"What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" – Thomas Keller
von Hippel on Innovation & Interesting Users
As of late I’ve been getting reacquainted with the thinking of Professor Eric von Hippel of MIT, who studies the innovation process. It’s intriguing stuff. Here’s an excerpt from his paper "Breakthroughs to Order at 3M":
Not all users are created equal with respect to the development of commercially-important innovations and innovation prototypes. Research shows that almost all user-developed ideas and prototypes of general commercial interest tend to be developed by “Lead Users” – that is, users that: (1) expect to get high benefit from an innovation and so have a strong incentive to innovate and; (2) that are ahead of a target market with respect to one or more important trends…
The point is, if you want to find users that are actively exploring and testing new ideas, it is a waste of time to survey users in the center of the target market. Instead, you must develop methods to seek out users that are at the leading edge with respect to needs that are important to that market – even if such lead users are rare and hard to find – because that is where interesting user idea generation and innovation is concentrated.
You can see more of his writing here.
Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness
The Yamaha Chivicker
Power to the People
Why you should really focus on creating net promoters (not net detractors):
Creating an Organization around Customers
A while ago I wondered what would happen to an organization whose CEO really understood its line of market offerings. Then I asked what the ramifications would be if a CEO was able — and willing — to blog. Now I think the biggest and best question is: what if your CEO were willing to create an org chart with the customer somewhere on the page?
What sparked this question was this interesting thought from Vincent Grimaldi I found while reading Interbrand’s 2004 User’s Choice Awards (top brand of the year? Apple):
…conventional organization charts contribute to reinforcing the wrong
behaviors, as they show the CEO at the top and the receptionist at the
bottom. Notice that the customer is not part of this picture… When the
customer calls on the phone, it is the receptionist who picks up, not
the CEO. Who is the most important person in that scenario?
So, what would happen if you mapped out your own organization from a customer’s point of view? You could start by asking these four simple questions:
- What is the user experience of our organization like today?
- What should the user experience actually be like?
- Who in our org actually delivers that experience?
- How can we better allocate resources to help those key brand representatives?
Everything should be fair game in this exercise: from how customer support calls are handled, how incoming resumes are sorted and evaluated, how content gets created for the company blog (you do have one, don’t you?), how the FedEx guy gets treated each day, to how the corporate website is structured. The results of this exercise should help your organization really "get" how to create wonderful
end-to-end customer experiences by becoming more aware of the human aspects of the brand impression your company makes in the world.
In essence, it’s about making your org chart a catalyst for fractal brand thinking. At every point from the janitorial staff on down to The Office of the CEO.
metacool Thought of the Day
“Brand management is fake." — Carlos Ghosn
Why Cadillac will soon be back on top
"We are in a long-term campaign to close our credibility gap. The reality of our hardware and the general misperception of the overall buying public still exist. The V-Series is shouting that we have performance and to take a look. We want to bring the general public up to speed on what’s happening at Cadillac. Part of that is getting the right kind of drivers into our products who will spread the news by word of mouth. If we give them a piece of hardware that is satisfying to drive, we’ve got them in our boat and have made them all advocates."
— Jim Taylor, General Manager, Cadillac
How do you build a brand? The people at Cadillac are rebuilding their brand piece by piece, and they’re doing it right:
- Creating great individual products
- Creating a product family where each member contributes to the bigger brand in a unique but complimentary way — for the first time in years, Cadillac is selling cars that aren’t a Chevy underneath.
- Pricing products so that they’re a good value, but not so low that they smell of desperation. Nobody likes being seen in a devalued product — that’s what happened to the Ford Taurus
- Racing the cars to gain credibility with gearhead mavens who dictate automotive goodness, which is how BMW grew to be the Ultimate Driving Machine from a nothing brand in the 60’s (it worked for Subaru, too)
It’s not about creating an expensive advertising campaign, holding your breath, and hoping the suckers don’t notice that their purchase doesn’t live up to your promises. Build it right, get the mavens to come, and then everyone else will come.
PS: If you’re asking "Why so many cars on this blog?", here’s my answer.
Good marketing takes guts
Good marketing takes guts. Sure, analytics are important and you need to have them if you want to avoid blowing both halves of your promotional budget on negative NPV efforts. But analytics aren’t sufficient. Good marketing means taking unquantifiable risks once in a while. Really, what do you have to lose?
That’s why I was thrilled last week to see that Footnote No. 2 on the iPod Shuffle product page said "Do not eat iPod Shuffle". Even with the lowliest footnote, here was Apple being Apple, thinking different, not afraid to poke fun at uptight lawyers and all the CYA footnoting typical of consumer product marketing. This was about being fractal, being willing to be as hip and daring in something as trivial as a footnote as Apple is with big things like messaging, industrial design, and channel strategy. Somewhere in Cupertino sat a brilliant, grinning brand manager, and I wanted to hire them on the spot.
So imagine my dismay today when I went back to the Apple site to write a post about that brilliant brand manager and found that their cheeky disclaimer has been replaced by this piece of paralegal drivel:
Music capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128Kbps AAC encoding
Perhaps the other thing was just a joke. Or perhaps some gutsy brand manager or web developer got their wee wee hit by the hard hammer of the CMO. In the end, boring won out over brilliant.
Bummer. Good marketing takes guts.
Feb 4 update: I ate iPod Shuffle
Good brands are fractal
Definition of fractal, from Hyperdictionary:
A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be
subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a
smaller copy of the whole. Fractals are generally self-similar (bits
look like the whole) and independent of scale (they look similar, no
matter how close you zoom in)
Good brands are fractal. Every interaction you have reflects the interaction you’ll have with every other piece of the whole, as well as the whole itself. Since "brand" is shorthand for the total experience you get from buying, using, servicing, and disposing of a product, creating a great brand requires taking a fractal point of view to the process of designing total experiences where everything — large and small — is consistent and mutually self-reinforcing.
What’s the implication for creating cool stuff? I haven’t fully thought this one out, but I think it all boils down to leadership. Behind every great product is someone who had a vision of the end thing in mind and was able to say "yes" and "no" to help the development team understand that vision. In a way, great products require a kind of fractal leadership able to recognize the right texture for a button, the right message for the box, the right approach to customer support and service.
Five alternatives to a keyboard
Some Sony designers have come up with five prototypes showing alternatives to the standard keyboard/mouse computer interface.
I find the Gummi-Bend concept particularly compelling. With commercially viable flexible electronic "paper" right around the corner, Gummi shows how this technology could be used to help people get more out of maps. Having recently spent four days tromping around Manhattan with only one, fixed-scale map in my pocket, Gummi would have been very useful. It looks like a lot of fun to use, too. And when it comes to designing interfaces, pleasure matters.