Few people would pay to get advertisements, in fact we pay to get rid of them. But a great deal of people would pay to get recommendations. Both are here partly to improve our lives by helping us find what we really need. I think advertisement might have one or two things to learn from it’s better twin.

What do you have in your business that benefits your customer, but might not be perceived as such? Perhaps just a small change would make it drastically more appealing? A change as small as advertisement tweaking itself into recommendations.

I had a chat with a friend and advisor Johan Ronnestam the other day and our discussion brought up this dear topic of discussion.

“A good way to awake peoples emotions is to be rational”

It might sound like a contradiction but here are two examples on why rational sense making is a great way to win peoples hearts.

1: The work of Dieter Rams

The German master mind of rationality is an Industrial Designer who has captured many hearts. Back in the days he made Braun a very desirable brand (they sort of lost it now though, being like any other electronics brand) and he has been one of the main inspirations for the way Apple design their products. Dieter followed his 10 principles of design that guided him to design products in a rational way in order to make people truly attached to them. One of his more famous principles is: “Good design is as little design as possible”. The principle should prevent designers from notoriously adding stuff to products that would result in those products making less sense, or if you wish, being less rational, and ultimately being less desirable.

2. Apple

Apple has taken what Dieter Rams did to physical products and applied it to their whole business: If it makes sense, if you really understand it – it’s easy to love. When Steve went up on that stage, I don’t think it’s as simple as saying that he won hearts because he was passionate as a person and a good speaker. It was probably as much because the products, the services and the UIs just made so much sense – or were so rational – that his belief in Apples quality took his positive impact beyond personality.

There are many companies that in my opinion should benefit from a more rational approach to designing their products, and their over all communication. Obviously – it’s like saying that there are companies that would benefit from making more sense in the eyes of their customers. If you would go to a brand meetings in, let’s say Braun, I wouldn’t be surprised if most people attending feel that Braun is failing to make people understand the uniqueness of the company. Braun and brands alike are less likely to establish an emotional bond with their customers. These companies competitive advantages are more or less restricted to the areas of pricing, durability and accessibility. But perhaps the most dangerous part is that they are left with the risk that competitors will start making sense the way Apple does and start to leverage peoples emotional attachment.

Gillette. A tangible example of a company I believe would benefit from a higher level of Rational Design

An opinion I hear often is that Gillette design their products and their campaigns as something explosive, that has an average speed of 600 km/h in a future far, far away. While Apple make simple designs because their value proposition is all about simplicity, Gillette seems to go into “Outer Space mode” with their design and marketing, when their value proposition is what? The closest shave ever? Grooming yourself in a hot cosy bathroom? I don’t see that the design approach of Gillette makes sense – sorry. I respect their ability to be accessible and keeping a quite good quality, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Gillette struggle to get people truly emotionally attached to the level of what Apple have accomplished today or what Braun did then.

What could this mean for your business?

So if you want to trigger your customers emotions, weather it’s by designing a new portfolio, a new strategy, a new product or a new business – perhaps a rock solid rationality is what your creative minds should rely on.

/ Johan Frössén

Email: johan@peoplepeople.se

Phone: +46 707 20 67 35

Martin Willers lectures on the Executive Design Management course at Berghs School of Communication in Sweden. The course sets out to answer some key questions:

Today, when 46% of the resources that companies devote to conceptualize, develop and launch new products go to projects that do not succeed:

• How can organization use design thinking to reach a higher rate of successful products?
• How can organizations become more effective in their development and innovation processes?
• How can organizations become more sustainable?

Berghs School of Communication is based in Stockholm – a city where some of the most innovative design and communication trends of the last decade were born. Berghs is founded by a world-leading creative community and is regarded as one of the best schools in the world for studying Communication. Many of the participating professionals see an increase in their salaries after completing the course. You can see Martins slides here (mostly in Swedish):

Nowadays people are looking for The Real Thing. We want genuine and robust stuff that last forever, or at least looks like they already have. On this very day of writing we have 1076 items on sale named “Shabby Chic” at the Swedish online sales market Blocket. They are everywhere these constructed antiques, the white painted worn out furniture and other “wannabe antiques”.

So why do we like old stuff? I have listed some of the reasons in my mind:
1. They tell a story. It doesn’t necessarily say what it has lived through, but the fact that it has been through a lot wins our respect.
2. Quality. Something that has lasted a long time is more likely to keep lasting compared to something that was made this morning.
3. Imperfection is human. Who loves a too polished surface? It’s those little glitches that adds personality and makes us relate.

The problem with the Shabby Chicism is that it’s fake. It’s not really old at all and doesn’t have any stories to tell, only lies.

Good Old Chair

We have created a chair that is a reaction to the hypocrisy, and an answer to our need for real, genuine stuff. This chair is made out of a hundred layers of thin wood. In normal usage, it will wear out one layer every year, revealing the growth rings in a similar way that a tree shows its age. When the chair seat has been worn all the way through, it will be a hundred years old. This age is what usually defines something as an antique.

Image courtesy of convoy.tumblr.com

Current problems for people

There’s a war going on in the living rooms of the world – the never ending battle between home electronics and interior design. It might be the huge TV that really doesn’t work with the nice old cupboard, or maybe the heaps of cables that for some reason needs to connect to our stereo system. Just making it all connect in the right way is tricky enough. Making it blend in often feels impossible unless we would build it into our walls. The thing is, hiding stuff behind walls is both expensive and difficult, and a lot of people actually want their hi-fi stuff to be visible. So we realized there are some improvements that should be made to this situation, and set out to meet the three following issues:

• People want music to sound good. How can we let the music equipment blend in nicely, while still be proudly perceived as high tech?

• These days people keep music in many different digital places. How can we allow people to play it without hassle or cables everywhere?

• Electronic waste is a huge environmental problem. How can we design something that doesn’t add to that huge landfill?

This speaker tries to answer all of the questions above.

How we designed it for people

The transparent design lets the speaker blend in to any living room out there. The size can be big enough to offer a good sound quality, yet the speaker takes little visible space. The box is transparent, but the sound creating components are clearly emphasized.

Usability

The speakers come with a small wifi antenna, that can plug in to any computer, music player or smart phone out there. It will also work for old stereos or vinyl equipment. The aim is to set the music free regardless where it’s stored.

Rechargeable WiFi antenna that plugs into any headphone socket

Sustainability

Being big is good for sound quality, but not so good for shipping. Any other speaker will ship a lot of air around the globe before ending up in your living room. This speaker ships in a small, flat package that goes in through your mailbox. The glass sheets making up the box is being ordered through the glass repair shop closest to every single customer. In that way the speaker reduces shipping with up to 90%, and supports local handicraft in one go. A very economical and ecological solution.

The speaker is then assembled at home, IKEA style. This also means that the components that breaks first (the rubber ring and the speaker cone) can be easily replaced, keeping the product away from any landfill.

A well established definition of sustainability is to satisfy the needs of people, planet and profit. Our speaker design tries to accomplish exactly that. Sounds great doesn’t it?

Update with some info: The speaker is still under development, and not available for purchase yet. If you are interested you can drop a mail to speaker[a]peoplepeople.se and we will keep you posted on the progress. Thanks! /Per

Image courtesy of convoy.tumblr.com

According to the swedish magazine Ny Teknik these companies - Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, Xpand 3D, Changhong Electric, Funai Electric, Hisense Electric, Hitachi Consumer Electronics, Mitsubishi Electric Corp, Philips, Seiko Epson, Sharp, SIM2 Multimedia, TCL Corp, Toshiba and View Sonic – are joining forces to standardise the technology around 3D-goggles. They are facing a huge opportunity and a massive challenge. They are about to design and make a farely unfamiliar product that goes on peoples faces in social contexts. When there was only one option of goggles in cinemas, people could laugh about it – all looking equally silly. When these glasses become an everyday object in peoples homes and lives and you have to compete with various market players – it’s a whole new game. The company who will make people not feel like technology nerds with their goggles will win the game.

Here are some advice on the way:

• Don’t be fooled to think that the newness of this technology is a value in it self or value enough to make it sell. If your competition makes something that is more accepted people will pay them to not feel stupid.

• Don’t allow yourself to do what you yourself think looks cool on a screen or in a magazine. Magazines and marketing is the easy part, making people feel great wearing them is the real challenge. Understand the people who will buy these things better than they understand themselves and use the understanding for a more safe result.

• Try not to rely to much on knowledge about existing products related to glasses with electronics. There are really none out there that are good enough, and if you learn from the winners of today you will make the same mistakes.

• Learn from what Steve Jobs said about typography when designing the first Mac: “It was beautiful. Historical. Artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture. And i found it fascinating.”. Give the challenge to designers that has a great feeling for proportions and aesthetics. There are a lot of good designers out there and only some of them have that unmeasurable but yet so important skill to simply make any style or expression into a beautiful object.

To be continued…

Photo: Emmy Jonsson
 
People People has been supporting a 48 hour open innovation challenge where groups gather around the world to come up with new sustainable solutions together with people they never met before. We strongly believe in the Jams vision that creative people working actively together is the solution to many of our problems. Even the big ones.
 
48 hours is all you need to make a working prototype with a dedicated team. Building the idea, breaking it, than building it again. This years theme was playgrounds, a theme that puts your brain, quite literarily, in a possitive spin.
 
Martin was in Gothenburg talking live to the global audience about what sustainability is and how you can make better products from understanding peoples behavior. One example he used was the water boiler.
 
Here is Martin answering some questions after coaching some of the teams.
 

We recommend you have a look at the global website where you find videos from some of the teams. We want to thank Anton Breman for the invitation to the great event in Gothenburg (South Sweden).
 

View Global Sustainability Jam 2011 in a larger map

When professor Karl-Henrik Robèrt, one of Sweden’s foremost cancer scientists, found out that doctors where travelling to different conferences to discuss cancer in different parts of the body he realized that they better find a common language so that they could travel to the same place and talk about cancer more holistically. That same insight later led him to found the NGO the Natural Step, an organisation focused on helping organizations and individuals understand and make meaningful progress toward sustainability.

Last week the European Union came to the same realization about Corporate Social Responsibility. The press release states:

“CSR offers a set of values on which to build a more cohesive society and on which to base the transition to a sustainable economic system. Only 15 out of 27 EU Member States have national policy frameworks to promote CSR. By renewing efforts to promote CSR now, the Commission aims to create conditions favourable to sustainable growth, responsible business behaviour and lasting job creation. The Commission invites EU Member States to present or update their own plans for the promotion of CSR by mid 2012.”

At People People we have many times met confused clients that are lost in ocean of standards and protocols affecting areas such as consumer electronics. Many time causing smaller companies to look to the less regulated countries like China for production options. To navigate the EU bureaucracy and lead the way in the design industry we have started developing our own tools to navigate trough the jungle and help our clients to find the smartest way to do sustainable innovation. Some of the things we help our clients with are:

• Ecodesign directive alignment: Meet new energy demands on products like vacuum cleaners, coffemakers and power tools.
• Weee directive alignment: Going from recycling compliance (cost) to new business model around material takeback systems (return on investment).
• EPD, Environmental Product Papers with life cycle analysis to win business contracts with green criteria. Sometimes used for marketing.

Our suggestion to the policy makers would be to increase the efforts in align processes and simplify tools for small medium enterprises. And finally, hire People People to create some infographics that makes these processes more accessible and actionable.

The graph is from Cambridge University, Department of Engineering Study by Jonathan Cullen and Julian Allwood and tells you where all the energy comes from, what service it gives us and the associated release of carbon in the air. This research creates a framework for assessing energy efficiency options by considering the scale of opportunity and the technical potential for improvement. We like to se more eco-innovation focusing on the opportunity, moving us from “less bad” to a “more-good-final-service” mindset. Let’s stop calling it Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and start navigating to Corporate Society Action (CSA).