Status Quo, Bicycles, and Innovation in Products that Matter!
Posted Jun 10, 06:29 am in business, business models, economics, environment, experiences, improvements, marketing, sustainability, transportation
UPDATE: I’ve continued my thoughts on the need for change in the bicycle industry in this post. You might want to read that one first before coming back to this one.
Status quo is there for a reason. People don’t like to change what they’re doing, and will find self-justifications for why they shouldn’t. This is true in many contexts; many of us have witnessed this in interactions at work, politics, and other social spheres. If someone is being forced by outside conditions to make a change in their consumption behavior or to purchase items that they weren’t planning on buying, they typically aren’t happy about it, and will find reasons to avoid doing it. That’s why companies that make high-involvement consumer products should really be proactive about finding ways to understand and address the dissatisfactions that consumers have about their products so that they can convert hesitating customers into excited, eager customers.
Case in point: bicycles.
I was picking up my treasured Cannondale bicycle from Revolution Bike and Bean, a cool bike repair shop in Bloomington, Indiana, and was talking with the owners about bike sales. Brad, the owner, was commenting that sales had risen considerably over the past year. I remarked that they would probably be even better if bike manufacturers had spent more time examining how people who don’t regularly ride bikes respond to them when they first get on, and understand why many people who bought them stopped using them.
Transportation in general can be viewed as a series of substitutes. If you don’t use one type of transit, you’ll use another. If you want people to choose your method of transit, you have to pose the argument in the form of benefits. Frankly, bicycle manufacturers have not been very effective at making their argument. They rely on the status quo, rarely if ever offering consumers new reasons to get on a bike. Ninety-nine percent of the effort bicycle companies make in bicycle improvements are incremental in nature and relate largely to shaving a few grams off the weight of the bike, and other such minor modifications that only bike nuts are likely to care about. The mainstream public— the largest piece of the bicycle pie, oddly— is left completely unspoken for.
I log a hell of a lot of hours on my bike, and even I have a huge list of complaints about bikes that are in need of being addressed. These aren’t things that will affect whether or not I actually use my bike —but this is only because I have already adopted it as my primary form of transportation. There are many people out there who currently drive, but who might like to adopt bicycles as their primary form of transport; unfortunately, most of those people never will. The reason they won’t is because they have their own status quo they are trying to maintain. They’ve always driven to work, so they always will. At least until someone offers a good reason why they shouldn’t.
But bike manufacturers don’t offer good reasons to switch that demonstrate new approaches to the biking paradigm. If you wanted to switch, you could have switched 10 or 20 years ago. There’s hardly any new reasons to switch. In almost every other industry, there are always new reasons to switch: think about improvements to cars, computers, televisions, appliances, anything! Those industries take constant efforts to make value propositions. But short of augmenting the available structural materials with things like carbon fiber, the bicycle industry has not made any significant leaps in decades. Now you might be wondering what kind of improvements I’m talking about.
Before I get into that, it’s important to understand something. Every time you make it hard for someone to do something, they are less likely to do it in the future. Repeat: Every time you make it hard for someone to do something, they are less likely to do it in the future. For those who haven’t adopted bikes as their primary mode or ever a regular mode of transport, everything that is annoying about bicycles is one more reason to not ride one. These may not even be major issues; they can just be small irritants. But small irritants add up. Think about these issues, for example, which constantly annoy me:
- It often takes a ton of time to lock up a bike. You need certain landscape features like lampposts, stop signs, or bike racks to lock your bike too.
- It’s near impossible to carry anything on a bike without a) buying expensive panniers to attach to the bicycle, or b) jury rigging a milk crate to your bike.
- bike chains get grease everywhere, especially on your clothes
- storing a bike indoors is often annoying because the handlebars stick out quite far
- getting a light on a bike is far more annoying than it should be, and you have to take if off and store it somewhere when you leave your bike to avoid having it stolen
- mud flies up from the wheels and gets all over your clothes
- there’s no way to store anything on/in your bike if you need to walk away for a few minutes
These are just some examples. They are not major things, but add them together and you have some serious irritants. Every time someone has a problem with their bike that involves one of these issues, it creates a negative perception of their bike and will drive them just a little further away from using it again. Eventually, people will feel so annoyed just thinking about the bike that they won’t even bother getting on. How hard are any of these to solve? I think they’re all solvable, and can be solved in a very simple manner. The question is why companies are not solving these issues, and spending so much time on stuff that only a tiny fraction of the potential market could possibly care about. Perhaps being gearheads make them lose sense of the big picture; or worse, maybe they are so entrenched in the way they’ve always done things that they resist any changes that might cause them to question the existing paradigm. It might even be that they don’t want to make changes that would make bicycle culture less technical and elite.
Yet, below I have written simple solutions to some these problems that could be easily implemented. Unfortunately, they are not the kind of ideas that gearheads would probably like, maybe because they seem too low-level and pedestrian; these are the kinds of changes that a non-biking scumbag might care about. Eww. But that’s where the room for growth is. If you’re trying to promote mass culture in the form of bicycles (and bike companies should be interested in this), they should be thinking about the issues that normal people might care about:
- A keyed lock system could easily prevent the wheels from moving. It may not prevent theft completely (someone could take the whole bike), but it could serve as a quick locking system in situations where there isn’t anything to lock the bike to, or when you only need to lock it up for a short amount of time.
- Bike are not well equipped to hold things/carry groceries. This is a major deficiency. If you want to make bicycles a viable primary form of transport for a mass audience, it needs to be able to handle at least some of the needs of a typical car owner. Almost everyone uses a car to get groceries. Make the bike a serviceable grocery carrying device, and you’ve given them one less reason to drive. Something as simple as places to hook on plastic bags, and metal guards that prevent plastic grocery bags from entering your wheels could make a huge difference.
- Regarding the grease: chain guards are for some reason disfavored by bike manufacturers, and they only put them on their lower end bikes. If you want a chain guard, you can’t even have one added because of the way the bikes are designed. How hard is it to have a chain guard be a default bicycle component?
- Pants and clothing can easily get caught in the chain. Not only does this ruin clothes, but it is dangerous, as you can be suddenly pulled by the chain off your bike if you aren’t paying attention. The only solution is to a) buy a bike with a chain guard—one cannot be added later!; b) roll up your pants c) wear shorts, or d) wear a Velcro pant holder strap. All of these options are subpar, and do not reflect the level of technological prowess that pervades our society. The bike could easily be re-designed to either move the chain out of the way of clothing, have it housed in an isolated unit, or at the very least have the capability of having a guard added
- Handlebars should fold for easier and more compact storage. Having two bikes takes up an inordinate amount of space, especially if you don’t have a garage. Simply having folding handlebars would allow one to take up half the space it did before.
- Bikes don’t have a built-in LED light source that can’t be stolen (required voltage for an LED light is so low that it could even be able to be dynamically powered, which is great because the old dynamos they had in bikes a few decades ago were pathetic and slowed you down big time). This would encourage people to ride even when it’s dark outside, and without having to carry their lights around by hand once they park their bike. There is absolutely no technological reason why this cannot be done.
- Currently, there’s no way to avoid getting wet during rain; this is a serious problems for bicycle commuters, and they have no way to get to school or work if they don’t have a car or mass transit options. This might sound like a silly problem to address; after all, the bike is not an enclosed unit. But it’s a big problem because it makes people feel like the bicycle is not a vehicle that they can use anytime, like their car; instead, they will feel that it’s a vehicle whose value is subject to external conditions and that there are minimum conditions that have to be met before using. That’s an attitude that is dangerous to allow to cement, and which should alleviated as quickly as possible. Surely it is possible to have a full plastic enclosure that can be propped up on the bicycle, and would keep the rider either completely or mostly dry. I believe in some parts of Asia, there are bicycle umbrella holders, but these are probably not that useful, given that the wind is often blowing, which makes rain go all over the place and would probably invert the umbrella too. I’m thinking more of a big see-through rectangular plastic box that goes over the entire bicycle and rider.
- When there is water on road, mud gets on your clothes from water being thrown off the tires. Mudflaps on non-racing bikes should be standard.
- There is no area on the bike to store possessions when leaving your bike parked for a while (the same way you might leave your things in the car when you go somewhere else). A small locking box could easily be built under the seat.
- No convenient place on bike for lock storage. This is partially the fault of lock manufacturers. Their lock holder designs are so horrible, illogical, and impractical that they are basically useless. Bicycles could easily have a standardized place for this.
- It’s too easy to steal the wheels. You can switch out a standard quick-release lock with one that requires an allen wrench (AKA hex wrench), but it’s still not that hard. I’m not sure how, but this can likely be fixed relatively easily.
- Geared bikes are a bit too hard for novices or casual bikers to maintain by themselves without getting into somewhat complicated and technical areas requiring a panoply of specialized tools. Make this easier!
- Bikes are heavy and unwieldy. Many of the above suggestions would make them even heavier, unfortunately. Newer designs should employ strong but light materials, perhaps like plastics or bamboo.
- Safety helmets are big, annoying, and hot. Is there any hope for a fix to this problem?
Bicycles are one of the most efficient forms of transport given the energy crisis and the increasing instances of obesity in our society, it is important for us as a society to encourage the use of bicycles. To do so we must address the reasons why people do not use them, and encourage bicycle manufacturers to address these issues in their next generation vehicles. It’s in their own best interest after all.