Campbell on Branding and Innovation

Toolkits

I keep a running document of great quotes that I’m constantly adding to (31 pages so far). It includes quotes on everything from business to life. I recently re-read this one from Roger Martin:

I see creativity as central to design strategy. For me, design is centrally about creating options or possibilities that do not currently exist, not choosing between or among options that currently do. So at its heart, it is about the creation of something new. This highlights the difference between business administration and business design. Business administration entails the intelligent selection from among existing known options and the taking of action on the selection in question. Business design entails the creative production of a new option that is superior to the existing options.

- Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

It got me thinking about a traditional business administration toolkit and a business design toolkit. I realize these aren’t absolutes, that there are MBAs taking design classes at places like Kellogg, and that designers use hard data as well. But, building off the above quote, I thought it would be an interesting exercise in the different approaches to uncovering problems and finding solutions.

Business Administration Toolkit vs. Business Design Toolkit
Focus groups vs. Ethnography
Statistically-valid surveys of hundreds of customers vs. Interviews of a handful of extreme non-customers
Free-for-all, unfocused brainstorms vs. Focused, calculated ideation sessions
Benchmarking your industry vs. Benchmarking unrelated industries
High-fidelity, functional prototypes shared with management vs. Down-and-dirty, iterative prototypes shared with end users
Mining of hard facts/data vs. Observation and uncovering of emotions and unarticulated needs

This is just a first pass but I’d love to build a thorough list of tools. What else do you think should be added or deleted?

My path to the Institute of Design

Today is the second day of the Fall recruitID, where great companies from all over attend. It’s a fantastic opportunity for students to meet with companies and design consultancies. One question I’ve been asked during interviews is how I ended up at ID. I have been meaning to write on this every since Jamey commented on this blog a few weeks ago.

Jamey wrote:

“Jon - 
David Armano turned me on to your blog. I'm facing the same dilemma it seems you have gone through. I'm considering the my career and agree that design is key to the future of business for innovation and development. I've been exploring MBA versus MDes and will be looking at the MDM program you're involved with. As a fellow Milwaukeean, it looks like Chicago is the location that is leading the way via IIT or Kellogg to achieve that type of education.
I'll be curious to follow your posts and get a better idea of how you reached the decision to go the MDM route and what you feel the future value for you and your career will be.”

So I thought I would share my “journey” to the world of design thinking. Here it goes.

I was working at Cramer-Krasselt as an ad account executive in 2004. At the time, the agency was working on a lot of TV and print and I felt there had to be better ways to engage people than shouting to them through TV spots and cluttered magazines. Media fragmentation was making “mass” media less massive and as you know it’s only getting worse. The end was coming for the Advertising Industrial Complex.

I was working on the WD-40 Company account and we were doing some fantastic work on their core hardware products – WD-40, Lava and 3-IN-One oil. Starting with a clean slate, we went from ideation sessions and concept evaluation to ethnographic research, prototyping through marketing communications program execution. It was incredible! We developed with WD-40 the Smart Straw, solving the number one customer complaint of losing the little red straw, the Lava Pro line and 3-IN-One Professional. There was nothing that got me jazzed like walking through a Lowe’s or Home Depot and seeing a customer putting a product I helped bring to life into their shopping cart.

I came across Seth Godin’s Purple Cow in the Fall of 2004 which helped generate more interest for me. If you haven’t read it, the premise is largely based on the idea that you can’t just yell out marketing messages about a product anymore. You have to build the marketing into the product, make it remarkable from the start.

I got the opportunity to join Harley-Davidson and felt that working on the client side for a while would give me the opportunity to implement some of this thinking since I would be looking at the full business rather than just touching the marketing communications slice of the pie.

I kept reading and talking with people about design and innovation and then in Spring 2006 attended the Wisconsin Innovates conference where Tom Peters was the keynote speaker. During a breakout session I asked Tom, a frequent critic of MBA programs, what his thoughts were on going back to school for an MBA, for design or to keep working. His recommendation was to stay in the workforce and do something remarkable or, if I wanted to go back to school, that something unique like design would be the way to go because you learn to approach problems differently and find solutions in other ways.

That sealed it for me. Here are Tom and I after the breakout session. Kinda cool I got a picture with him. I'm on the left. :)

I had read an article about ID by Bruce Nussbaum in BusinessWeek the year before and started researching schools that taught design with business and only found a couple – ID and Roger Martin’s Rotman School of Management – that really intrigued me.

So it took me a year from talking to Tom Peters to get up the nerve to apply to ID and then take the risk of quitting my job to do something I was passionate about.

And it’s been so super worth it. I’ve been able to interview with companies and design consultancies that get it and have been doing this for years. They understand that all the touchpoints that have been ignored for decades while mass media was the focus are where you create and reinforce brands – product/service development, environments like retail locations, employee dress and signage, interactive, packaging, collateral. All based on insights derived from user-centered research.

So that's my long-winded story, what's yours? Were you always in design? Are you just now getting into it? Are you still in the exploration phase?

Oh?! Design school? That's cool!

That's the reaction I got from some coworkers last week when they learned that I was leaving Harley-Davidson to go to the Institute of Design (ID) full time for my Master of Design Methods degree. That's the same reaction I've received from acquaintances, family friends and others over the last couple of months.

This is related to the issue Bruce Nussbaum's blog post mentions regarding coverage of the NY Times where he states:

"It's not that the article is bad--it's a nice discussion about how back-end process innovation is often key to the success of products. The problem is the rarity of this kind of piece in the NYT. Design in the Times is still mostly about style, aesthetics and fashion. Glitzy, cool stuff with skinny models and empty, but beautiful homes. Coverage of design in the Times is a throwback to, what, the 50's? The entire evolution of design out of simple form to process, methods, strategy and more just isn't in the newspaper. Even the business side of fashion, which is huge, is barely covered."

Many people still think of design in terms of creating logos (graphic), cars (industrial), or the good ol' haute couture (fashion). These all fall under the broad umbrella of big D Design, but for a marketing manager at a Fortune 500 to leave to work on what many envision is a degree in making logos and pantsuits doesn't really make sense to a lot of people. So to make sure they don't have a mental image of me appearing on Project Runway, I inevitably fill in the pause after "That's cool!" with a five-minute explanation of what design-centered thinking, planning and strategy is, how that leads to innovative products, services, business models, and ultimately revenue to a company, and how it's the Future of Business, and that programs like ID are years ahead of mainstream business, fancy MBA programs and super narrowly-focused "design as a trade" schools. Not surprisingly, I often end up boring people. In fact, I might have just lost some of you readers.

Therefore, I thought I'd try my hand at writing up a brief explanation of design in the context of the program I'm attending. A quick way to get the gist across when I tell someone what I'm currently up to. Here it goes:

Design is a strategic way of thinking that places the user at the center of all decisions, using an iterative approach to deliver on unmet needs that creates real value for users and thereby for the organization.

Does that work? Is it too light on conveying the power of design? Is it too vague? What do you think?

In future posts I'll start digging into why design thinking is only going to get bigger, how it will be key to any company's future success, how it can solve world hunger (I put that in to be a smart ass but, in fact, it holds the potential to solve problems of that scale), etc. And I'll throw out my two cents on why I believe this is a more valuable degree going forward than an MBA for many people currently looking at going to grad school.