Design is the excellent differentiator we often take for granted. It takes a product that would otherwise be a mere commodity and gives it a shot at becoming an icon that transcends and even redefines the category it slides into. Apple's iPod was beautifully designed, not only in its sleek, elegant look, but in its simple user interface, packaging, and advertising push. All elements work seamlessly as one, sending an unwavering, unstoppable message of cool-as-all-get-out design that makes you want to hold one, touch one, hear one--oh, and buy one.
Design seeps out of every pore at Apple, and it's not surprising its products do damn well in prestigious international awards such as Design and Art Directors (D&AD) or Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA, from the Industrial Designers Society of America).
Design is the new black. Firms from all around the world are cutting through. Nike Inc.'s Considered shoe from the United States demonstrates design innovation through a combination of styling and environmental benefits, while another brand, Solemates, makes a shoe in India from recycled paper and at fifty cents a pair is both cheap and crazy disposable.
Design works in even mundane categories to develop product must-haves. There is, for instance, the Spring Roll fetch toy for puppies from WETNoZ Inter-national, ultraknown makers of designer pet toys, which honestly looks like a big spring roll! Or the stylish and overpriced BYO Lunch Bag from design-focused accessories company Built NY Inc., that keeps your food cool while making you look cool too as you schlep it.
One toilet design has made its designers flush from a run of success! The Purist Hatbox Toilet includes an electric pump within its minimalist casing so it doesn't need to be plumbed into the water pipes and can be placed anywhere in the potty area or perhaps in the living room as a conversation piece (or stopper).
Another award-winning bathroom fixture is the Revolution showerhead by Moen Inc. Moen's team of designers, engineers, anthropologists, marketers, and managers found that people wanted distinctive shower experiences whether in the morning, the evening, or after sports, and so they included a dial that gives the user a choice of shower sensations. For their all wet research, dudes spent hours watching people showering (in swimsuits, they said).
A major winner in those 2005 IDEAs was the coveted Motorola Razr V3 mobile phone. It is as thin as a razor and has the keypad etched onto its metal casing, which is made from "aircraft grade" aluminum and magnesium. The antenna is incorporated into the mouthpiece, and a built-in camera uses a chemically hardened lens. This tremendous design helped the Illinois-based Motorola out of a really horrible slump to smash Nokia into second place and make it the number one handset seller in the United States in 2005.* Cingular--the cell service provider that carried the first Razrs-introduced the exclusive piece and rose above the din to pull in customers who had stuck with their competitors (it helped that their own lobby efforts to get "porting" succeeded just then).†
Razr's success at Cingular led competing provider Sprint (then Sprint Nextel, and eventually Sprint Nextel T Mobile Bell South Crosby Stills Nash & Young) to rush out a vastly inferior copycat called Samsung A900, which ended up as appealing to customers as its devilishly awful customer service.
The Razr firmly established Motorola as the last stop for design in phones. They became accessories--not just something to keep in your pocket that tickles you every now and then. A public statement, perhaps!
Motorola sure had the background for this as innovators in technology. In 1928 they were responsible for the first car radio, then the first walkie-talkie, and that huge clunky first cell phone in 1983.* Design had always taken second place for Motorola. Until they realized it was make a statement with the phones--or change businesses.
How this came about is a metaphor for design's now-ensconced place in the hearts of corporate executives. Early in the millennium, the chief of Motorola's cell phone division, Mike Zafirovski, boosted the in-house arts team and hired as chief of all designers Jim Wicks from Sony Corporation, who had been head of their Innovation and Design Center in San Francisco. As part of the investment in design capabilities Jim and his team conducted more consumer research than ever before and opened a new design center in chic Chicago overlooking the Lake Michigan shoreline in an effort to recruit the hottest design talent. We mean, after all, Schaumburg, Illinois doesn't have quite the same cachet.
Wicks now headed up a division of about two hundred folks worldwide that included among its designer crew a bunch of psychologists, sociologists, musicologists--and a bunch of other ologists--that still today ensure that all phone designs meet consumer needs and win awards. Wicks said, "Back then we were saying, 'Here's the features and the technology,' then put a wrapper around it. Now the starting point is 'What does the consumer want?' and then apply the technology to that." Music to a real Punk Marketer's ears.
So, yes, it is desirable to attempt to understand what the consumer wants before designing products that break through the brand clutter. But breaking through is also about breaking rules and taking risks. Without a gamble, a true innovation in design is--damn it--hard to achieve. Highly respected New York design firm OXO International routinely takes risks and happily makes mistakes while creating beautiful and functional consumer products.
Such boo-boos have led to the best learning and most outstanding successes; that's why OXO has thirty regular ole home products inside the permanent collection at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, of the Smithsonian Institution New York. That museum with the unwieldy name is the one U.S. collection devoted to historic and contemporary design, so to have a potato masher in there is quite an honor.
OXO's humble masher was in fact born through their own mistaken assumption that traditional design would do fine. According to lore, they received a letter from a customer who asked why the original handle was vertical rather than in a more natural horizontal positional, so the company saw it as a Thing That Makes You Go Hmm and created a new device that lets users mash down on a cooked potato by pushing the palm on the more sturdy and soft Santoprene masher rather than a normal vertical handle that seemed to give poor mashers serious blisters.
OXO also made an error attempting to solve a consumer problem when there was none. Take the cheese slicer. (No--please--take it.) This crucial element for any Scandinavian smorgasbord possesses a thin metal wire with which to prod through the Jarlsberg for wafer-thin slices; the cheesy eater can drop them on an open sandwich. Yet in slicing the wire often snaps, sometimes in midcreation! OXO's crack designers thought it through--maybe even too much. They felt it made sense to create a wireless slicer, and the engineers replaced the wire with a more durable metal blade. But remember that those who slice have for years treasured the wire-based doodad, so it was tantamount to treason and customers revolted.
Not a pretty sight.
OXO went back to the wire and used a stronger variant. They almost screwed up by being too damn innovative.
Dull product categories are often overlooked in design standards. Yet Eric Ryan, co-founder of Method Home, the San Francisco maker of home-cleaning products, proclaims with pride, "There is no such thing as dull product categories, only dull brands." With cofounder Adam Lowry, Method Home chose to invigorate a dull category full of yawn-inducing home-cleaning products. Procter and Gamble, SC Johnson: A Family Company, Clorox, and Colgate-Palmolive Company had dominated the market for decades, and all products looked pretty much the way they'd looked for half a century or more.
In a clever burst of imagination, Method made the leap for home-cleaning products from toxic substances hidden beneath the sink to all-natural, biodegradable, lovely countertop accessories!
Design was a key part of their strategy to make consumers "think different" about the products that Lowry, a chemistry graduate from Stanford University, developed to be safe around people yet stubborn in removing dirt. Beginning with a line of spray cleaners whose unusual teardrop design and bright-colored liquids got distributed in supermarkets such as Vons, a large division of grocery chain Safeway Inc., they were suddenly on their way. (You can now find Method at Target, Duane Reade and in my bathroom too.)
They persuaded Egyptian-English design guru Karim Rashid--whose designs for furniture and housewares are in collections of museums such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York--to come aboard as chief creative officer to create a "dish-soap bottle" you'd be proud to show your concubine and/or mistress. This piece had to be elegant and functional, so Rashid devised an inverted-bowling-pin-like design dispensing soap upright when its base is twisted. It took brain-busting thought and strange engineering, but, boy, does that dispenser stop traffic in the kitchen!
What's hilarious is that SoftSoap, the generations-old standby of the soap-on-the-potty variety, now has a serious need to be all beautiful after years of dullness. They are hyping the aesthetics of dispensers--and you wonder why?
Design will always win out in the America of looking good.
This is excerpted from the soon-to-be-issued paperback of Punk Marketing by me and my buddy/coauthor Mark Simmons (www.PunkMarketing.com).
Twitter @laermer