4. Being Design Driven
Design as a total concept—how iconic design-driven companies behave—a look at what your company needs to do to be design driven—how companies such as Apple, Samsung, and Interactive behave and how design is embedded in their culture.
Let’s say you know your company isn’t yet the icon you want it to be. Perhaps you’ve taken a few steps, tentative or assertive, but you aren’t yet a design-driven company from one end to the other. Well, you need to be. It isn’t easy; otherwise, more companies would be doing it. If your company, products, or services do not live in the gut of your customers as a positive emotional experience, you need to take a candid look at yourself and consider what you need to do to get started and keep going.
This chapter, and those that follow, provide a more "how-to" look at becoming design driven as a company. On your path, you need to progress through the following steps:
- Awareness of where you are and where you need to be.
- Commitment to taking the leap of faith.
- Implementation of some new approaches and people, taking half-steps to full steps.
- Vigilance to stay fresh and tap the most current customer needs for emotional experience. You also need to stay on top of every aspect of the customer experience supply chain so that all things that effect design are done properly and are coordinated.
Vigilance is important because companies that previously "got it" have shown that it is possible to "lose it." Rejuvenating and keeping the process alive is up to you. Before you start, you need that first step of awareness. The purpose of this chapter is to explore these topics—to begin to answer the question, "What is a design-driven company?"
Conrad Hilton was famous for a couple things, the least of which is having Paris Hilton as a descendant. He is notably more famous for saying that every member of his hotel staff is on the sales team, from bellhop to mail room clerk, to reservation maker to accountant. Hilton wanted the customer experience to establish a positive emotional connection to his brand. Every detail went toward that. Hilton’s hotels were among the first to put an H imprint in the white sand of the hallway ashtrays and to fold the toilet tissue into a triangle at the end.[5] The effect was to communicate to the customer, "We’re paying attention to every detail of your stay."
Hilton clearly had the customer experience in mind, but did that make his company a design-driven one? No. It wasn’t long before competitors were putting an S imprint in the sand of their hallway ashtrays, and it wasn’t too hard to fold the end of toilet tissue. Competitors on a misguided path even went to extremes of origami, enough to scare away the patrons from some complimentary items in fear of getting a paper cut.
A step toward awareness is recognizing what part of your design a competitor can easily replicate and what amounts to a truly iconic experience that cannot easily be copied.
A design-driven company has commitment from the top. Hilton had it while Conrad was around, but it has since devolved to become just another "respectable" chain. Hilton couldn’t retain its iconic quality without focus, vigilance, and freshness. As noted, Apple began to drift during the interlude when Steve Jobs was not present, but it quickly restored focus when he returned. By way of contrast, becoming design driven has proven to be difficult for Dell, which brilliantly built a business using superb traditional supply chain management rather than a focus on an intended customer experience. Companies must champion the commitment to become design driven with a relentless vigilance of the customer experience supply chain. This must start at the top and cascade to every aspect of the way a company operates.
That’s why a company doesn’t become a design-driven company without continuing executive leadership. It’s inevitably difficult, it’s not everyone’s initial passion, and you might need to do things that you’re not comfortable with or that you haven’t done before. People don’t perform that way unless they are inspired to, are forced to, or are given an incentive to do so—that’s human nature. Consequently you need a champion who understands all this and is willing and able to drive change through the system.
Apple continues to be an excellent example. Selling 25 million iPods can do that, as can being named the world’s most innovative company multiple times. Yes, we know—you read the press, and sometimes we all get sick of hearing from pundits. But the thing of it is, there are too few examples of companies that have really achieved this level of mastery when it comes to being design driven. However, consider this the good news, because this is also a notice of opportunity for you to get out there and lead a parade. If you look inside any design-driven company, you will find someone doing the job of chief experience officer. It’s what to do if you’re not Steve Jobs because you don’t have to be the chief executive officer to be the chief experience officer. It just so happens that Jobs holds both jobs (couldn’t resist that one), but it doesn’t have to be this way.
Back to Apple. What is it really about on the inside? What it’s about, according to Apple’s Senior Vice President of Design, Jonathan Ive, who was the 2003 winner of London’s Design Museum inaugural Designer of the Year award, "Not only is it critical that the leadership of a company clearly understands its products and the role of design, but that the development, marketing, and sales teams are also equally committed to the same goals. More than ever, I am aware that what we have achieved with design is massively reliant on the commitment of lots of different teams to solve the same problems and on their sharing the same goals."[6]
Ive says this is the reason so many new products are bland and derivative: "So many companies are competing against each other with similar agendas. Being superficially different is the goal of so many of the products we see. A preoccupation with differentiation is the concern of many corporations rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking the time, investing the resources, and caring enough to try and make something better."
Consider these characteristics of Apple’s design-driven experience:
- Driven from the top—The senior team is thoroughly committed to not only championing the design-driven strategy, but also making design and innovation a feature of the company’s DNA. According to Ive, this is a major part of Apple’s success as a design-driven company.
- Design-driven focus—Design is not applied as an afterthought or window dressing; it is a starting point. Design isn’t primarily about good looks, either. It’s about solving a problem by blending function and usability, often in an iconic style, to create an emotional connection with the intended customer. As Jobs tells it, it is about making products "that people love."
- Thinking differently—Greatness is not achieved by doing like everybody else. By thinking differently, you can make a difference. In some ways, Apple’s iPod had fewer features than competitors’ products, but the design of the feature set functioned to provide a better customer experience. People do get to love their iPods.
- Quick to prototype and market—A design-driven company doesn’t labor on a product until it’s perfect. To quote Jobs, "Artists ship." Instead, a design-driven company launches new products quickly and often, and it improves on them in response to consumer feedback. Recall how the iPod came out with a Windows-friendly version during its first year of release.
When you look at the companies that excel at design and are driven by it, you can see that they are, from the very beginning, searching for the right opportunity; they’re already thinking about the experience design possibility. When they find the opportunity, they begin to design it. When they move into engineering, the design of both the physical and emotional elements is very important to engineer. The emotional elements are not something to be eliminated because of costs. You have to figure out how to do it. Same thing in manufacturing. The selection of quality materials and how parts go together (fit and finish) must be an integral part of the design. Companies can’t view it as "Oh, we’re spending an extra 50¢—let’s cut that out." You must figure out how to do it, and then get the product into distribution.
Design-driven companies manufacture to the way they design instead of designing to the way they manufacture.
Consider another instructional and compelling Apple example: When the company creates something, it doesn’t force it into an existing manufacturing line and then wait to see what happens. When the product design uses clear plastic, the company actually changes all the lighting in the manufacturing facility, and everyone wears gloves. The company builds its line around the reality that "we have to maintain the quality of these parts": People need to be able to see the parts as the product moves along through a scratch-free system. Apple spends the money to do that. Another company might just say, "Let’s throw it on this line," and then "Oh, we’re having a lot of defects. This is too expensive—we can’t be doing this. The reject rate is too high." Design must carry into every corner of the process and, of course, into the promotion and into the market. That’s the idea of being design driven. It’s a process, not an event. It’s just the way you do things.
It’s important to understand how you become design driven. You don’t just flip a switch and make it an overnight event. You need to give it time. Progress is usually non-linear.
Courtesy of Apple Inc.
Apple did not start out as design-driven as it has become. As Apple focused on customer experience (above a lot of distractions), it became so. During the Scully years, the pioneering Apple Industrial Design Group was established by Brunner. It continued to do great design and build an exceptionally talented design team. But at the same time, management grew to misunderstand what Apple was really good at and what really mattered. Focus was quickly restored when Jobs returned and saw how the business had drifted. He realized that the company was not leveraging the full capabilities of a unique design infrastructure.
Design, as we discuss it here, is really a methodology you use to shape and create the relationship between you and your customer. Design means you are overtly creating, developing, prototyping, and manufacturing with customer emotion in mind, not just letting all this evolve and happen. Most companies go about doing their business in their little silos. Working independently, they concoct an experience in a haphazard way. Then they try to shape it all—this isn’t working here, let’s fix this one, then we’ll jump to this one. Although they might incrementally improve things, they aren’t aligned in any sort of "where are we going?" way.
Design is everybody’s business. And if a CEO is going to do it right, he or she needs to understand this. As you think about becoming a more design-driven company, you can use baby steps and big steps. But if you want to know in a nutshell, what do you need to do; you must build a development process that centers on people and an experience. You must give everyone an incentive to be an active part of this process. You must build a marketing process that can characterize and communicate those design ideas to people emphasizing design as an integral part of it all. You need to build an engineering system that understands that the people driving design sensibility and values are, at the same time, part of the marketing, engineering, manufacturing, and delivery equations.
So if you want to become more design savvy, you need to understand that it’s a total concept. You can’t just jam an in-house design department into place, like some airplane passenger who’s stuck between the two fat people in row 26. You’ll have to manage relationships among all the constituents and the stakeholders in the process. In product design, a classic dog vs. cat battle usually emerges between the industrial designer and the engineer. The engineer is always saying, "I’m not the artsy guy, and what’s all this stuff about how or what people should feel?" The industrial designer is saying to the engineer, "I don’t care if you have to walk over flaming coals to do it—just do it." Then all of engineering rolls its collective eyeballs to the chorus, "Here go the stylists again. They don’t know about engineering or manufacturing, and they’re screwing up this company."
One of the most critical aspects of creating a good product is the relationship between the designer and the engineer—it’s not a natural or easy one. You have to ensure shared values, a shared understanding, and a shared commitment—all reinforced by the right incentives and rewards that matter to each individual.
If you’re a designer, you can make one object perfectly. It’s a much greater challenge to make thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions. You can’t do that without the support of very talented engineering and manufacturing teams. You have to build that relationship and ensure that people understand why it’s valuable to spend the extra time and money. Then you need to respect the technical expertise that you work with and help them build the product. You also need to monitor the relationship with manufacturing and then how the product is delivered to the consumer. You can learn a lot when you watch a customer unpack your product. Are they delighted or not? Did you make a good first impression? You need to know. We’re talking about managing the entire customer experience supply chain.
In summary, a sequence of events drives a design-driven company:
- The customer need
- The product that emotionally answers that need
- The orchestration of design, manufacturing, and delivery of that product to the customer
- The vigilance to keep looking ahead to the next customer need and the next product
That’s the cycle, and the process need not be painful once everyone understands the deal and has the right incentive. Then you roll forward to continuing profitability. With that in mind, let’s take a look at a company or two where this works well—and a couple where it turned out their cornbread wasn’t baked all the way through to the middle.
Positive Examples of Design-Driven Companies
Sticking with some big names for a moment, we have BMW, IKEA, Nike, and Samsung. The IKEA business concept is a terrific case in point. Its catalogue and user manual enable customers to do their own interior design and assemble the furniture—all part of its value to the customer. Instead of just being a consumer, the customer becomes a coproducer or cocreator, filled with an experience of achievement.
Now let’s look to a big-name company that, while it may not be exactly like your own, made a dynamic shift from business as usual to become a design-driven company. We speak here of Samsung, where there are lessons for us all.
Design for the Seoul—Samsung’s Turnaround
In 2006, BusinessWeek rated Samsung as 20th on the top 100 global brands list and number 1 in the electronics industry. Business Week also placed Samsung as number 12 in a ranking of the "Top 100 Most Innovative Companies" in a special report published on April 24, 2006. In January 2007, BrandFinance ranked the company as the number-one global brand in electronics. Yet as recently as 15 years ago, some regarded Samsung as just a second-tier manufacturer of cheap electronics. What happened?
In 1994, Samsung’s chairman, Kun-Hee Lee, who had a net worth in the billions and was one of the richest and arguably the most powerful man in South Korea, began transforming the company into a design-driven one when he aimed to sell top-quality branded electronics products at premium prices. To accomplish this, the company needed the cultural equivalent of an extreme makeover to envision products that would appeal to the much broader global market. The company already had a design staff and frequently hired design consultants. However, the results had been inconsistent. So Lee, who had spent his college years in Japan and the United States, hired a Japanese design consultant to take a hard and honest look at Samsung’s strengths and weaknesses. The verdict was a surprise. The consultant said Samsung already had world-class designers on its staff; the problem was in the process.
Lee sent 17 Samsung employees to the Art Center College in Pasadena to see what they could learn about creating a similar design facility in Seoul. In return, the school sent a team of its people to Seoul, where Gordon Bruce, an industrial design consultant who acted as the school’s liaison with Japan, and James Miho, chairman of the school’s Graphic, Packaging, and Electronic Media Department, were among those invited to Lee’s house for dinner. This was a rare treat because Lee is a virtual recluse who rarely visits his own company sites. Lee had in mind an Innovation Design Lab, eventually known as ids, which was to be housed in an eight-story $10 million building in Seoul. He asked Bruce to serve as chairman of product design and Miho as chairman of new media.
The design-driven path they laid out had to weave its way through as many downs as ups, but the futuristic innovating spirit of looking to consumer electronics needs generated an array of high-definition TVs, computer monitors, digital cell phones, video cameras, music players, and still cameras. Meanwhile, Sony, once the company everyone looked to for electronic products, had channeled much of its money into the music and movie industries. Its U.S. executives had become so paranoid about piracy that they were reticent about approving product capabilities that could possibly be used for duplicating digital media files. Samsung surged into the vacuum, but not without that occasional dip in the road that comes with taking risks.
In a Wired article,[7] Frank Rose describes a rare visit by Lee to one of Samsung’s biggest plants in Gumi, a south-central Korean factory town. Lee had sent out Samsung’s new wireless phones as a 1995 New Year’s gift, only to learn they didn’t work. Something was about to hit the fan, and no one would be confusing the fragrance with Chanel Number 5. As Rose put it, "At Lee’s command, the factory’s 2,000 employees donned headbands labeled ’Quality First’ and assembled in a courtyard. There they found their entire inventory piled in a heap—cell phones, fax machines, nearly $50 million worth of equipment. A banner before them read ’Quality Is My Pride.’ Beneath the banner sat Lee and his board of directors. Ten workers took the products one by one, smashed them with hammers, and threw them into a bonfire. Before it was over, employees were weeping."
In his New Year’s address, Lee proclaimed 1996 as the Year of Design Revolution, referring to design in the broadest sense—not just styling, but consumer research and marketing as well. Engineers had previously defined new products and decided what features to give them; now specialists in everything from industrial design to the cognitive sciences would embrace that role. "Most of us didn’t understand what he was talking about," says Kook-Hyun Chung, the senior vice president who heads the Corporate Design Center in Seoul. "Now we understand that we have a new, bigger, broader responsibility."
But another dip in the road loomed ahead. Part of Samsung’s strength was its vertically integrated, globally networked manufacturing, which enabled it to save millions by making its own memory chips and LCD screens. By 1997, the market for memory chips plunged. At the same time, the Korean currency, the won, plummeted (along with all the overextended East Asian currencies) to half its value, pushing Samsung toward bankruptcy. In response, Samsung had to eliminate businesses and lay off as many as 24,000 factory employees—30 percent of its workforce—and move much of its manufacturing to other locations in Mexico, Brazil, Hungary, Slovakia, China, and Malaysia. In 2000, the company took another hit when it tried to enter the automobile business.
How a design-driven company handles its setbacks, as well as successes, shows through. By staying tuned to design and using consumer research as a window to emerging needs and possibilities, Samsung was quick to make the shift from analog to digital. As the Korean economy recovered, the company outstripped many of its competitors with products such as a 56-inch DLP high-definition television—a U.S. Super Bowl party animal’s dream. What made it all work? A driving eye to the global consumer market of the future, not the past. As Rose describes it, "Samsung put together an elite creating new businesses (CNB) group to explore long-term social and technological trends that could spark new product lines."
CNB is one of Samsung’s secret weapons: a team of designers from different business units who look into the future. Ki-seol Koo, the vice president who heads the organization, was a TV designer who found his new assignment bewildering at first. "There was no agenda," he recalls. "We were just told to come up with something. Normally you have a road map to follow—you know what’s going to happen months from now. But this was blank." Now the unit’s approximately 30 members develop animated what-if films and 3D mock-ups to show top executives how products might be used in some future world. "It’s not about what’s happening now," Koo says. "It’s about imagining what our living environment will be like five or ten years down the road."[8]
Interface Gets in the Face of Business as Usual
Going "green" is all the rage these days, but one of the first companies to see this light, respond to it, and actually benefit at the bottom line was a company called Interface. With annual net sales of more than a billion dollars, Interface is the world’s largest manufacturer of commercialized floor coverings.
If you’ve ever needed carpet hauled to a landfill, you know it comes with a whopping fee because of the nonbiodegradable content of carpets. Interface was generating tons of solid, liquid, and gaseous waste during production, not to mention more than 920 million square yards of used carpet being heaved into U.S. landfills annually. Ray C. Anderson, CEO, had an enlightening experience in 1994 when he read The Ecology of Commerce (Collins, 1994), by Paul Hawken. He was not merely moved; he decided to do something about it, and that something involved design.
Changing the business from one that hadn’t given a second thought to its impact on the environment for more than 20 years to one making a conscious effort to clean up its act meant reinventing the carpet-making business to become environmentally friendly, and becoming aware of how to make positive changes to its product at every stage of its life cycle.
The company’s design consultant, David Oakey, was reluctant to buy into the new vision. When he gathered a group of people from all over the company to investigate the notion, they came to some surprising conclusions. Chief among these was that the company had been designing its products poorly in the first place. The group members considered ways to eliminate waste when making the products, such as using less fiber. They considered what materials could be recycled and ended up eliminating waste in the manufacturing process. They also put an end product that could be recycled at the front end of their considerations. And that, along with the other steps, serendipitously helped lead to two of the company’s most innovative brands.
Images © Flor
With one of the products, named Wabi, Oakey asked his manufacturing people if they could make the pile lower. When he kept insisting that it be lower than what they came up with, one technician, in an outburst of frustration, suggested that if he wanted the pile that low, why didn’t he just turn the carpet upside down? That actually worked. Customers loved the simple, minimal look that fit the growing trend toward hard finishes and away from textiles. Serendipity can be a real part of how a design-driven culture strikes gold.
Something similar happened with Solenium, another breakaway success for Interface. In a discussion about the success of Wabi, someone said that it was a shame the company couldn’t make carpet out of recycled pop bottles the way it did with Teratex, one of its paneling fabrics. That led to the invigorating question of "Why not?" The result was Solenium, a carpet with the look and feel of fabric, the cleanability of vinyl, and the serviceability of replaceable squares. A lot of educational and health care facilities found it perfect for their needs.
As it turned out, the path to thinking differently about every consumer need, was also the creative path to carpet tiles that can fit any sized space and eliminated many carpet sample books in favor of better-illustrated catalogs and Internet samples (www.thesamplecenter.com). Making 100-percent recycled and recyclable products is one step, but the goal was to manufacture in a sustainable way. That goal has forced the company to be more creative in rethinking everything it does, and it has led to doing things in better ways with lower costs. The green that Interface was aiming for also turned out to be the color of money.
© Michael Graves & Associates
Getting on Target with Target
Yogi Berra once said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." That’s exactly what the mass-merchandise chain Target did. Founded in 1962, about the same time Kmart and Wal-Mart began, it has defined itself by taking a different direction. Although Kmart and Wal-Mart are both price oriented, Target has consciously aimed to be design oriented. It might generate only $60 billion a year, compared to Wal-Mart’s $350 billion a year. And Target might have only 352,000 employees, compared to Wal-Mart’s almost two million employees as the nation’s largest employer (a good chunk of whom must be just generating W-2 forms). But Target is quite comfortable with its particular niche. A Gallup poll on mass-merchandising trends in 2002[9] indicated that only 16 percent of shoppers polled with incomes of $20,000 or less choose Target, but that climbs to 47 percent among those with annual earnings of $75,000 or more. The median age of Target shoppers is 37, and 80 percent have attended college;[10] 97 percent of American consumers recognize the Target bull’s-eye logo.
Target has targeted the yuppie and puppy yuppie shoppers with designs that are fun, unpredictable, yet still affordable. It attracts these customers with unique products designed by the likes of Michael Graves, Isaac Mizrahi, Mossimo Giannulli, Fiorucci, Liz Lange, and Philippe Starck. Graves’s work, for instance, tickles the emotional fancy with chubby toasters, whimsical teakettles, sleek candleholders, and egg-shaped utensils. The egg shape is part of his signature style, and it has begun to appear on Target’s garden furniture and timepieces as well. The scale of producing these goods for nearly a thousand stores enables the store’s customer base to enjoy such eclectic goods.
The products are only part of the design. Target also distinguishes itself with other store-wide touches that contribute to the jokingly French pronunciation of "Tar-zhay" that many customers use. These differentiators are all part of Target’s overall design:
- No Muzak or ambient music
- No promotions through a public address system
- Wider aisles
- Drop ceilings
- Artful displays of merchandise
- Cleaner fixtures
- References to customers as "guests"
- No firearms or even realistic firearm toys sold
- No tobacco products sold
So Target might be fifth in size behind Wal-Mart, The Home Depot, Kroger, and Costco, but it remains first in the hearts of many of its selective customers, and it achieves this by design.
Some Not So Positive Examples
A point we’d like to emphasize is that even companies that get on the path of being design driven might have rogue cells in their DNA that can multiply into a potentially fatal flaw. The risk is almost always to do with losing that magic that got them where they were and backing away from a living approach that ensured freshness and ongoing vision. They might have developed success-induced megalomania, slipped into rigid thinking, not understood how they got there in the first place, or not fully committed to being design driven.
Starbucks Slips in Coffee
Just a few short years ago, it seemed everyone was singing the praise of Starbucks, a company that seemed destined to have one of its shops on every street corner of every city. At first, the success story was all about the customer experience. Then suddenly, news came of Starbucks pulling back on its expansion plans. What happened? After growing to nearly 15,000 stores, the first quarter of 2008 marked a 3 percent decrease in U.S. transactions. Shouldn’t that number have gone up?
Let’s face it—at $4 for a cup of coffee, you’re not just buying a cup of coffee. You’re paying for a unique experience, a trip to Milan to sit at a sidewalk café. You’re paying for a carefully selected bean that is handled and brewed in the best way. The air is alive with the smell of freshly brewing coffee. You’re in a clean, well-lighted place, as Hemingway would put it. It’s a social place where you can meet others. And you’re getting something you can’t get just anywhere.
Here you see the making of the flaw. With a Starbucks wherever you go, the experience is hardly unique anymore. Furthermore, the experience is subject to commoditization. Witness the McDonald’s chain addition of coffee baristas to many of its stores. And now you can get Café Select at 7-Eleven convenience stores. Starbucks is even available in vending machines. The hip drink of the 1990s threatens to become the ho-hum drink of the new millennium, and the sales numbers are the slip that’s showing. Did we also mention that Starbucks’ market cap walked off a cliff?
What happened to the ambience and style that led Starbucks’ director of creative services to be referred to as "the keeper of the look"? Myra Gose, who filled that role until 1997 when she left after spending 18 months planning for the chain’s birthday party, once said, "All our design, whether it’s a packaged food or a new mug, needs to make sense and tell what we’re about." So what happened?
For one, the magnificent La Marzocco traditional espresso machines were replaced with soulless super-automatics. They’re easy to use for the recently hired "barista" (even Homer Simpson on a bad day could use one), but it’s a far step from that trip to Milan. In the face of increasing competition and a diluted uniqueness of experience, it was hardly the time to be cutting corners. The experience was further diminished by a number of other merchandising ploys (deals with music companies, sandwiches, and so on) that all defused the original focus of providing a unique experience.
What’s the company to do? Perhaps taking a cue from Apple, in January 2007, the company brought back Howard Schultz, who founded today’s Starbucks in 1987.[11] He openly stated his intention to "reignite the emotional attachment between the consumer and the coffee."[12] With stock selling at that time for about half of what it sold for the previous year, Schulz planned some drastic measures. He placed approximately 100 underperforming stores on the block, and he phased out the warmed breakfast sandwiches because "the scent of the warmed sandwiches interferes with the coffee aromas in our stores." Starbucks began to market-test an 8-ounce short cup of coffee priced at $1 (let’s see, a Starbucks for a buck—there’s a concept).
The company also announced 600 layoffs, and the temporary closing of its 7,100 U.S. stores for three hours of employee training. The coffee chain said the in-store training program would foster enthusiasm in its 135,000 U.S. employees and improve the quality of drinks made by Starbucks baristas. "We believe that this is a bold demonstration of our commitment to our core and a reaffirmation of our coffee leadership," said chief executive Schultz in a statement.[13] We’re not filled with warm fuzzies yet.
Is it too little, too late? That will depend on whether Starbucks is able to reinvent itself. Apple pulled that off when Jobs returned. Starbucks seeks to do the same with the return of Schultz.
Polaroid Loses Focus Lock
Yep, that sound you heard was from Polaroid, a once-proud design-conscious company, as it swirled and let out a gasp as it headed down the porcelain bowl.
The Polaroid story begins with a designer, Edwin Land, who dropped out of Harvard after only one year and invented a polarizing film just in time for it to be used in World War II for photo reconnaissance. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Polaroid made most of its money from its camera that went color in 1972—the legendary SX-70. Ideas kept percolating in the company, including the special cameras used for passports and security badges, Polaroid sunglasses, 3D movie glasses, and the not-so-successful Polavision that was a flop in 1978.
© Polaroid Corporation
By the 1990s, Polaroid was still trying to be design driven, but it wasn’t quite making the connection to what was going on in the world around them. The suddenly ubiquitous one-hour photo labs initially threatened the instant-picture concept; then the arrival of the digital camera drove a spike through its heart. The company was in debt equal to 42 percent of its capital in 1995 when Gary Di Camillo came on board as CEO; five years later, that amount had grown to 60 percent. Marketing and administration took 37 percent of what came in from sales. Polaroid was a listing ship that would soon be sinking.
As Wally Bock put it, "By the end of the 1990s, Polaroid was thrashing around like a drowning swimmer. First they were concentrated on new product innovation. In 1998, they introduced 25 new products. Similar numbers followed in 1999 and 2000. There were lots of products, but many weren’t very good and the good ones were late to market."[14] It wasn’t until 2000 that Di Camillo decided Polaroid should become a "digital imaging company," long after the competition was firmly entrenched in that market. Polaroid should have driven one-touch simplicity and immediacy into digital. Instead it squandered billions of dollars of the consumer equity it had created.
Again, see the irony here: The company that invented instant photography was beaten into irrelevance by the invention of digital instant photography. Polaroid’s failure to understand the essence of its customers’ experience and the emotional thrill of instant was a fatal flaw. It built a technology company on customer delight and failed to notice customers’ changing needs and interests. As they say, if you can’t be a shining example, you’ll just have to be a terrible warning. Consider yourself warned.
Implementation
So you can start with a product, hire a consultant, and reorganize from within, but total commitment from top to bottom must eventually rule the day if you are to become truly design driven. Let’s say you hire a consultant to work on one product with you. You let that consultant work with your team and you give the consultant your support. Together you can drive that one product through, although you’ll endure some bruises along the way. But if you want to do it over the long term, you need to start looking at the overall structure of things—how resources are allocated, how people are given incentives, what the culture is, and how you can operate from a customer-experience perspective. Learn what you can change, because that’s how you achieve longevity.
That’s why being design driven is a process, not an event. You can do an event once, but unless you make some fundamental changes, you’ll go back to doing things the way you did.
To use Dell as an example, one of the general managers asked us to look at the company’s overall product-design experience from the concept to delivery and beyond, and evaluate the flow to see how to improve it all. The inquiry unearthed a tangle. When we looked at all the organizations that impacted what came in the box to the customer, we found that they didn’t communicate with each other. They didn’t have a shared strategy or vision. Resources were allocated across industrial design, engineering, manufacturing, packaging, and instructional products in a way that was inconsistent with building the kind of design-driven capabilities we have discussed. Nobody had any performance criteria around design. Nobody got a bonus for creating a really great design and designing a great customer experience. They all got a bonus if it was delivered on time, if they reduced cost, or if they met other similar criteria.
We told the manager we could do the strategy piece and could give him a common approach and set of values for everyone to use when creating materials. But to make any significant change, we told him, the company needed to restructure. It needed to reallocate resources and change people’s incentives. At the time, the company wasn’t willing to do any of this because it was just too difficult. Its approach was more like this: "Okay, we’ll pay you some money and you’ll write a document—we’ll distribute it to everybody, and then it’s back to business (as usual)." To really be a design-driven company, you have to be willing to reengineer the way things are done. Yes, once again, Dell has put out some really good-looking products lately. Our wish for the company is for it to become a master of customer experience supply chain management, because their mastery of commodity supply chain management will not sustain them.
When you’re starting a design strategy for your company, you can think of it similar to the architecture of a building. In that light, we would say, "The first thing about a brand or a product line is that you’ve got legacy. And you cannot quickly divorce yourself from a legacy. It’s there—you have to recognize it." A lot of companies make a mistake here. They say, "We’re known for a bad design experience, so we’re changing that tomorrow; we’re coming out with a new product." And your customer will look at it and say, "Oh, hey, that’s kind of a nice thing from company X, but I still remember all the other crap they put out. They’ll never keep this up."
Our recommendation is that you look at this as two tiers. On the lower tier is the legacy. You want to embrace your positive legacy. You want to take the things you’re known for—how people feel about you, the good aspects—with you into the future. When Microsoft asked us to take a look at Windows, we came up with these three words: qualified, understated, and reliable. By qualified, we mean that it’s a standard. People know it—it’s Microsoft. It’s an entity that obviously is here and will continue to be here. The product is understated in the sense of productivity and professionalism. And it’s reliable—not in the sense that it doesn’t crash, but that most people don’t worry that Microsoft will disappear tomorrow. Then you ask, "How do I build on top of that? How can we change the idea and the experience to be different?"
How Do You Know How Your Customers Feel?
What you really want to do is get out and understand what people are doing, how they’re doing it, what’s going on in their lives, what their issues are, and what problems they face. You have to learn what a phrase such as "it just works" means to them. You need to not only see and hear this concept, but also understand it at a level that helps you look for opportunities. You need to step outside your own little box and immerse yourself until you feel that you have made a genuine and usable discovery. Then out of that discovery, you build a map of ideas, opinions, and assumptions, and you go off and create stuff. Later, you need to go back and validate against those assumptions.
From your discovery process, you should learn that this idea of yours is something people need; this is the way they do things now; and this is how they want to do it. You go off and design to that specification. Then you put what you’ve designed back in front of the people who revealed the need you discovered. You say, "Okay, use it," and you wait and see what happens. You notice that one guy can’t find the on-off switch, another person can’t get the lid open easily, and another person has trouble reading a screen. You are validating your assumptions, learning whether you’ve hit them or missed.
If, on the other hand, you start by saying, "OK, we’re going to do this product—let’s ask people what they like," you wind up with the sort of mediocre outcome that comes of designing by committee. When people think as a group, they end up liking a bland type of product because that’s what makes most of them feel comfortable.
If you go develop your product and later play show-and-tell again, the group might say, "Yeah, yeah, I like that." So you bring it to market, and lo and behold, everything out there has changed and moved forward, and what you now have is a boring product that’s based on the collective opinions of the 7 out of 12 people who liked it. We refer to it as the "7 out of 12 syndrome." You’ll be basing your entire business strategy on the fact that 7 people out of a group of 12 expressed a "like" in a certain direction.
At Apple, someone would come in from HP, Sun, or wherever, and really struggle with this concept for a while. They would say "Wait a minute, you guys are putting all this effort into this stuff, but you’re not consumer-testing it." They wanted to apply all the usual corporate process-driven metrics. This path can lead to death, or at least mediocrity. Mediocrity is what you end up with if you try to make something everybody likes. Apple didn’t target the iPod at everybody. Research and testing can be a deadly double-edged sword. You need to be very clear about what you want to learn and what you can draw from it.
What happens with a lot of companies when they do that kind of research is they put a design in front of customers and say, "What do you think?" And the customers say, "Well, I don’t know; I don’t know if I like this; it’s new; it’s scaring me; it’s too big; it’s too round; it’s too square." That’s the kind of responses you get. People who use this kind of research come back and say to the designers, "People think this is too square—you’ve got to make it more round." Most customers have a difficult time articulating their design preferences. You can do far better by watching, listening, and observing.
Cost Factors
A lot of people and companies like to put the cart before the horse and talk about cost first. Well, if cost is everything, you might find yourself sitting beside the road with your hat in your hand while other companies take a risk and surge around you. However, out of respect for these general concerns, let’s talk about costs for a moment. Yes, it’s true that being design driven is initially more expensive because you’ll need to invest time and money doing things you haven’t done before that you need to learn to do well. Initially, the product cost might be more because you will run into processes and technical issues that you haven’t ironed out or fully considered as you move to the future.
The thing about Apple is that they will create something that might initially be more expensive, but the company realizes it’s fine for this first time around—they’ll figure out how to choreograph the cost out of it. That’s the great thing about the human experience—if you place really good people on an idea and give them a clear directive, eventually they figure it out. Where a lot of companies fail is they give up the first time because they can’t figure it out right away.
Go ahead and build it the way you want the first time. Give it your best shot, and then set loose your army of operational maniacs to figure out how to eke out the pennies. Along the way, be really grounded on what makes or breaks the design and the experience. If you start with too many constraints—that it has to be a great design, but it can’t cost another 10¢ over what it does today, and we have to build it in our existing factory—then you end up only nominally better in the short run and inevitably worse off in the long run.
The Human Factor
Whether you are recruiting for design-driven talent or you want to send your current executives to a school that will immerse them in customer-experience thinking, the good news is that such places exist.
Stanford University’s D-School is one such place. Consider its stated mission:
We believe true innovation happens when strong multidisciplinary groups come together, build a collaborative culture, and explore the intersection of their different points of view. Many talk about multidisciplinary collaboration, but few are actually successful at sustaining attempts to see what will happen. Even strong partners often lose interest because they cannot get along well enough or long enough to see the fruits of the collaboration. We believe having designers in the mix is key to success in multidisciplinary collaboration and critical to uncovering unexplored areas of innovation. Designers provide a methodology that all parties can embrace and a design environment conducive to innovation. In our experience, design thinking is the glue that holds these kinds of communities together and makes them successful.[15]
Other schools with programs or courses include The Institute of Design (ID) at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Harvard Business School’s course "Managing the Innovation Process," Northwestern’s "Product Development and Design" class, Georgetown’s "Developing New Products and Services" class, an elective at the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business, the Product Development track for MBAs at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School executive program ("Design, Innovation, and Strategy"), and INSEAD’s joint program with the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
According to a Business Week article, "With MBA enrollments down … schools are striving to become more relevant to prospective students."[16] The need for a creative component that understands the customer experience is increasing. BusinessWeek says one indication is that "many companies are going directly to top design firms to set up customized executive-education sessions. Most of these involve getting the CEO and his top managers out shopping for the things their company sells. It’s a game of ’be your customer’ that, despite its simplicity, can have enormous impact. Samsung has learned a great deal about design by attending various sessions at IDEO and other consulting firms."
If you look at most of the Ivy League’s business school structure, it delivers captains of industry that should wear a handicapped sign with respect to design sensibilities.
The next chapter explores how the design-driven concept needs to extend to your brand and uncovers how your brand is way more than just your company’s logo.