Given how smart our doorbells have become, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that even air fresheners are getting smarter, too. “We’re going after an unmet consumer need,” says David Turner, senior scientist in product design R&D at P&G. Turner’s team took the Febreze air freshener plug added an on-board computer chip to track usage and estimate the date of the next refill. “If you spend any time talking to consumers, they stop noticing the plug after just a few weeks” and forget to change it, he says. “We’ve gone after that consumer tension and been able to solve that.”
This new product from Febreze is a case study in creating a smart product that aligns with consumer behavior. (Click here if video doesn’t play.)