metacool

metacool Thought of the Day

"If you want a successful product, test and revise. If you want a great product, one that can change the world, let it be driven by someone with a clear vision. The latter represents more financial risk, but it is the only path to greatness."

-- Donald Norman, Emotional Design

Why so many cars on this blog?

Yes, it's true: I'm guilty of a heavy reliance upon automobilia to illustrate my thinking in this blog.  But, lest you dismiss me as a dumb motorhead (which is a false stereotype, by the way), let me explain why cars happen to provide so much fodder for my musings:

1)  Cars are the Third Space in Our Lives:  Home.  Work.  In our society, when you're not in one of those two spaces, you're probably in your car.  Automobiles are a huge part of our built environment.

2)  Cars are Computers:  With a LAN, multiple processors, and complex human interface points, a modern car is the other computer in your life.  It may be the only computer you ever love.  Or lust after.  Granted, I haven't touched on this subject area at all in this blog, but I will.

3)  Car Forms are Difficult to Design Well:  Ever wonder why not every car comes out looking as gorgeous as a Ferrari Daytona?  Or as honest as a Toyota Sienna?  It's because shaping sheetmetal to trigger positive visceral reactions is about heuristics, the realm of mystery and art.  As such, cars make for compelling discussions about aesthetics.

4)  Getting Cars to Function Well is Hard:  Why does a BMW M3 steer so well while the steering on a Ford Taurus lacks the sophistication of my 1974 Big Wheel?  It's really hard to get the functional aspects of automotive design right, and it's fun to talk about things when they go right.

5)  Automotive Marketing = Cubic $$$$: Creating meaning around the most visible and expensive machines we ever own is a big, competitive business.  And it's one where product goodness drives brand image drives product goodness.  As such, cars represent a reflective design challenge of the highest level of difficulty.

6)  They're Familiar and Fun:  You want I should gossip about urine analysis machines?

How Does One Say "Poison Your Brand" in German?

Porsche’s management is planning to add a four-door, front-engine sedan to their lineup.  I find this rather painful, as Porsche is all about – and only about – two doors and rear engines.  To be clear, it’s not about having just two seats, as the 911, and the 356 before it, proved that four-seat cars can be real sports cars.

So why roll out a four-door sedan?  Well, automakers like multiples of ten, and some MBA-type at Porsche wants to be able to grow sales to the 100k mark, something not likely with only a lineup of pure sports cars.   Porsche Chief Executive Wendelin recently stated in BusinessWeek that the key to creating shareholder value “… is to avoid a quarterly [earnings] orientation,” but it seems to me that by floating this four-door concept, Dr. Wendelin isn’t practicing what he preaches.  Shareholder value is defined as the present value of all future cash flows; if you believe, as I do, that creating a four-door Porsche will erode the brand’s hard-won equity, then it’s bound to erode long-term cash flow as well, for in an automotive landscape where a $30,000 Subaru can run with any Porsche 911, what else is there besides brand image?  No, a four-door Porsche is just a play for short-term earnings.

If they were really serious about long-term growth, Porsche the company would keep the Porsche the brand focused on making tasty sports cars, and then find another brand whose name could be used to rollout sedans without dilluting Porsche's heritage, much as Ferrari is doing with Maserati.

Next thing you know they’ll be talking about introducing a SUV. 

Oh.

More Bonafide Book Reviewing: Emotional Design

I just finished reading Donald Norman's new book Emotional Design, and it knocked my socks off.

Read my review at 800CEOREADblog

metacool Thought of the Day

"The perfect state of creative bliss is having power (you are 50) and knowing nothing (you are 9).  This assures an interesting and successful outcome."

-- Tibor Kalman

More on the Stanford d.school

The d.school now has a website up!  Here's the credo:

Stanford University is creating a bold new center for design.  The center is intended to advance interdisciplinary research and teaching, place Stanford at the epicenter of the design field, and strengthen the connection between the university and industry.

As I wrote about earlier, it's a remarkable mission, this d.school.  Design is a discipline, not just a profession.  As such, the design process can be taught to people from all walks of life, and applied to their respective domains to help bring about positive change in the world.

Attack of the Brandroids

The stock is down 45%, the financial clock is ticking faster... it's time for practicing the brand management of desperation!  How about a 20 oz, 740 calorie frozen blended "beverage" that packs a 114 gram carbo wallop and tastes vaguely like a stale floor scrap off our signature donut line?  Sure, it'll ruin our laser focus on making great donuts and great donuts alone, and turns us into something more like a Starbucks with better pastries and worse coffee, or a Dunkin' Donuts with better donuts and just-as-mediocre coffee, but we'll keep our jobs for at least a few more months, and besides, as brandroids we're all about line extensions and "tremendous" growth opporunities and what was De Niro talking about anyway with all that "this is this" mumbo jumbo?... I think he was babbling about something like "fundamental goo", which is what this drink is all about and pretty much sums up what Krispy Kreme will be with just, oh, three more years of this kind of inane marketing behavior. 

Jerry Garcia on Strategy

Brian Camelio, President of ArtistShare, came up with a radical new business model for musicians by asking himself the fundamental question of any strategy generation exercise: what will make me unique and desirable? As he told the New York Times:

I got to thinking: what's the one thing you can't download, the one thing that the artist can hold onto? The answer: the creative process. That's the product I'm offering: the creative process.

What he come up with is ArtistShare, a collection of tools to help artists move from a product-centric business model to one built around continuous, interactive relationships with their audience. In his new approach, recorded music is allowed to do what it does best – be an idea virus that sells the artist – and value is claimed for the artist instead by charging for access to the rest of the creative process. Kaplan says it well:

The creative process is a timeline. It is a living, breathing thing. An artistic product… is just a quick snapshot of that timeline. The moments of brilliance an audience hopes to experience when purchasing that artistic product exist throughout the entire process.

I applaud ArtistShare’s determination to build a thriving venture off of a business model innovation (check out their patent here – respek!). It is a wonderful answer to the strategic question posed at the top of this post. As that notable musician/business guy Jerry Garcia once said (thanks to Tom Peters for the quote):

We do not merely want to be the best of the best, we want to be the only ones who do what we do.

metacool Thought of the Day

"I truly believe in beautiful cars.  The cost is the same.  And they're better."
-- Peter Horbury, Executive Director of Design, North America, Ford

(things that look and feel good work better)

Sound Matters, part 2

A few days ago I touched on the importance of paying attention to all aspects of your product’s use experience, even to the point of considering the sounds it makes.

Sound character can be a vital element of your entire brand.  Consider the lengths Porsche went to make the new 911’s exhaust note evoke the same intense, visceral reaction in listeners as did 911’s of yesteryear.

To understand why sound is so important to Porsche’s brand, understand that the original 911 was powered by an air-cooled, boxer motor which sounded like nothing else.  Most cars used liquid-cooled motors in a vee or inline configuration, combinations which sound radically different than the raspy banshee wail of an air-cooled 911.  The new 911 uses a liquid-cooled motor, and the cooling fluid muffles the sound of all those whirring chain-driven camshafts, pistons and valves, much as wrapping a violin in muslin would deaden its voice.  As a result, the motor didn’t meet people’s expectation of what a Porsche should sound like when it debuted six years ago.

Porsche carefully engineered the old 911 sound back into the new car.  First, they recorded a sound signature of the 911 using 32 microphones in an anechoic chamber.  The design team used the resulting acoustic fingerprint to help shape the sonic character of the new 911 as heard from the driver’s seat.  They even placed a computer-controlled Helmholtz resonance chamber in the air intake manifold plenum.  The engine control computer automatically adjusts this resonance chamber to tune the sound of the motor in real time, much as trombone player adjusts his airstream to create music.  The result of all this is a car which sounds remarkably like an old Carrera RS even though it share very little mechanical DNA with that car.

The visceral element of a brand can (and should) be a source of intense emotions.  Porsche gets it.

metacool Thought of the Day

"It's a bridge with great character.  It tells a story."

-- Santiago Calatrava, on his new Sundial Bridge in Redding, California

Fundamental Goodness, continued

"You see this? This is this. This ain't somethin' else. This is this!"

-- Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter

Fundamental Goodness

Just read an interesting article, Artisan Bakers Prosper in Low-Carb World.  As people figure out that Bimbo white bread makes them go blimpo, they’re also learning that real bread made from real ingredients by real bakers like Red Hen Baking can be something else altogether.  Something really good, in fact.  Says Gina Piccolino of the Bread Bakers Guild of America:

[Artisan Bakers have] taken the time to educate customers on what it is they are actually buying when they're buying artisan products… Multigrain, whole-grain, whole-wheat kinds of products are good for you.

There’s a lesson here for all of us trying to create winning products in the 21st century.  Gone is the day where brilliant packaging and glossy advertising wrapped around a mediocre product create winning offerings.  No, now people want Acme Walnut Levain instead of WonderBread.  They want a soulful Mazda 3 instead of a Ford Focus.  They want a burrito from Andales, not Taco Bell. 

The market winners of today are those products which stand on their intrinsic merit alone, not on what their creators say we should think about them.  We the consuming populace are the final arbiters of quality and we want great stuff created by product crazies who couldn’t – and wouldn’t – be doing anything else.

Jay Leno's Hot Rod: to the hilt!

Probably because they are by definition uniquely personal works, hot rods are hotbeds of “doing it to the hilt”.  A few weeks ago we examined the Zausner Torpedo.  Jay Leno has something well, a bit bigger to show you.

Jay Leno knows what it means to take something and really do it to the hilt.  His latest hot rod is powered by the motor from an old M-47 Patton tank.  For those of you out there who aren’t exactly into tanks, you’re not really supposed to put tank motors into a car.  It’s just not right.  But it is to the hilt.  Here’s what Jay has to say about it:

The car weighs 9500 pounds--nearly 5 tons, but only one-twentieth of what the tank weighed. This thing is faaasssttt. Best of all, it's hilarious to drive. The size is what's the funniest. The engine alone is 6 ft. long. The car looks like a roadster on steroids.

Man, it’s great to see someone doing things to the hilt.

metacool Thought of the Day

"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)

Another Bonafide Book Review

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.

Maeda's Simplicity Design Workshop

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.