digitizing smell means, and then think about what potential user needs this type of technology could solve.

Some clarifying questions:

It seems like we can both capture and re-produce smells - is that accurate?
Are there limitations or technology/hardware needs to be able to capture a smell or reproduce it?
Do we have a primary objective for this? If not, I'm going to say it's to come up with a useful product that has high user adoption, and potential for monetization down the road.

Alright, with that information, the general framework I'm going to follow is identifying a primary user group and use case that we'd like to focus on, and from that, determine what our marketing message will be and what channels we should go through for GTM.

First, I'd like to think about user segments. The biggest way to split up users in my mind would be consumer vs. commercial applications. Typically commercial applications involve a bigger sales cycle though individual contracts are worth more than a single consumer. Is there one you'd like me to focus on? Ideally I'd come up with some ideas for what this technology could be used for, and then do some market sizing to pick a customer. If not, for now, we'll just assume this is for consumer and discuss some solutions there.

For consumer, in my own life, smells come up as a way to capture/remember memories (e.g., nostalgia), a way to set the mood (e.g., through candles, perfume, or even baking), a way to cover up other smells (e.g., Febreze or poo-pourri), and a way to prank people (e.g., leaving bad smells behind). If I were to break that down into some potential products, that could include:

Using your phone to be able to capture memories and relive them
Using it as a Travel VR enhancer
Being able to recreate restaurant experiences
Creating candles or other scented goods out of smells you've captured
Being able to send smells across the cloud to others ("Share" smells)
Being able to program an air scent for parties or home ambiance
Neutralizing smells by detecting them in the air and automatically balancing them out

I'd likely do some market research to see if there are other ideas out there, and otherwise, think about how we would estimate market size for these solutions and potential for revenue. It seems like there is a general theme around being able to create and relive memories so I'd double down on that and think about what types of consumers would be interested in this. Maybe parents for recreating smells of their children growing up, or couples for recreating smells of each other, or millennials for capturing smells of memories, or adults for remembering smells from childhood. Of these, I'd focus on the adults and couples markets given that it seems like there would be quite a bit of $$ spent there and an overlap in messaging about capturing memories in full.

GTM strategy wise, I'd also want to consider what channels could reach adults and couples. I'd probably think about a holiday-based launch - e.g., Christmas gift-giving or Valentine's Day so that the idea of memories is more important, and then work on video or FB ads to target my users. The commercial would show something like nostalgic memories that are faded or hard to remember then being enhanced with a smell.

So in summary, with this new technology, we would try to target consumers first and market it as a way to capture memories in full. In particular, we'd target couples and adults around gift giving.

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I'd love feedback on how to think about prioritizing this, and what other structure I could have used. I found it challenging to think about which particular user segment to go after without knowing what product I was going to use this technology for.