"When I was at Audi, it took us 15 years to change the company… By the time the Ford brand is really where I want it, I will be ready to retire. I have 10 to 12 years. You scratch away at it one car at a time."
— J Mays, Ford
(Your products drive the brand and ultimately the value you create in the marketplace; brands on their own don’t create value)
My latest book review is live and in living color at 800 CEO READ Blog
I reviewed Lovemarks, by Kevin Roberts. An interesting read with some stimulating ideas, but not a stellar book.
John Maeda of MIT is leading an effort called the Simplicity Design Workshop. As quoted by Jessie Scanlon in the New York Times, Maeda says that “simplicity is an endangered quality in the digital world, and it is time to break free from technology’s intimidating complexity.”
Along with several other designers, Maeda has formulated a list of the fundamental tenets of using simplicity as a way to design technological solutions:
1) Heed cultural patterns
2) Be transparent
3) Edit
4) Prototype
What I find stunning about these design principles is that they apply equally well to the domain of designing business models and venture structures appropriate to the realities of the 21st century. We need ventures that are willing to live in symbiosis with the cultures that surround them. We need ventures that are willing to be honest and transparent in the financial dealings — more of the old HP Way and less Enron kniving. We need ventures that edit what the scope of what they do, so that what they do end up taking on is rich with meaning; we’ve got too much generic, me-too crap in the world today. Finally, we need ventures that are willing to prototype their way to a better and ever-evolving state of being.
I recently spent a fine Saturday morning sipping Bluebottle Coffee outside San Francisco’s Ferry Building Marketplace. As I sat there under an open sky watching traffic trickle by on the Embarcadero, it occurred to me that I’m a bit weird when it comes to cars. As in “I can tell the brand of car just from its exhaust note” weird.
Here’s a list of the notable automobiles I heard go by:
Yes, they’re all sports cars – products designed to deliver an emotional use experience. And isn’t it cool that each of these remarkable products delivers a substantial portion of the brand experience via the ears? Believe you me, this stuff doesn’t happen by accident; Mazda is famous for squadrons of engineers who methodically try out umpteen combinations of induction/exhaust components until they reach that indescribable point of aural perfection.
What’s the sound of your brand?
“The reign of the poetical has started.”
– Philippe Starck
Google is hot because they let their products do the talking for the brand. If you think about it, the Google brand is synonymous with the Google use experience, and isn’t the result of some expensive “brand building” campaign. No, those crazy Google people spend their dollars on product. At Google, everyone – the engineers, the graphic designers, the cooks in their fabulous cafeteria – owns the brand.
You can see this in Gmail. Google took free email and said “How would the Google experience work here?” This kind of thinking led somebody at Google to place a wickedly brand-defining message in, of all places, the Trash box (see above). This is brilliant. Like 99.99% of all adult males, I skipped all the marketing messaging when I cranked up Gmail. Sure, I knew going in that it had 1 Gig of memory reserved for me, but this little surprise in my Trash really drove the value proposition home for me. Brilliant.
All experiential elements of your offering can be, should be – must be – thought through and consciously designed to define, embody, and amplify your brand’s unique song.
Good on ya, Google!
Wonderful things are brewing at Stanford University in the form of the d.school. You’re undoubtedbly familiar with "B Schools" (business schools), but the d.school is something entirely different: its goal is to help people learn to use the process of design to solve problems beyond the traditional domains of industrial design, product design or architecture.
Simply put, the d.school will train leaders who are able to think and do. And we’ll all be better off for it.
“We became a $6.6 billion brand because of design. To compete, we knew 10 years ago with the original founding team that we had to have a design group, because that would be our competitive advantage over value players such as Kmart or Target. We create our lines and the whole experience around design. If we were just another value player, where would we be today?”
– Jenny Ming, President, Old Navy Gap Inc.
The June 18th edition of The Economist discusses using the rapid prototyping technique of building plastic and metal parts layer by layer – someday – to “print” replacement organs one cell at a time. Living cells grown in a culture would be loaded into the hopper and then mechanically spit out to create a new liver, tongue or eyeball.
In my mechanical engineering days, I employed this layer-by-layer technology to create prototypes of my designs. The purpose of these prototypes was to fine-tune the metadesign before releasing it to production, where it would be churned out in the thousands, millions, or billions. Designers love the ability to print out parts, as it enables a high level of fidelity with quick turnarounds, on the cheap.
In fact, some designers (for example, Karim Rashid talks about this) go so far as to envision a future where everyone could design, modify, and print out their own special products. In reality, for most arenas of material culture, allowing anyone to customize and print out products doesn’t quite jive, for a multitude of reasons ranging from safety to performance to IP to aesthetics. For example, would you really want to mess with the professional design expertise embedded in your iPod just to have a personalized shape or interface? Myself, I’d gladly pay for Mr. Ive’s aesthetic values over my own.
In contrast, there’s an obvious and compelling value proposition in using rapid prototyping to create custom versions of anything that becomes part of the body. In some ways this degree of customization is already being achieved today, albeit with ancient casting techniques, in the domain of custom replacement dentures. But just imagine what happens when we get new organs designed, built and delivered expressly for a market of one.
I’m an unabashed fan of Vartan Gregorian, and was quite taken with his thoughts in Ken Burn’s film The Statue of Liberty:
"If you could say one single force that is threatening liberty, in my opinion, it’s ignorance.
Second, is to treat ourselves as only economic units, rather than as spiritual beings.
America is not an actuality, but is a potentiality. We have to remember that the Universe is not going to be seeing somebody like you again in its entire history of creation. So it’s up to you to become a dot, a paragraph, a page, blank page, chapter in the history of creation."
The modern corporation is one of the finest inventions of past 500 years; it has helped create an elevated state of innovation unknown to all previous generations of mankind. However, it often suffers from a lack of respect for the individual humans who sustain its economic well-being. Though they are its lifeblood, these people all too often are regarded by the corporation’s management as mere “resources” or cost centers to be dealt with as primarily economic units, rather than as unique individuals. I don’t think corporations are going to become more humane and respectful of the individual anytime soon.
But individuals can make a difference. If you work for a corporation that mistreats its employees or the society in which it operates in the name of maximizing shareholder value, try to make it more humane from the inside, or vote with your feet. Just do something — start making changes yourself within the company, or take your once-in-the-Universe potentiality somewhere else. It’s hard to do, I know. But if we all did it, our society would benefit from a powerful opportunity to balance the liberty-threatening power of the modern corporation.
