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 ABOUT THE PRODUCT...
 Interview with Giovanni Cutolo


Some time ago, during a visit to a firm of the furniture sector, the manager, talking about the rising importance of the abstract factors in the selling of a product, said something like "What's communication? What's service? It's the product that is the most important thing. Without this it's like making love without "passion".

The manager you are talking about, like nearly all his colleagues, was making the mistake of forgetting that not everyone makes love, even the most passionate, always and only in one way. And even though it's true that the product is the greatest communicator of itself, it's equally true that nowadays it's become difficult to convince the market to make love only with products.
Nowadays the market falls more and more in love with other things. It falls in love with services, images, the abstract quality of goods, because the new consumer is less and less liable to the craving – a bit fetishist – for owning things, all the things. He is more clever, doesn't fall in ecstatic trance in front of his car anymore and doesn't wash it anymore in his days off, like when he had fallen in love with it many years ago. He even starts thinking that it's not the car he really needs after all, but rather the assurance of being able to move quickly from a place to the other, without effort and with the least number of hindrances as possible. And so here are industrial-business projects which go beyond the car as an object. We can just think of the project-product Smart, even though it's then partially failed, mainly because of its price, which was exorbitant in comparison with what the traditional cars market had fit itself out to offer.
Today – our manager-manufacturer will excuse us – the product by itself may not be enough anymore, even though it's beautiful, useful and cheap. Who makes it has to arrange, or at least to supervise, the way it has to follow from the Finished-Products Store of the factory to the houses and the places where it's used. So the manager has to face the problem in a way which is not the typical one of the nineteenth century, and he has also to become the manager of distribution and communication, not only of production.


Italian firms have always shown to be able to work on the product. They have more problems from the market point of view. How can they be helped to overcome such a handicap?
It's true that there are many examples of Italian firms able to work well at the solution of production problems but it's also true there're not few which have been able to connect to this ability also the one of introducing innovations into communication and distribution. Benetton, for example, or in a field I know better, Natuzzi. This is a firm which in 1991 was selling 80 models of couches to 700 sellers with a turnover of 7 billion liras; five years later it was selling the same 80 couches to 70 franchising shops with a turnover of 70 billions liras (in 1999 the franchisees became 115 and the turnover about 140 billions liras).
Firms have to understand that they don't only need to change products and that there's a great demand for creativity applied to the market and to its structures (shops, promotional events, advertising, etc.)


Small firms and great distribution: what are the possible relationships?
I don't know what they are. I'm nearly sure they're extremely dangerous, for small firms, of course.

Is it possible to conceive in our country a remarkable diffusion of e-commerce, like it already happens in the USA, for sectors like the furniture one?
I don't think so. Because the dimensions of US territory require and promote modalities of relationships completely different from the ones typical within the thick historical and human plot of old Europe. We're also talking about commercial relationships: for instance, we can just think of the great mail-order selling catalogues which in the USA were already used at the end of the nineteenth century and have never really caught on anywhere else.
And also because I don't think Internet can be successful outside the commodities, so that people will end up buying mainly what they know. And it's hard to think that the typical furniture buyer knows the products he thinks he needs, considering that we normally buy furniture two or three times in life.


Talking about furniture again, what problems will arise in the present distribution channels after the diffusion of e-commerce?
I think the greatest problems will consist in finding some ways which let the new live together with the old. The people who'll be able to exploit the e-commerce to shake up and modernise the old distribution structures and the traditional partners, will be good, especially if they'll manage to avoid at the same time all the brave amateurs ready to take the risk to ride the horse of a fake modernity and to use it as for their cheating or, even worse, only useless operations.

Text by:
Gloria Refini

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in cooperation with:
Elena Granchi
Sonia Morini

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