Germ-Kill Kit Case Study

In addition, the device had to be fail-safe from a consumer perspective – and so it needed indicator to signal the approaching end-of-life of the consumable refill component (which was subsequently named ‘Germ-Kill Kit’), and also to have an auto-shut off mechanism that would shut the flow of water when the germ-kill power of the consumable refill component was over. Notably, at the time, even premium UV and RO purifiers that were priced at USD 100+ did not have an end-of-life indicator, or a safety auto-shut off mechanism. The product design was further complicated by the fact that a sound understanding of the target consumer had translated into a whole range of ergonomic, aesthetic, and aspiration-related design requirements for the product.
Since water quality differed from area to area meant that the device had to effectively function against the three different types of harmful germs - the easy-to-kill bacteria, the harder-to-kill viruses, and the parasites that would have to be physically removed from water because they were most difficult to kill. Further, the output water would not only have to be safe to drink, but would also have to look clear, be odorless, and have a good taste since research revealed that it was difficult for consumers to believe that water could be safe to drink unless the aesthetics of the water also suggested so.

In developing Pureit, essentially a miniature water treatment plant was being recreated. What towns and municipalities did using a batch process in huge volumes was now being attempted as a continuous process within each piece of equipment meant for use inside a small home.

The team literally faced a new technical hurdle every week – and it took roughly 200 design changes spanning four years to resolve them all. At one point in this innovation journey we had a product that met all the target design specifications except one – the Germ-Kill Kit was four times the desired cost target. We went back to the drawing board to find innovative ways to dramatically reduce cost without compromising on quality.

CE1.5.2 Product
The product was tested at multiple locations i.e King George’s Medical College, Chennai, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and US EPA to establish its superiority against the existing set of competitors.

Finally, Pureit was soft launched in 2004, test marketed from 2005-2007, and taken national in 2008. To rapidly establish leadership positions in their targeted consumer segments, we followed a strategy of pricing the product at what the target consumer could afford, rather than following a cost-based pricing approach

HUL’s move into water purifiers was thus the beginning of many firsts for the organization: venturing into the consumer durables market; working backwards by identifying the consumer opportunity rather than the top-down leveraging of brand opportunity; developing new R&D and manufacturing capabilities in the consumer durables area; building a direct-to-home sales capability, and building consumer durables retail channel capability. Indeed, this was the first time, that HUL could not directly leverage many of its existing corporate competencies and synergies.

CE1.6 Final