Did you know that you can make a functioning product or a part for a machine by just scanning it and letting a 3-D printer build it instantly? Have you ever seen a 3-D printer? Can you grasp just how fast we can create an awesome product and manufacture it in a space smaller than your cube at work? I have see it happen, on the Web – where I see everything else in the world.
To make a complicated story short, it is a “printer” that makes a 3-D model or prototype of something, almost anything, actually. For instance, it can make antique car parts that are no longer manufactured simply by scanning the old part and creating a 3-D plastic prototype for building a mold. Or it can make the product itself, if you want it in plastic. It can even assemble a gear or a steam engine. Scan a wrench and it will create a functioning plastic wrench. Check it out with Jay Leno here:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/jay_leno_garage/4320759.html
Next Engine makes these things and a quick click through their site shows a few things they can do. 3-D printing is all over Google.
In their book, “Baked In,” Alex Bogusky and John Winsor talk about one of the 3-D printers at CPB (the ad agency). They mention making sunglasses with the correct prescription in the lenses. I am still wrapping my mind around that.
As cool as it is to imagine instant products, how cool is it to imagine that your spare bedroom could, with a small investment of approximately $20,000, be a product incubator. Start your own manufacturing plant for ideas. When the manufacturing plant of the future is your garage, what happens to the big factories on the edge of town? The same thing that happened to typesetters and color-separators when the Mac launched. Technology put the power to change the world into a tiny plastic box and gave it to us. Mine has an apple on it.
Before 3-D printing, the toughest part of getting a prototype built for what might be the next big thing, or the next big flop, is the considerable machinery that is needed to turn your genius into reality. Now that machinery will fit on your kitchen table with room left for a pizza.
Speaking of pizza, brands of the future will carry their own stories. A successful brand has an inherent story by nature. The story is baked in.
That’s the subject of Baked In. The future of branding will be products that inherently have their branding “baked into them”. It began with Quakers selling better seeds years ago (that is one of the stories in Baked In, thank you Alex and John).The iPhone is it’s own ad, for instance. A Mini Cooper is a brand on wheels, as is a Segway. Sheetz and Wawa are three dimensional marketing campaigns sitting beside the highway. Starbucks is still in business because they did it. Saturn tried to be, but it was a product with the branding painted on. We all know which products baked in their brands. They are surviving the worst economy since The Grapes Of Wrath.
In this thinking, the product or experience is the branding. You don’t have to make up stuff in ads to give these products an advantage. The product screams its own message. Listen, you hear that? It is coming from your pantry.
If you watch how people react to your product in their lives; how they use it; how they talk about it (not in focus groups but in community groups), how they have passion for it (or not), you will find out if your brand is baked in. It is like trying to separate the smell of cookies from the cookies themselves. If you bake in your story, you will see how people react to your branding and your product at the same time – because they are one. They cannot be broken apart.
The old corporate silo was invented during the industrial age to manage different group functions. It served an operational purpose for decades. Today, there simply are no more budgets for silos. I’m not saying the world is flat, but the wrinkles are getting ironed out minute by minute. I feel the same way about offices.
I work in an office, yet 80% of the people I know and work with are not in my office. They may not be in an office at all. They are connected to me and the world by a laptop or mobile device. So why should we pay for the overhead of an office when our overhead can be the shade of a bursting orange tree or the porcelain sky? We could pass the physical savings on to our customers as one of our advantages. Amazon has always done this. Soon, more of us will be doing it.
Social networking is a real conversation today. I speak daily to friends I have not seen in years. If I want to work with them, why do I have to go where they are, or them come to me? We can work right now as fast as you can read this sentence.
Which brings us back to the cool, 3-D printer. No silos. No factory. No office. Just you, your idea, and the machine that will create it. If everyone had one of these things, how quickly would we be swimming in innovative products?
Look, there is one floating over there now.
Links:
https://www.nextengine.com
http://www.bakedin.com
http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/29/objet-geometries-set-to-unveil-multi-material-3d-printer
http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/14/desktop-factorys-cheapo-3d-printer-is-coming