metacool

Sound Matters

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:

• Subaru WRX
• Nissan 350Z
• Mustang GT
• Porsche 911
• BMW M3 (the newest one)
• Mazda Miata

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?

metacool Thought of the Day

"The reign of the poetical has started."
- Philippe Starck

You'll Find Google's Brand in the Trash

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!

The d.school at Stanford

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.

metacool Thought of the Day

“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.

When the Prototype Becomes the Product

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. 

Vartan Gregorian on Liberty

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.

Strongly-Held Beliefs of Lutz

I consider Bob Lutz to be the epitome of the designer/product guy as business person.  He gets great product at an elemental, instinctive level, and couples that facility with deep execution skills in the business arena.  As evidenced by the changes he's wrought at GM (400 horsepower, 6-speed Cadillacs!), he's a walking, talking example of what happens when you smash Knowing-Doing gaps to oblivion.

And how can you resist the dissonant charm of a Cohiba-puffing, Cobra-driving, jet-flying ardent vegetarian?

Lutz's "Strong-Held Beliefs" memo, published upon his arrival at GM, is a classic piece of product development wisdom.  Here are the big ideas:

Strongly-Held Beliefs, by Bob Lutz
1. The best corporate culture is the one that produces, over time, the best results for shareholders.
2. Product portfolio creation is partly disciplined planning, but partly spontaneous, inspired all-new thinking.
3. There are no significant unfilled "Consumer Needs" in the U.S. car and truck market (except in the commercial arena).
4. The VLEs (vehicle line executives) must be the tough gatekeepers on program cost, content, and investment levels.
5. Much of today's content is useless in terms of triggering purchase decisions.
6. Design's Role Needs to be Greater.
7. Complexity-reduction is a noble goal, but it is not an overriding corporate goal.
8. We all need to question things that inhibit our drive for exceptional, "turn-on" products.
9. It's better to have Manufacturing lose ground in the Harbour Report, building high net-margin vehicles with many more hours, than being best in the world building low-hour vehicles that we make a loss on.
10. We need to recognize that everything is a trade-off, that we can't maximize the performance of any one function to the detriment of overall profit maximization.
11. Remember the Bob Lutz motto: "Often wrong, but seldom in doubt."

See the full memo here

metacool Thought of the Day

"I see us as being in the art business. Art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.”
-- Bob Lutz (aka The Man)

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

(ah.... the Care Racing Development Prodrive Ferrari 550 GTS... it shares almost no body panels with the street version, but looks oh so much better... AESTHETICS MATTER, AND AESTHETIC DETAILS MATTER EVEN MORE!)

metacool Thought of the Day

“Design can unlock the technological performance we build into a product and help the consumer see it, touch it. Good design is serious business.”
– A.G. Lafley, Chairman, Procter & Gamble

Venture Design, continued

I’ve been writing about how anything can be designed and prototyped, even a venture or a business.  Nailing a concept design is critical to long-term success, as both flaws and strong points telescope out far into the future.  A rich example of how very critical concept design is can be seen in this thought from Dr. Mario Theissen, Director of BMW Motorsport.  Here he’s talking about the design of their Formula 1 car:

"If you look at this small line between success and failure - the big difference there is whether your concept is right or not. If the concept of the car or the engine is not right, you won't be able to fix it in the running season, you'll have to come up with a new concept and that takes time and it requires total focus. If the concept is right - and that's what we found out last year after a few races - and you just have not been able to exploit the potential of the concept, then you can make it."

Imagine if BMW Motorsport didn’t have to wait until the Formula 1 season started to know – really know – whether or not their fundamental car concept was quick enough to be a winner.  The payoff would be tremendous, as it takes about $300 million to campaign a season of Formula 1, and for that kind of money, you might as well win a few races.  You can prototype anything, and should.  But doing it is quite another thing.

metacool Thought of the Day

“At some point, you’ve got to cut through the analytical logic that’s driven the automotive business for the past 30 years and say, 'Hey – what’s going to turn people on?'" -- J Mays

Look for Less-loyal Evangelists

Download BzzAgent_HBS_CaseStudy_Sum.pdf

John Moore (who is one of my book reviewing peers at 800-CEO-READ-BLOG) turned me on to this summary of an HBS case on BzzAgent. It’s a nice overview of how word of mouth marketing (aka customer evangelism) is affected by network types and the players within them.

The most interesting – and counterintuitive – assertion in this piece is that the most influential source of incremental word of mouth marketing comes from individuals with weak ties to your organization, meaning that they’ve only experienced your brand once before, as opposed to being repeat or long-term customers. The reasoning behind this is that more loyal individuals have already saturated their networks with talk about your offering, while less loyal folk offer virgin fields, so to speak, for you to plow.

This is a nice way of thinking about the dynamics of word of mouth for established brands. For nascent players or offerings, however, you’d have to alter your tactics, because very few individuals, if any, are loyal to you, and in order to cross the chasm you’ve got to establish some pockets of deep loyalty.

metacool Thought of the Day

"I don't understand why enduring design is better than disappearing design"

-- Ettore Sottsass

The Zausner Torpedo: to the hilt!

Do something to the hilt, and you’ll end up with something that makes you want to cry “mama mia”. 

How does a built-from-scratch hot rod with a 5.5 liter, 485 horsepower Ferrari V-12 grab you?  Draped in aluminum bodywork still dripping from the classic Alfa + Touring gene pool, with an interior of ostrich hides and precision, machined controls.  Craftsman Steve Moal and patron Eric Zausner did it, and they call it the Torpedo.

Too cool!

Bluebottle Coffee: to the hilt!

Bluebottle Coffee Company, an artisan microroaster, is a purveyor of Way Beyond Critical to Quality (WBCTQ).  In the minutes leading up to a sip of Bluebottle espresso, my knees go giddy with anticipation, because they know I’m about to have the best damn coffee around, crafted with care by one James Freeman.  Like Woody Allen, Freeman is a clarinetist when not laboring for his art, and that art is sublime: watching him whip up a cappuccino from beans roasted not more than 24 hours ago is a deep lesson in passionate product creation.  He’s serious about brewing coffee to the hilt:

The highest achievement, I think, is just a straight shot of espresso.  Coffee itself is very sexual. Espresso is nerdy. You have to have the soul of a poet and the heart of a band nerd to get everything right.

Freeman takes things beyond sane limits because it’s the only way he knows – it’s about Way Beyond Critical to Quality (WBCTQ).  Ettore Bugatti and Enzo Ferrari understood WBCTQ .  Yvon Chouinard, Steve Jobs, and Quentin Tarantino are instinctive WBCTQ’ers.  Bluebottle Coffee is using WBCTQ to create what, one day, will be a widely-renowned brand.  Doing things to the hilt is how great brands get made.

Knowing by Doing at Pixar

“I used to say for years that story was the most important thing to us.  Then I realized that all the other studios were saying the same thing.  They say that and then they go and produce crap.  What you say doesn’t mean a damn thing.  It’s what you do that matters.”
                                                                                        -- Dr. Ed Catmull, President, Pixar

(Pixar gets things done using a “fail early to succeed sooner” rapid prototyping process where story concepts go to the big screen early so that bad ideas get surfaced fast)