Why Your Company Must Have a Design Culture
Design is on everyone’s mind—almost a mantra. You see a new product—a car, an iPod, or the latest cutting-edge cell phone—and you may think the design that drives the product was arrived at through a fairly straightforward process. In some cases, this may be true, though often not. As a matter of fact, the process that delivers a good design—the physical embodiment of the product and the way the thing looks and feels to a customer that is so important for success—is often driven more by serendipity than an integrated understanding of the impact that design makes on the broader idea of a product and business. Serendipity is a good thing—counting on it isn’t.
We think most people are prone to define design, particularly good design, more narrowly than they should. You see an iconic product, an iPhone, for instance, that enjoys an initial runaway success, and it’s so easy to overlook the big picture of how the product fits into the company’s future, the future of products like that in general. We want you to consider a far broader view of the significance of design.
Consider, for instance, the case of Motorola’s Razor phone. Here is a product you might consider iconic. Motorola has been a historically innovative company. The Razor had been a runaway success and a bit of a fluke actually because Motorola didn’t really understand what they had. They just came up with a nice design and a nice form factor—it was thin (they sacrificed some footprint for thinness) and the design tied in with the naming, the Razor, and it worked: The imagery around the product struck a chord in people’s hearts and minds. The Razor was marketed well—and since then, well, nothing to speak of.
The design did not inform the Motorola culture. They only had a single product, and then the company was back in trouble because they simply tried to milk this one product over and over and over again. The mobile cellular phone was invented at Motorola by Martin Cooper. Remember “the Brick.” Then the Startac became an iconic product. Motorola could pioneer but they could not build a design-driven culture to establish sustainable leadership. To be blunt—Motorola doesn’t matter in the mobile market anymore. At the time that this was written, Apple had a market cap about equal to IBM, HP, and Cisco; about three times that of Dell and close to half the market cap of Microsoft.
This would be one reason you care about design.
Motorola tried to take the veneer of the product and apply it to other products as opposed to saying, “What would be the next step of creating an experience that people resonate with?” They did not continue to grow and build and invest on what made the Razor successful. Instead, it was imitate, not innovate.
Motorola is not a design culture. They have an engineering culture that tries to be a design culture. But they fundamentally failed to get it; they behaved as though design is just sort of “We’ll make a cool thing and that will be great”—but they did not develop the ability to do it again and again consistently. On the operating system side, they have never been able to design a great mobile phone user interface (read experience). Design goes beyond simply the physical form factor. There’s a big difference between a good design and a great product. Motorola did not take the next steps to make the Razor the essential portal to people’s mobile experience. They have not been able to create consistent design cues across all customer touchpoints. They may not even know it matters. And it does.
You can create a good design, do it once and do it well, and have a nice object. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be a great product or a good business. It might be mildly successful; it might win some awards; and it might even get some buzz on the blogs. The difference between a great product and a merely good product is that a great product embodies an idea that people can understand and learn about—an idea that grows in their minds, one they emotionally engage with.
Right now we (or you) could design a product that looks like an iPhone, has really nice details and nice materials, and becomes an object of lust. This doesn’t mean that it’s going to be ultimately successful, because unless there’s a strong idea that pervades not just the way it looks, but the way it operates, what it does, how this is communicated to people, how it’s branded, and how people identify with the brand—well then, it is not complete, because these are all things that go into making a great product that becomes a good business.
Design establishes the relationship between your company and your customers, so the thing they see, interact with, come in contact with—all the things that they experience about your company, based upon which they form opinions and develop a desire for all your products—should be part of the total design. These touchpoints should not be allowed to just happen. They need be designed and coordinated in a way that gets you where you want to be with your customer—to where you matter to them. (And believe us—you want to matter).
This is product design as a total concept—how the product operates, how the product sounds, and how it feels. Included in the design is the experience of how you buy it, the experience of what happens when you actually get possession and you open up the box, how you start to feel, and what all this communicates to you. And of course, there is the chain of events through which you became aware of the product—this is part of the design, too—how you became aware of the product and what those touchpoints meant to you.
Taking possession of the product is just the beginning of the next phase of the relationship. What happens if and when something goes wrong with the product? What happens next? How do you feel about it? All these things need be included in the total design of the customer experience. This notion is something that IDEO (a Palo Alto design firm formed in 1991) has based their entire practice on—the idea that design is not just limited to this thing with buttons; it expands to designing all the interactions people have with the product that create (or destroy) the relationship people have with your company and whether or not you matter to them.
Some of this is design in the old sense of creating visuals and materials and such, and some of it is designing the total experience. For example, what should the telephone service experience be? How is that designed? Because it is designed—either consciously or by default.
The message here is: really grasp this idea of design—or you die! And oh yes—your products themselves have to be great.
Design or die! For companies that make products (or provide services for that matter), design or die is in fact the deal. Design of the customer experience is fast becoming a tool that businesspeople have to understand or be laid to rest in the graveyard of irrelevance. The American automotive industries, to an amazingly large degree, don’t seem to get design. Why? We don’t have a satisfying answer to this question. But it is from a design point of view that American car companies are being consistently outperformed by European car companies. We can guess that they haven’t fully figured out how to focus on the experience they want to create and provide, which then informs all that follows.
When it’s all said and done, your customer doesn’t care about your process. To you the logistics of everything are important. The process of getting things engineered and getting them manufactured and the cost structures—all this is very important. Businesspeople love this stuff because it’s Excel friendly—all very quantifiable. But, in the end, all of this doesn’t matter if the design experience is wrong. You can have all your boundary conditions around cost and timing and market opportunity and use the data to make a decision. Along the way, you will likely throw out some ideas because they’re too expensive or they’ll take too long, so you end up with a mediocre product that no one buys. Perfect process doesn’t matter unless the total design is right.
The question to ask is, “What is the design experience?” This is exactly what Apple does. They ask: “What is the design experience we want? Then let’s do whatever it takes in the system to get it out the other end.”
Other people have tried to open stores where people can go and play with the products and buy them. Gateway did it and wound up closing the stores.
The iPod is an iconic product of our time, a glorious example of design and business success. So, close your eyes and imagine you are holding an iPod. Now take away iTunes, take away the ability to buy the song you like for 99 cents without having to pay 15 bucks for a dozen more on a CD you don’t want, lose the ability to create playlists, cut out the packaging, take out the ads, delete the Apple logo and shutter all the Apple stores. The remaining question is—do you still have an iPod? Yes, the physical product in your hand is exactly the same, but what do you have now—really—what do you have?
Well, you have a nicely designed object. Is it an iPod still? No, it’s not, because an iPod is a portal to a kaleidoscope of experience; an iPod is not just an object. The object is an icon that offers access to an experience.
Successful businesspeople in all fields of endeavor understand that they are in the business of designing a total customer experience. We call this the customer experience supply chain. The physical product or service is a necessary part—but alone not a sufficient part—of the equation for lasting success.
Of course, Apple is the obvious example of understanding the customer experience supply chain. In the automotive world, it’s usually BMW that’s offered up as the icon, because they definitely design a great automobile, and they are dedicated to designing the broader experience of owning a car and what that means to an individual owner. We know for example that they spend a lot of time, not just on the esthetics and the materials, but on: How does it sound when you close the door, and how does the steering wheel feel when you turn it? These are not just driven from a mechanic’s point of view of “how are we going to get the door to open?”—of course, that’s part of it—but it’s also driven from the moment the customer grabs the handle and pushes the button. How does that feel? The customer closes the door and it makes a sound; how does it sound? These are all design elements.
IKEA is another great example. Of course, they use design in their products, and they figured out how to make good design available at a low cost, but there’s more to it than that. It’s also the nature of the store. There are, we believe, some kinks in all of this. IKEA has enjoyed substantial growth, and now the experience isn’t as good as it used to be, but the core idea of building simple, well-designed, knock-down furniture and presenting it in this really amazing environment is still intact. It’s not just “Here’s the furniture, here’re different ways you can use the furniture, and here’s how you can....” The idea includes virtually tutoring people on design and how they set up their homes to support a great experience of living at a very low cost. IKEA represents a great approach to product design and a really great approach to the design of the customer experience.
If you look at the apparel industry, Nike got it and has kept getting it. Levi Strauss had it once and lost it—the tragic destruction of an iconic brand that is beyond comprehension. At Nike, they stay intently focused on athletic authenticity. The vast majority of Nike customers aren’t athletes. That said, Nike focuses on keeping their product design and their brand very much in orbit around athletic performance. It’s very aspirational. You get people who probably have never jogged a quarter mile in five years wearing Nike sweats and Nike shoes because it feels authentic. For these people it’s not just about design, it’s the marketing message and the athletes they associate themselves with. “Tiger—you can’t have his swing but you can wear his clothes.”
At Nike, the dialogue always goes way beyond just “We’re designing watches and walkie-talkies” to “What makes this product authentic to the performance of the sport?” There has to be content as part of the design that does that. This is especially the case in the “category definition” phase of establishing the meaning of a product. Once the category is defined, they get more into fashion and leverage that and build it out. But there always has to be some seed of authenticity in the design.
Nike has always included their celebrity endorsements with the same kind of thoughtfulness, with that same requirement for authenticity to athleticism in their incorporation of the celebrity messaging to their entire brand, the store, to the design of the Nike experience. So again, all this is designed as part of a living design.
One of the things we need to do here is to define what we’re talking about—what design means. So, let’s take a shot at this.
One of the challenges here is that, when you think about design, and particularly the category of industrial design, the temptation is to begin thinking about a physical object and not go much further. So, let’s go further and define design as the overt, thoughtful development of the interaction points between you and your customer. This can go from the obvious interaction point of the thing that you hold in your hand and touch, that you wear, eat, watch, listen to, or drive, to the less obvious interaction point that becomes the catalyst of all the emotions you experience when you interact with a company in some way.
If we boil this idea down to its point of intensity, what effective design does is establish the emotional relationship you develop with a brand through the total experience to which a service or product provides a portal.
Where the question of “Do you matter?” came from is looking at what defines a good brand versus not such a good brand. When a class at Stanford University was asked, “Who cares if Motorola goes out of business next week?” one person raised his hand. Asked, “Who cares if Apple goes out of business next week?” most of the class raised their hands. If you are the CEO of Motorola, this is not good news because you have just been put on notice that you don’t matter all that much. If you don’t think this is true, check your stock price.
Apple matters to people because it designed aesthetically stunning hardware and a total customer experience (think of this as software for the soul), so people feel connected to Apple in some way. That’s what good design does. In creating a broader definition of design, we include the emotions and feelings that arise to become part and parcel of the relationship people have with your company through every touchpoint that they experience. You don’t want to let other people define this for you. If you’re really smart about it, you define it. You can’t entirely control it, because people create their own version of the relationship, but you can commit to influencing this in every way you can. This is how you build an idea in people’s minds of who you are as a company and as a brand.
We include in the meaning of design the “choreography of the experience” that people have of your company across whatever possible points of contact they can find.
We think this represents a shift, and the thing that CEOs mostly don’t understand when they tell their people: “We’ve got to be design savvy.”
It seems to us that you can’t necessarily (or perhaps at all) get at what design means to a customer from just running a focus group. Our experience with customers is that many of them cannot articulate why they chose a particular product. They’ll tell you why they think they chose it, but if you give somebody a Razor and an iPod and put them side by side and ask, “Why do you care, or why don’t you care, if Motorola goes out of business and you do care about iPod and Apple being around—Why?” This is the answer you need to hear and pay attention to.