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?

Class projects at ID this semester

I apologize for not writing much in the last week. We’ve been crazy busy. Partly as an excuse but mostly because I think you might find it interesting, I’ve outlined the cool projects my teammates and I are working on. It shows the breadth, the real-world application and the problem-solving ability of design.

Design Planning Workshop
As I mentioned before, the DPW team of eight students is working on a project to help a major retailer better understand Generation Y and their shopping/retail habits. We were lucky enough to visit their headquarters last week where my teammates put together a killer presentation, we got a tour of the offices and were able to meet with members of various departments. This project is a full semester, starting with ethnographic research and ending with design concepts and broad strategic recommendations to the client.

Observing Users
For this class, our team of four chose car-sharing services, specifically IGO. We spent the first part of this semester-long class on learning and practicing the tools and methods of observation. The last ten weeks of the semester are focused on doing user-centered research for our project, gleaning insights and translating those into meaningful concepts.

Design Planning
For Design Planning, we broke into groups and were tasked with choosing a topic related to 19.20.21 – an initiative to address issues surrounding the 19 cities that will have 20 million residents in the 21st century, such as health, food, water, infrastructure, information flow, and more. My team of three is focusing on talent, specifically the migration of knowledge workers across cities and how a platform for tracking these knowledge workers will help cities cultivate, attract and retain talent. Attracting talent is the bedrock of a city, providing a solid tax base, new businesses and industries, culture and more.

Service Design
For this class our group of four students chose FedEx Kinko’s as our topic. We have two professors for this class, one is the vice president of innovation and concept development at McDonald’s, and the other is head of the service design practice at IDEO. They asked the class to find an opportunity to innovate an area within a service business and build that out. We feel FedEx Kinko’s has some great strengths to leverage and areas for improvement.

Of these projects, only the Design Planning Workshop is sponsored by a client. The others we selected. It’s great to apply what’s learned in the classroom and in the readings to the real world. Obviously in some cases we have to make assumptions but it allows us to put methods into practice, learn more, and also create portfolio pieces to share with prospective employers. I'm really getting a lot out of this and my appreciation for the power of design continues to grow. After all, what's great about these projects is the breadth. We're using design to understand Gen Y for a brick-and-mortar retailer; explore services with IGO and FedEx Kinko's; and how to improve the quality of life for people in megacities.

Playing with Post-its

We’re rockin’ now! As I’ve mentioned, our team in my Design Planning Workshop is working on a project on Gen Y and shopping for a major retailer. It’s getting really busy as we cruise through secondary research while digging into the lives of Gen Y through various methods, interviewing twenty-somethings as well as “extremes” like professional shoppers. A couple of weeks ago we distributed disposable cameras and journals to eleven Gen Yers and had them capture in pictures and words there shopping habits for a week.

Once the cameras and journals were collected, our team of eight divided into small groups and interviewed the research participants in their homes, asking them to walk through their photos and journal entries, discuss habits and opinions, give us a tour of their living space and so on. Today we met as an entire group and each team presented the people they interviewed to the rest of the team. We have written up personas for each person and shared those with the team, posting the pictures the participants took, as well as pictures we took during the interview, on large foam core boards.

Each interview team described the participant, and tried to bring them alive for the others. As a team talked the rest of us would write down notable habits, insights, quotes and anecdotes on Post-it notes and then would place them on the participant's board, clustering similar themes and ideas together. You can see us “in action” here.

Once this is complete we’ll start analyzing, determining dozens and dozens of insights that will then go into the Insight Matrix, an Excel Macro tool developed by our professor, Vijay Kumar, that helps visually organize similar insights into clusters that might be worth exploring further. This is one of the many tools and frameworks we’re being taught at ID that we’re using in Workshop for a real client. So cool!

The whole team is really jazzed about the project and the process. I’m learning a ton about how to uncover insights through in-depth interviews and observation, and then process these to find meaningful patterns that can help drive innovative ideas.

As a marketer, I’m accustomed to doing quantitative research that ensures we have some statistical validity as well. With these design processes though, the goal is to uncover unarticulated needs and find new ideas, and that can only be done by really getting into the user’s life and better understanding them. There’s no need, and no real use, in fielding quantitative studies at this stage. You want extreme users, extreme habits, extreme work-arounds, extreme anything because that’s where opportunity lies.

It reminds me of a quote by Ryan Matthews and Watts Wacker, who stated in Fast Company, “Deviance tells the story of every mass market ever created. What starts out weird and dangerous becomes America’s next big corporate payday. So are you looking for the next mass market idea? It’s out there … way out there.”

So that’s our Saturday. I’ll keep you posted as we move along to the next stages on this project.

Twitter as a research tool

For my Design Planning Workshop, my project team has been tasked by a major retailer with gaining a better understanding of shopping and retail experiences among Generation Y and how the company can gain a greater share of wallet among this age group as they become an even larger force in the market.

Using ID methods and tools, we are beginning by digging into secondary research and conducting extensive primary research including camera-journal studies, one-on-one interviews, shop-alongs and more. We're looking for insights that will allow us to form hypotheses, and then concept and deliver recommendations to the client. We are conducting in-home interviews with the participants from the camera-journal study, and are therefore limited to the Chicago area.

So, how do we follow Gen Yers in other parts of the country as they go through their daily routines, following their shopping experiences and purchases, their interaction with media and the like? Our team had the idea to use Twitter, which if you're unfamiliar, is a site that allows you to tell the world in 140 characters or less, what you're doing via instant messaging, cell phone text messages or the site itself. Or as the site says,

A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?

The idea is a Web 2.0 version of beeper studies from the 90's, with a handful of Gen Yers from all over the U.S. recruited to create Twitter accounts and then, for a period of 3 days, they Twitter their way through their daily life.

From the time they get up in the morning until the time they go to bed, the participants send updates to Twitter when they go shopping (online or off), make purchases, see or experience something remarkable, etc. On the last day, we provide them with a gift certificate for use at the retailer client and ask them to report on that experience as well.

Since Twitter posts are time-stamped, we're able to then download all their posts, sort them by day and time and gain insights on their habits. We then follow up with phone interviews to clarify posts, gain context and ask some follow up questions.

The benefits are great:

- Gain insights in real time
- Understand shopping and purchase habits regardless of geography
- Thoughts are documented online and time-stamped for later review
- No hordes of researchers hanging over the participant's shoulder
- Quick feedback with little cost and easily scalable

We'll see how it works and I'll post on the results in a few weeks. It could turn out to be a neat new research method. Haven't seen this done elsewhere, has anyone else?