HBS CASES

HBS Cases: Clocky, the

Runaway Alarm Clock
Published: December 12, 2011
Author:
Carmen Nobel
There had not been an innovative
breakthrough in alarm clock design since the
snooze button until entrepreneur Gauri Nanda
created Clocky. Her runaway hit has been the
inspiration for several cases written by
Professor Elie Ofek. Key concepts include:
We have an intimate relationship with our
alarm clockbut we generally hate it.
Clocky was an attempt to create a clock
with
personality
and
unexpected
functionality, while avoiding the danger of
becoming a flash-in-the-pan fad.
The Clocky cases deal with a variety of
issues of importance to entrepreneurs,
including managing the growth phase, retail
strategy, and outsourcing manufacturing
and design.

In the spring of 2005, media outlets from

Gizmodo to Good Morning America were
buzzing about Clocky, an alarm clock that
jumped off the nightstand and rolled away
chirping and beeping, forcing its owner to get
out of bed to turn it off and stop the cacophony.
The publicity was unusual, considering that
Clocky wouldn't even hit the market until 2007.

"I would kill Clocky in

about two days."
Diane Sawyer
At that point, the device was just a project
that Gauri Nanda, a graduate student at MIT's
Media Lab, had developed for an industrial
design course. She hadn't planned to publicize
Clocky beyond a few photos on the course
website, but several gadget aficionado blogs
found the photos and linked to them. The buzz
went viral, eventually garnering Clocky a photo
on the front page of the L.A. Times, a mention
in Jay Leno's Tonight Show monologue, and a
question on Jeopardy!
Around the same time, Harvard Business
School Professor Elie Ofek was seeking case
studies for his second-year Marketing and
Innovation course.
"I was looking for new products and
innovations
that
were
unexpected
successesthings that you wouldn't anticipate

to catch on, and yet they didand trying to see

why that happened," says Ofek.
Clocky fit the bill. In the case "Clocky: The
Runaway Alarm Clock" (with Eliot Sherman)
and the follow-up case, "Nanda Home:
Preparing for Life after Clocky" (with Jill
Avery, HBS DBA'07), Ofek explores the
challenges that Nanda faced in designing,
positioning, marketing, and selling the animated
snooze-button thwarter, as well as the challenge
of expanding the company's product line.
The
cases
deal
with
universal
entrepreneurial consumer product questions:
Should the product be sold at big-box stores
or through upscale specialty boutiques?
(Nanda stuck with small museum shops and
specialty catalogs at first, in spite of all the
advance publicity.)
Is it better to partner with an American
product design firm and risk prohibitive
expense, or to team up with a less-expensive
overseas firm and risk the inherent quality
control and communications issues? (Nanda,
who was able to launch the product with
seed money from family members, retained
full design control but subcontracted
production to an Asian firm.)
More pointedly, the cases address the
reasons for Clocky's startling, unsolicited
publicity, along with an issue that faces any
entrepreneur looking to build a business around
an unconventional product that elicits multiple
reactions:
How do you balance fun and function in
order to avoid the danger of your product
becoming a flash-in-the-pan fad?

Clocky strikes a nerve

Until Clocky, there hadn't been any major
innovations in the alarm clock market since the
1950s, when General Electric-Telechron started
selling clocks with snooze buttons.
"For some reason, we had relegated the
alarm clock to be a low-involvement, low-cost
item with no emotional involvement, albeit with
a very specific function," Ofek says.
But for most of us, our relationship with
alarm clocks is both intimate and codependent.
It's the last thing we see when we go to sleep,
and the first thing we see when we wake up. We

COPYRIGHT 2011 PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

rely on it every morning, but we resent the

living daylights out of it.

"Because waking up on time is so

important, and for some people so difficult, they
end up developing an emotional reaction to an
alarm clock, even if it's something they don't
outwardly express," Ofek says. "And that
reaction is generally negative. When I poll
students in class and ask how many people are
chronic snoozers, lots of hands go up. Over
time they end up developing a negative emotion
to that alarm clock. What's outwardly a
low-impact $10 commitment is actually the
source of deep feelings because sleep is so
central to our lives." (According to the case, 57
percent of 25- to 34-year-olds hit the snooze
button daily in order to get an extra nine
minutes of shut-eye in the morning. Many of
them hit "snooze" at least three times before
getting out of bed.)
In the "Clocky" case, which Ofek has taught
for four years, the authors credit these universal
deep-seated feelings for the initial media
interest in the productand for the reactions it
engendered among journalists. Following a
demonstration of a prototype on Good Morning
America, for example, Diane Sawyer said, "I
would kill Clocky in about two days."

Fun vs. need

1

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL | WORKING KNOWLEDGE | HBSWK.HBS.EDU

When Nanda designed Clocky for her

course, she initially had a kitten in minda
robotic pet that would wake you up in the
morning, but that you couldn't help liking
because it was so cute. The Clocky on the
market today comes in chrome or plastic, but
the prototype Nanda built was covered in crude
furry carpeting. Yet in marketing the product,
she had to be careful to focus on function as
well as fun, lest Clocky be relegated to fad
status along with past products like Sony's
now-discontinued robotic pet dog, the AIBO.

"Apple succeeds because in

addition to providing an
appealing design, it does the
functions pretty well."
Elie Ofek
"Most fad items don't have a functional
element," Ofek says. "A Pet Rock doesn't have
a functional element. A Tickle Me Elmo toy
does not have a functional element. With
Clocky, even if the cuteness factor wears off, it
still has a functional element. Take Apple
products: The design does something to you,
but if competitors had products that blew Apple
away on function, the design wouldn't win you
over. Apple succeeds because in addition to
providing an appealing design, it does the
functions pretty well."
In the case, Nanda mentions the Roomba,
iRobot's robotic vacuum cleaner, as an example
of a product that manages to steer clear of
passing-fad status.
"I've heard a lot of people say that the
first-generation Roomba turned out to be a
gadget, a fad item, because after a while it was
a hassle to use and provided little results, even
if it was always fun to have running around the

house," Nanda says. "After seeing its product in

the field for some time, iRobot has since
improved the original Roomba and is
introducing other new products like the Scooba
[a robot mop] that are targeted to solve more
difficult household chores."

Next Steps
The follow-up case, "Nanda Home," which
Ofek began teaching this fall, revisits Nanda
and her company, Nanda Home, a few years
into Clocky's tenure, when sales had begun to
flatten. Revenues in 2009 were $990,000, down
from $1.5 million in 2008 and $2.2 million in
2007. Nanda, who had cut the original price of
the clock from $50 to $39 in order to spur sales,
knew she needed to extend the existing product
line or venture into new product categories in
order to grow the company successfully.
"This is another lesson for entrepreneurial
students," Ofek says. "How do you manage this
growth phase?"
The case describes the prototypes that
Nanda developed as potential complements to
Clocky: Ticky, which sported digital minute
and hour hands as opposed to a standard digital
interface; and Tocky, which had the ability to
upload MP3s so that owners could wake up to
their favorite songs rather than beeps.
At the same time, Nanda was playing with
new product ideas: a power-saving electrical
plug called the Spitlet, which would eject itself
from an outlet once its device was fully
charged; an ambulatory houseplant pot that
would move itself around in order to get
adequate sunlight; and the Follo, a roving robot
that would act as its owner's personal assistant.
Conducting consumer research on a
completely new product idea is a dilemma for
many entrepreneurs. "When you come to

COPYRIGHT 2011 PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

consumers with a concept that's completely

different from what they have or have seen,
they'll give you a negative reaction just because
it's unfamiliar to them," Ofek says.
History shows us that Nanda took a cue
from iRobot and decided to market Tocky.
Ofek remains in touch with Nanda,
reporting that she is now mulling the idea of a
children's alarm clock to be called Clockiddie or
Clockiddo that will not only wake kids in the
morning but also tell them bedtime stories and
sing songs at night.
"She realizes that for kids it's not just a
struggle to wake up, it's also a struggle to go to
sleep," he says. "But will the parents buy it?"
Might this be the subject of a third case?
"Time will tell," Ofek quips.
In the meantime, Ofek invites Nanda to
attend his class when the Clocky cases are
taught.
"I think she likes it because it gives her a
chance to have people poke at her ideas and
propose new ones," he says.

About the author

Carmen Nobel is senior editor of Harvard
Business School Working Knowledge.
Post a New Comment:
Name:
Position:
Organization:
Email:
I would prefer to remain
anonymous
By hitting Submit you
agree that your comment, in
Comment: whole or in edited form, may be
posted online. Comments are
selected on the basis of
relevancy and variety; not all
will be posted.