Please help us recycle easily

We want to voluntarily participate in recycling but do so only when it is easy. Here are the two bin boxes available at a university in Seoul. Unfortunately, their colors and their names are not matched: the left one has a blue cover and its green panel says “recycled” whereas the right one has a green cover and a blue panel says “disposable.” The mismatch among name, cover color, and panel color led me to give up choosing one for my empty coffee can. Instead, I threw it away somewhere else. Indeed, behaving in a sustainable way requires huge mental resources. Therefore, things need to be designed carefully in advance.

DML_Bin box_01

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Reference

White, K., Hardisty, D. J., & Habib, R. (2019). The elusive green consumerHarvard Business Review11(1), 124-133.

People say they want sustainable products, but they don’t tend to buy them. Here’s how to change that.

Bridging the Chasm between Design and Marketing

DML_Productdesign_UoT_02Although integrating design and marketing is critical for successful new product development (NPD), there has been a limited attention to the potential problems that arise during the NPD process and their possible solutions in academic literature. In order to narrow this gap, our study conducted a series of surveys of an interdisciplinary class project between marketing and design students over two year periods and identified two major potential problems: (1) conflict from the functional background, and (2) the conflict from imbalanced decision-making authority between design and marketing. In order to resolve such conflict, we found the two contrasting solutions: (1) facilitating communication to enhance cross-functional integration between the two groups and (2) prohibiting communication to protect each group. Our findings contribute to the formation of a theoretical basis for research on the topic of design-marketing integration.

 

Behavior Change in University Education

DesignMarketingLab

Historically, a professor distributed its course outline with a textbook (e.g., Principles of Marketing) and students bought it at a convenient place (e.g., book store in the campus). This pattern is now dramatically changing.

First, students change their book purchasing behavior. The book store in the campus are now facing the price war with online booksellers. Although it keeps saying that “Out textbook prices are competitive with THE largest online bookseller,” many students pursue hassle-free-and-more-convenient shopping experience. They click a few buttons at home and then pick up the textbooks in their mailbox in a few days. They do not have to walk down to the book store.

Second and more importantly, students change their learning behavior. Previously, teachers needed widely accepted textbooks to transfer the established knowledge to students through lecture. However, contemporary teachers often develop new courses (e.g., Design Marketing) or lead typical courses in different ways (e.g., New Product Development). As such, they look for alternative formats to share insights with students; students could learn how to sketch from designers, they could identify business opportunities for 3D printers by discussion, they could make a pitch in front of real managers, or they could even register courses available at the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) systems such as Coursera or EdX. Now, learning and teaching is not limited with the form of lecture.

Two Different Ways to Play with Words

University of Toronto has two interesting institutes: Martin Prosperity Institute and Best Institute. The former is an academic place for the global-scale prosperity and inequality. Its research papers discuss the creative classes and cities (Richard Florida), the integrative thinking and strategies (Roger Martin), and the global crowdsourcing for problem solving (Don Tapscott). The latter is a relatively practical space where the start-up companies focusing on health-care products and services run their offices.

While visiting them, I found there are two different ways to play with words. At the Martin Prosperity Institute, a visual art piece hangs on the wall saying PROSPERITY. At the Best Institute, a verbal notice posts on the door saying “Come to the Dark Side. We have cookies.” I find these two pieces are very creative but in different ways: the former changes the visual aspect of the word, whereas the latter changes the verbal (meaning) aspect of the word.

DesignMarketingLab

DesignMarketingLab

Expert Products, Novice Consumers

DesignMarketingLab

Crate and Barrel, one of my favorite stores following Pottery Barn and Williams and Sonoma, has a section called “Everything You Never Knew You Needed.” It introduces highly specialized kitchen utensils including jar spatula, melon baller, strawberry huller, avocado slicer, dual citrus squeezer, egg timer, and herb scissors.

At first, they look useless for many who do not cook often. Even if they do so, they can slice avocados and trim herbs using existing kitchen utensils. However, it is true that people often fell in love with a product only after they experience it. For example, I love the salad spinner by OXO, Panini grill by Breville, and wine decanter by Spiegelau. Although I am able to dry vegetables, grill sandwiches, and oxygenate wines without using these products, they make my cooking experience enjoyable. Indeed, I believe most smart kitchen products are the nice marriage of careful observation of people’s behavior in the kitchen with just a bit of technological flavor. If I should slice many avocados and trim a lot of herbs all the time, I may need a slicer and a pair of scissors designed exclusively for them to enjoy my cooking experience.

This leads us to a series of critical questions about new product development. Should designers and marketers ignore the novices’ voices (e.g., I am fine with an existing slicer) but listen to the experts’ voices more carefully (e.g., I need a better slicer for avocados)? If so, how do designers and marketers confirm that there will be a market for highly specialized expert products (e.g., avocado slicer)? Alternatively, how should designers and marketers “educate” novices when launching highly specialized products so that the newly developed products are appealing to novices ?

DesignMarketingLab

Mobile World Congress (MWC) sketch

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Mobile World Congress (MWC) takes place February 24-27, 2014 in Barcelona, Spain. Some companies put huge design flavor into their booths to successfully attract attention from visitors and press (see pictures and articles on the Arts Technica by Ron Amadeo). Here are a few more pictures sent from one attendee. They are Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, SK Telecom and its TV services, Sony and its gadgets, and Huawei (from the top left corner).

Microsoft Store vs. Apple Store

I recently visited a MicroSoft Store in a shopping mall in Toronto. My first impression was that it looks highly similar to the Apple Store. For instance, the MS Store places a simple logo outside, displays a wide variety of working devices on the tables, and has many assistants wearing blue (!) T-shirts. However, many visitors in the MS Store spent their time on playing gesture-recognition X-BOX video games. Only few paid attention to the physical devices and virtually none of them had any conversation with the MS assistants.

DesignMarketingLab

DesignMarketingLab

Different from the MS Store, the Apple Store in the same shopping mall had more visitors who played with the working device on the tables or who had a conversation with the assistants. At the surface level, the visitors and the assistants in the MS store “played together” whereas, in the Apple store, they “communicated each other.” However, more importantly, the MS Store needs something unique rather than copying its competitor. Otherwise, it might follow what Sony showed after it opened Sony Stores. 

DesignMarketingLab

DesignMarketingLab

Design Thinking: David Kelley + Roger Martin

David Kelley, the president of the IDEO, visited Toronto and talked with Roger Martin, the former dean of Rotman School of Management, under the title of unleashing the creative potential within us all.

He claimed that we need three things to innovate routinely. They include creative confidence, guided mastery, and design thinking.

DesignMarketingLab

First, creative confidence (or self efficacy proposed by Bandura) enables us to go beyond inside-the-box thinking. Next, guided mastery (or a series of small successes) helps us to generate wild ideas without losing our flames. Finally, design thinking (or mindful or open-mind attitude) encourages us to try something new, in particular when we work with others.

DesignMarketingLab

While introducing the three elements of routine innovation, he emphasized empathic observation by sharing with us the projects that his employees or students have conducted. For example, his team once aimed to help K-12 students in California eat more healthy food. Their key findings were that lunch is not just for food but a social activity. As such, they proposed games in which kids come back to the table together, sit down together, and eat vegetables together. This game activity successfully led kids to eat more vegetables.

DesignMarketingLab

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Reference

Chang, YoungJoong, Jaibeom Kim, and Jaewoo Joo (2013), “An Exploratory Study on the Evolution of Design Thinking: Comparison of Apple and Samsung,” Design Management Journal, 8 (1), 22-34.

… Samsung is a good example of a “technology push” firm. Samsung has been a late mover in the electronics market. Responding to unparalleled business challenges, the company first expanded its design team from 200 designers in the late 1990s to 1000 designers in 2012. Samsung has made noticeable debuts in winning several international design awards. However, the company’s intuitive and analytic teams needed to work closely before they were able to deeply understand and appreciate each other’s way of working. The forced collaboration produced challenging decision-making conflicts—the types of conflicts that are difficult to resolve without a moderator. Instead, decisions were made exclusively by the intuitive team or exclusively by the analytic team. This issue explains why Samsung has performed well in design awards, but has not yet introduced an iconic product like the iPhone…

Technology-push path

… Apple approaches design thinking differently from Samsung. Its design team does not communicate with its manufacturing team. Instead, an independent team (consisting of Steve Jobs and his supporters) made most of the firm’s business decisions. In the process, Jobs limited the decision-making power of the analytic teams in order for them to be comparable with the power of the intuitive team. Note that although Steve Jobs was often criticized for his assertive decisions, he did free the intuitive team from the analytic team. As a result, Apple products are welcomed by a massive number of consumers—even though their individual features do not necessarily outperform the products manufactured by their competitors …

Technology-epiphany path

Jaewoo Joo | design thinking, behavioral economics, field experiment, customer experience