Author Archives: Diego Rodriguez

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

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Any startup is hard.  Startups involving internal combustion engines are even more difficult to pull off than the usual venture.  Demanding distribution, sales, service, and support logistics, not to mention the sheer complexity of a modern vehicle, makes a vehicular startup an endeavor for the very brave of heart, the very wealthy, or (hopefully) both.

The Motoczysz company of Portland, Oregon, is working to market the innovative motorcycle shown above.  It’s full of innovative mechancial design elements, and the aesthetics ain’t bad, either.

Let’s wish them luck.

VCitis

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Now, some of my best friends are in the venture capital industry, but Dave Hornik’s creative connection between Narcissistic Personality Disorder, your average VC, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is just too funny to pass up:  VCitis

When Bad Things Happen to Good Brands

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No matter how carefully you design a brand experience for customers, bad things will happen.  Some will simply be beyond your control.  Recent heart bypass surgery recipients will waltz into your store, try to use the restroom, and end up glued to the toilet seat in a lonely stall. 

No, this isn’t something out of The Onion:  Man’s glued ass spurs lawsuit

The only question is, how far would you be willing to go to rectify this?

On Tangible Brand Mantras

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Consider these tidbits:

  • BMW is in the process of building a "new" 1972 BMW 2002tii.  It’s coming together in a glass-walled area of the BMW museum.  The 2002 is the icon that defined every BMW since (except for those X cars, perhaps).  And it’s orange, natch.
  • Audi recently commissioned a "new" 1939 Auto Union D-type Grand Prix racer.  Though the original Auto Union racers were funded by the Nazi propaganda machine, and sported swastikas, the design itself was a highwater mark for German automotive design which flowed from the brain of one Ferdinand Porsche.  All of Audi’s design language is rooted in this car.

Why engage in these expensive endeavors?

Well, if a brand is an expression of everything you do in the world, then why not literally build the brand again in front of the world.  These are tangible brand mantras, intensely meaningful.  And probably better at saying "this is our brand" than a written positioning statement ever could be. 

As such, they’re priceless.

18nov05 update:  here’s a nice overview of the 2002 project, written by Matt Davis (superb as always)

Venture Design, part 10

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The airline Song is dead.  As Seth notes on his blog, Song was a superficial attempt to create a new airline with a new value proposition.  The superficial part was that it was more about the "brand is who we say we are" approach than the much more real "brand is what we do" approach.

The cool part of Seth’s post is his insight that this event can be looked upon as a total failure, or as an opportunity to learn.  If you can do the latter, and treat everything as an experiment to be learned from, no matter if the outcome is "good" or "bad", then you’re well on your way to a process of creating ventures that starts to look a lot like design thinking.

What was I thinking?

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My recent column in BusinessWeek Online drove a bunch of feedback my way, most of it very positive. 

Thanks, Mom! 

(just kidding)

While I did get a lot of great feedback, some of it doubted my sincerity.  "Diego, you’re the biggest car dude I know, " most of it goes.  "Surely you can’t be serious about Saturn?  Don’t they suck?  That was all facetious, right?"

My answer is a big, fat "no".  Everything I said in my column was heartfelt.  I really believe in Saturn the brand and in the Saturn Sky.  I think the Saturn Sky is stunning and will provide a wonderful driving experience.  In fact, if Cadillac and Saturn were the two brands of a standalone car company, I’d be first in line to buy stock.

Beausage?

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Is this beausage?

No.  Beausage is the confluence of beauty and usage.

This rusty Porsche 356 is just plain usage. 

What I can’t believe is that there’s a FastPass RFID beacon in the windshield.  Clearly the owner is an optimist.

If you’re nano and you know it, Clap your…

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Clap.  It’s a verb, but it’s also a noun highly correlated with another popular verb which I can’t use within the limits of metacool’s PG-13 language decency protocol.  And, as I’ve just learned, Clap is also the brand name of an automotive engine therapy product which supposedly features nanotechnology.

Just what were the Clap marketers thinking?  Now, over the years I’ve been known to apply scatological appellations to certain things I’ve run across in the product development funnel, but never have I ventured into the realm of social diseases as a source of naming inspiration.  But maybe — and this is a bit of a stretch — maybe there’s a touch of genius at work here.  As a brand name, Clap is so bad it’s good, and – who knows? –  it just might be the magical message which really connects with the demographic/psychographic market segment of males who really believe engine treatments will work wonders on their clapped-out Chevy smallblocks.  Good marketing takes guts.