The Product Is the Marketing

Great products sell themselves.

Back in 1972, brand recognition was all you needed to sell a product. Major companies like consumer-goods manufacturers could easily correlate their advertising and television media buying budgets with sales figures. For a laundry detergent manufacturer, the performance of the detergent and its chemical formulation were less important than the brand name that a customer recognized. Procter & Gamble, for example, introduced Tide laundry detergent in 1946, backed by a $21 million ad campaign that made it the top selling brand in the country within two years, which continued well into the twenty-first century.

Technology has upended this strategy. Television advertising has declined with the arrival of VCRs, TiVo, YouTube, Hulu, OnDemand, Netflix, and whatever is coming next that lets the customer decide which ads to watch—or perhaps to blithely ignore your ads altogether. The Internet and social media are the new conduits for information, and that has led to a sea change in the way people perceive products and make judgments about them. In the 1970s, you might have been swayed by ads for a painkiller such as Excedrin (each type of headache had a specific number, such as “Excedrin headache number 10” for a “screaming child”), but today you hear a million voices on websites and through social media trumpeting the benefits or drawbacks of a particular brand.

The Internet, with its instant feedback and information overload, is the great leveler of our generation when it comes to a product's success or failure. Advertising and branding still play important roles, but advertising and branding can no longer make false claims about a product and get away with it for very long. The Internet speaks too loudly. And too quickly: Your product will be praised or pilloried in seconds.

In his 2003 book Purple Cow, Seth Godin reinforces this notion. He suggests that in the post–television advertising era, it's prudent to invest less in advertising and more in R&D if you want your product to stand out in a cluttered marketplace. These standouts are the so-called purple cows that you notice while driving by a field of ordinary black-and-white Holsteins. “Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service,” Godin writes. “If your offering isn't remarkable, it is invisible.”¹

It's true. As customers, we are confronted every day with a mind-boggling array of products in stores and online, as well as the marketing and ad campaigns pushing us to buy one brand or another. How we sift through the clutter and noise and decide to choose one product or the other has kept psychologists, economists, and marketers busy for years as they seek the perfect strategy to attract our attention and harness our purchasing power. As a designer, my view is that the product is now the ultimate message, and to reinforce that message the product must be of exceptionally high quality and part of a pattern of repetition.

MESSAGE

Apple under Steve Jobs has always championed products. “What Jobs loved most was products,”² Adam Lashinsky writes in his book, Inside Apple. Products anchor the company and are the primary lens through which the customer perceives the brand. Apple invests heavily in advertising, too, but the advertising is focused on the product (with the formidable exception of the 1997 “Think Different” campaign).

Apple spent $691 million on advertising in 2010, a big increase over the previous year due to the launch of the iPad and the iPhone 4. That seems like a remarkable amount of money, but it is actually just a small percentage of its annual revenue, which reached $108 billion in 2011. Yet even without spending a penny, Apple's brand would resonate just as loudly with customers. The reason is Apple's relentless commitment to the product. Marketing and advertising leverages that good work, not the other way around. All the money in the world spent on ads won't help a “just good enough” product become an insanely great one. As Amazon's chief executive put it at a shareholders meeting in 2009, “Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.” Create great products; then you can promote them.

Author Scott Ginsberg is more colorful in his description of the pivotal role played designing a great product. “Marketing is like sex—if you have to pay for it, you're doing something wrong,” he writes. “Smart companies spend money earlier in the process. Smart companies build things worth noticing right into the product ahead of time. Take design, for example. It's not an extra, it's not an also and it's not an accident—it's everything.”³ The temptation to favor empty messaging over great products is sill strong. To wit: a dancing elf.

The dancing elf, courtesy of on OfficeMax online media campaign called “Elf Yourself,” appeared in 2007. It let you upload a picture of yourself to attach to an animated elf doing a hilarious dance. You then e-mailed it to friends who added their self-made dancing elves. And on it went from one person to another, a viral version of a chain letter zipping across the web. After wiping away tears of laughter, you realize that this type of new cheap trick—a self-distributing ad—is very effective. An advertiser saves ad dollars, and the message rides the wave of personal recommendation.

But for all the belly laughs it produced, this ad had a critical flaw. I couldn't remember which company was behind it. Was it Staples, OfficeMax, or Office Depot? The video was adorable, but it had nothing to do with buying office supplies or OfficeMax's value proposition. Yes, it generated views. But there was no connection to OfficeMax in the mind of a shopper wanting to buy pens and printer cartridges at a competitive price. People were talking about the dancing elf, not the great products, prices, and services available at OfficeMax.

The real question concerns OfficeMax's differentiation, or lack thereof. What is its remarkable product? How do we distinguish this office supplier from Staples and Office Depot? Ultimately, the company's clever viral campaign could not make up for the lack of a differentiated message. If you have remarkable, well-designed products that really connect with people, these products create their own following. They are amplified by advertising and marketing campaigns that help propel a message that you have already established with your unique offering.

Now think about the many products you have bought, cherished, and shared the most. How many of them had brilliant design? How many of the products at your own company have the same qualities? As a manager, the key questions you need to answer are these: Do your products stand on their own without additional marketing? Are you creating remarkable products that create a long-lasting consumer following? If you use this benchmark for judging how remarkable (or unremarkable) your products are, the design will be the best (or worst) advertisement of all.

The wide gap between great and merely good products can best be seen in toothbrushes. Yes, toothbrushes.

For a long time, toothbrushes were commodity products that were largely supported by network television advertising. With the declining influence of this type of messaging, manufacturers increasingly turned to design to create differentiation in what would become the ruthlessly competitive toothbrush market.

The toothbrush shelf in the grocery store exploded with apparent innovations that promised to clean teeth better. Flexible necks would put less pressure on your gums. Angled brushes provided an ergonomic advantage and more serious cleaning. Blue bristles that turned white were a reminder to replace a brush that had become less effective. Fighting for the toothbrush dollar, toothbrush makers spouted pseudoscience to claim that their brush was more effective because of a soft grip handle or special bristles or gum-massaging fingers.

One toothbrush from Reach was famous for claiming to be the most ergonomic brush on the market. It featured a bent neck that made it look like a tool your dentist would use. But on closer analysis, the design only borrowed a visual element from a professional dental tool rather than providing a true design benefit to sleepy consumers. In fact, the bend in the handle made sense only for the dentist; you would have to hold your hand as far back as your ear to brush your front teeth.

The design of the Reach toothbrush is flat-out wrong. At LUNAR, we discovered this fact when Oral-B, a rival toothbrush maker, hired us to create a new flagship design for its toothbrush family. To do this, Oral-B needed a breakthrough product. To achieve a breakthrough product, we needed to understand how people hold toothbrushes and all the minute details to do with toothbrushing. Otherwise, we wouldn't be to create a design that truly resonated with people as they performed this mundane daily task.

Surprisingly, Oral-B had little cataloged understanding (for a toothbrush manufacturer) about how people hold their toothbrushes. We recommended engaging an ergonomic design and research house, Metaphase, to help answer this fundamental question. Because time was of the essence, however, we initiated our own research and design work in parallel.

That work didn't involve following sleepy pajama-clad customers into their bathrooms. But we did conduct guerrilla research among our own staff and at any location where toothbrushes were sold. With the tenacity of archeologists digging amid ruins, we collected a wide range and variety of brushes and analyzed them according to their features and putative benefits. We began prototyping ideas right away by bending conventional toothbrushes into different shapes and trying them out ourselves. That's when we first noticed that the Reach toothbrush, although telegraphing better ergonomics with its bent form, was actually making us contort our wrists at strange angles to accommodate the otherwise simple task of brushing. Where's the ergonomic advantage in that?

Meanwhile, the researchers at Metaphase had reported from the field that people hold toothbrushes in some combination of five basic grips. Our designers trained themselves to use all five grips, and we continued prototyping. Working first with sketches before moving to foam models, we quickly tested for comfort and quality among the designers and engineers in our office. (There is more about the advantages and techniques of prototyping in Chapter 5.)

The Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush leveraged better design to capture another five points of market share. Image: LUNAR

Before long, the designers came up with a “good enough” product. That's the moment when most companies pull the trigger and rush the product to market. But Oral-B knew that every product requires a huge investment to start manufacturing in the volume required to get this toothbrush to thousands of stores. Oral-B was also committed to making great products that would further support its reputation among customers as an innovative company. To let a product out of the stable without enough consideration and design refinement, the Oral-B executives understood, might not only lose money in manufacturing and delivery but also tarnish the company's carefully honed reputation.

Oral-B tooled four of our recommended design variations. This enabled the company to easily build hundreds of production-quality prototypes that could be put in the hands of customers for side-by-side testing. This additional prototyping, what we call a validation step, helped us better understand some elements of consumer behavior and preference that weren't obvious at first.

Our new toothbrush had a fat handle to fill out your hand and provide greater control. But it thins down between the thumb and forefinger to allow easily spinning of the brush to reach different sides of different teeth. We originally assumed that the cross section through this thin spot should be cylindrical to facilitate spinning. What we learned after exercising the design was that a cross section with a shape that was closer to square is better at telling the fingers where the bristles are pointed.

You might think this is a seemingly minor design detail, but it's just the kind of detail that adds up to making a “good enough” product great. It's the design difference that sells more toothbrushes for a higher price, builds empathy with consumers, and makes them come back for your toothbrush when they need a replacement.

Another detail we had to consider was all those thin toothbrush holders in millions of bathrooms in American homes. Would they not be rendered useless by the arrival of our fatter model? Oral-B wondered about that, too. We always listen intently to what our clients say, but in this case we advised ignoring the worries about too thin toothbrush holders. Arrogant? Perhaps. Yet we reasoned that this was such a great new product and design that a bigger holder would follow the fatter toothbrush.

This is an important lesson worth expanding on. Sometimes it is necessary to let go of a design constraint in order to make a remarkable product. We looked at toothbrush designs that would fit into conventional holders, but they were all missing the elements that were helping the new design really stand out. The fat-and-thin profile of the toothbrush was the defining design detail that made it so comfortable and visually different. The profile was also at odds with the requirement to fit into conventional holders. Something had to give, and in this case, Oral-B recognized that an opportunity to shine in the market trumped everything else. I'm happy to report from the trenches of the toothbrush wars that the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush, introduced in 1998, was a huge hit. Exact figures are not available, but the Los Angeles Times reported in 2000 that Oral-B had increased its market share to 30 percent from 25 percent of the then $650 million annual toothbrush market within two years. As of 2012, the toothbrush is still in production—further testimony to the benefits of designing a great product.

Oral-B did spend $54 million on CrossAction ads, but this winning product wasn't solely the result of an effective advertising and marketing campaign. It came about through intensive design research and prototyping that led to a great product for the customer and a big boost for the bottom line. Any company can have this kind of win if it is committed to design, even if the product (a humble toothbrush) might not seem the most likely candidate for a full-blown design investigation and makeover.

By focusing on the product instead of simply pouring more money into branding and advertising, Oral-B bested the competition in the battle for customer allegiance. This is the same strategy that Apple has used since the days of the Apple II. If you make the best product out there, it will pay dividends well beyond what the equivalent advertising dollars could buy you, because, as we have seen, the product is everything.

Tom Peters, author of the seminal 1982 book In Search of Excellence (and also our neighbor at LUNAR's Palo Alto office), has always been a big fan of design. He particularly likes the CrossAction toothbrush, and he must have had it in mind when he told the @Issue Journal of the Corporate Design Foundation about making design the center of product development rather than an afterthought. “Mistake No. 1 is treating design as a veneer issue rather than a soul issue. The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to understanding that it's a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.”⁴

QUALITY

For many years General Motors' Pontiac division perpetuated an unfortunate mismatch between the brand's marketing pitch and the product. Pontiac's advertising promised drivers the kind of “excitement” that would make their hearts race and eyes dilate, as their high-performance sports cars hugged the road at high speeds and turned heads. The stark reality, though, was that year after year Pontiac delivered economy cars with more horsepower and trendy, short-lived styling. There wasn't much excitement at all, except perhaps in the Pontiac ads. For the most part, the cars were wholly unremarkable. They lacked quality.

Consider one entry called the Pontiac Aztek, launched in model year 2001. This clunker was a midsize crossover vehicle targeting a twentysomething market, but it looked like a soccer-mom wagon pretending to be a youthful camper. The idea was to marry some SUV features, such as seating height and cargo space, with carlike handling and fuel economy. The Aztek was promoted as an ultraversatile vehicle that could even turn itself into a sleeping tent for the ultimate camping trip. This was a new category of car. Moreover, it was an amazing development in that GM is not particularly known for innovation.

Even so, it was a mystery to me why Pontiac was the right brand to innovate or why the Aztek ended up looking like the love child of a minivan and a garbage truck. There was near universal agreement about its bad looks. Time magazine derided the Aztek as one of the worst cars of all time. “The Aztek design had been fiddled with, fussed over, cost-shaved and otherwise compromised until the tough, cool-looking concept had been reduced to a bulky, plastic-clad mess. A classic case of losing the plot,”⁵ the magazine wrote in a searing rebuke. In another bad move, this otherwise breakthrough car idea was dropped onto a minivan chassis. That single decision saddled the car with a minivan-like appearance that no amount of body sculpting could hide.

There's an old saying in the product design world: A camel is a horse designed by committee. The Aztek proves the truth of that. Aztek had no singular vision, and so it acquired the various attributes of everyone who touched it. I can almost hear the committee members talking about their strategy: Save money by using an existing platform. Reduce the size of the tires to reduce gas mileage. Wrap it in plastic to make it look rugged. The result was a crappy design owned by no one because everyone involved in the development process designed it.

The Pontiac Aztek—with its flat sides, humped back, and two sets of grilles—was saddled by compromises that watered down the original vision for the car. Image: General Motors, LLC

After four years of trying to recoup its investment Pontiac pulled the plug on the Aztek. By 2010 GM shuttered Pontiac entirely. The slumping economy was surely partly to blame, but it was also due to how badly Pontiac, a brand first launched in 1926, had failed to live up to its own advertising image as a carmaker supposedly dedicated to high-quality and charismatic vehicles that provide owners with an exciting ride.

Any number of corporate pressures and constraints can lead to an Aztek-like debacle in any industry. I hear complaints from clients all the time about these pressures—ranging from cost controls to managing capital investments, business cycle downturns, cutthroat competition, and regulatory considerations. These are just a few of the myriad issues that can easily preoccupy any company and divert attention from focusing time, attention, and resources on designing a great product.

Apple, of course, isn't immune to these constraints. At times it, too, has succumbed to the “good enough” weakness. In 1993 Apple launched Newton, a product that was well ahead of its time. Newton was a handheld computer that would fit in your pocket (should you have extra large pockets). Its primary innovation was a promise to interpret your natural handwriting. Rather than using a keyboard, the advance here was that you could merely use your handwritten scrawl to schedule a meeting, make a note, or write an e-mail. Could there be a better Apple product? Newton promised to take the natural human skill of writing and convert that to the digital domain.

Bidding good-bye to the keyboard sounded like a great idea. The problem was that Newton was working just fine in the lab but not on the portable hardware itself, according to Tesler, who led the Newton development team, and Alan Kay, another interface guru at Apple who had often dropped in on the project to critique its design. Newton had issues. It wasn't powerful enough. It didn't sync properly with the desktop computer.

But because Apple was in a horserace with Microsoft and with a company called GO Computing to bring such a product to market, it rushed in with a device that was a first try. In other words, a product that was just good enough. In a desperate bid to be first, Apple didn't allow the technology time to catch up with the promise of an integrated desktop and portable experience. And it paid the price. Newton was shipped before its technology was ready, which led to jokes like this one about the glaring inaccuracies of its handwriting interpreter:

Apple continued to invest in Newton for the next three years, trying to correct the initial missteps, until Jobs finally killed it in 1998, shortly after his return to the company. One of the most astounding things about the Newton flub was that Apple had had another option. Joy Mountford, an early Apple user interface manager, had advocated another approach to the personal digital assistant (PDA), the term that CEO John Sculley created to describe the device. Leaving out the troublesome handwriting recognition piece, Mountford recalled in an interview with me, Apple could have delivered a quality PDA.

Every manager is under pressure and timeline demands to rush out mediocre products like the Newton. Development teams will often acquiesce to a “good enough” product because there is money to be made (at least in the short term) with “good enough.” Great is so often the enemy of good. Great costs more and requires more energy and effort. A company can subsist on good enough products. But in the long run, “good enough” will damage everything: your products and your brand and eventually your company, which will also be perceived as just good enough rather than great.

The natural handwriting recognition software in the Apple Newton worked great in the lab on powerful computers, but was a disappointment on the shipped product. Image: Grant Hutchinson

One way that Apple manages to create insanely great products in terms of quality is by selectively limiting the functionality that it promises to deliver, much like we did for Oral-B in giving up on the conventional toothbrush holder. The first iPhone was insanely great even though it lacked some functionality you might have expected in a smartphone. All those apps couldn't be organized into folders. You couldn't switch between apps running at the same time. No picture taking with a locked phone. Did the geniuses at Apple have a momentary lapse and just forget about these features? Not likely. They know that packing too much functionality into a product at the start will mean either missing the launch date or giving up on quality. And they know that there's time to add functionality into the product in updates. In the first iPhone launch in 2007, Apple didn't go after the business user as much as entertainment-focused customers, who were delighted with the product.

REPETITION

If you continually design quality products, then each successive one benefits from and adds to the greatness of the one that came before. The first iPhone in 2007 was a sales megahit (up to 700,000 units in the first weekend alone, according to estimates) and so was the iPhone 4S, released in late 2011 (4 million units sold in the first weekend). This despite the fact that the iPhone 4S wasn't a great leap forward technologically—except for Siri, the built-in personal concierge—and initially debuted with less-than-stellar reviews. More important than the number of new features, though, is the quality of how those new features are implemented.

A basic tenet of Apple's success is that consistency propels a brand forward. The effect of repetition is like a flywheel. I can explain.

A flywheel is a nifty moving component of many machines. It's merely a heavy wheel that is hard to get moving, but once it gets going, the flywheel stays spinning and keeps things running smoothly. Think of your brand as that flywheel. Its speed represents the impact of marketing on all of your products, services, advertising, and any other touch points. Each new product has a huge potential to make the flywheel spin faster or to slow it down.

Advertising can also speed up or slow down the flywheel, but these days it has a much smaller effect on the flywheel than does a great new product. Great products create momentum in the flywheel because customers develop trust in your brand and spread its greatness by word of mouth, propelling the flywheel even faster. Taking the metaphor one step further, when your brand flywheel is moving very fast, it's easier to convert new customers because the trust in the brand reputation is very high.

While Apple had a sterling reputation in the early 1990s for building remarkable products compared to much of the competition, the launch of the ill-fated Newton endangered its reputation as a leader. The Newton slowed down the Apple flywheel. So did MobileMe, an early cloud computing service launched in 2010 that was criticized for numerous and embarrassing technical snafus. It just didn't work. Apple had screwed up. But did it stop the fast-spinning Apple flywheel? Not at all. Apple had already created a very fast flywheel of a brand with the iMac, iPod, and iTunes. The problems with MobileMe were a relatively a rare but glaring and unexpected glitch that didn't stop Apple's flywheel because it is a company that repeats its quality formula so well.

The flywheel analogy works the other way, too. If your company has consistently offered unremarkable products, when a great one comes along it won't move the needle much in the marketplace. This hasn't stopped any number of companies from spending vast amounts of money on designing one-hit wonders, as Motorola did with the RAZR V3. Or what Pontiac tried to do with a two-seater ragtop sports car called Solstice that it introduced in 2004.

Unlike Pontiac's doomed Aztek, the Solstice received impressively warm accolades from the automotive press. Its design was more like an attractive British-made roadster than an ungainly American muscle car. “What a beauty,” concluded Roger Martin, dean of the School of Management at the University of Toronto and a popular design advocate, after getting behind the wheel. “A drop-dead gorgeous convertible roadster listing at a mere $19,995. [It's] destined to be a hit.”⁶

I was also beguiled by Solstice's dashing good looks, while also wondering how it was produced by Detroit. But in the end I didn't buy one. I loved the look of the car, but it still wore the Pontiac badge, the brand with the slow-moving flywheel. In my mind, it would never be as great and lovable as an MG from the 1960s or the Audi TT, which I did end up buying because it is not only a beautiful car but also part of a continuing tradition of great cars and Audi's sophisticated design heritage. It was a great product that simply sold itself.

The Pontiac Solstice, launched in 2006, was a one-hit wonder that failed to carry the brand. Image: General Motors, LLC

SUMMARY

The product is the ultimate message and messenger in the Internet age of too much information, where the competition for attention is frantic. Only a truly great product stands out amid the clutter. Traditional advertising and marketing can't make a “good enough” product great; a great product with outstanding design is the best messenger. That product is the primary lens through which the customer sees the company and brand, and what customers want to see is quality, again and again. Repeating quality reinforces the design values and creates customer appreciation and loyalty.

THE BUILDING BLOCKS

Message

is what your product or a succession of products says to customers and what it means to them cumulatively over time.

Quality

design elevates a product from the ordinary and unremarkable to extraordinary and outstanding. By focusing the function of the product and even narrowing your market and marketing requirements, you can overcome the tyranny of good enough and create products that are great.

Repetition

of message and quality in new and innovative products, or even incrementally better ones, reinforces a product's design credentials and solidifies the company brand and image as dependable in the customer's mind.

DESIGN LIKE APPLE AGENDA

Before we discuss the concept of the context in which your products live, let's review the lessons of this chapter by asking questions about your products and whether they qualify as great:

Notes

1 Godin, Seth. Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. New York: Portfolio, 2009.

2 Lashinsky, Adam. Inside Apple. New York: Hachette Book group, 2012.

3 Ginsberg, Scott, “Six Prices You Shouldn't Have to Pay.” Hello, My Name Is Blog, July 20, 2012.

4 “Tom Peters on Design,” @Issue, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 2000.

5 Neil, Dan, “The 50 Worst Cars of All Time.” Time magazine, 2007, www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1658545_1658544_1658540,00.html.

6 Martin, Roger L., “Reliability vs. Validity.” BusinessWeek, 2005, www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/sep2005/id20050929_872877.htm.