What Makes Successful Products, Services and Brands?

“If I eat a pink cake, the taste of it is pink; the light sugary perfume, the oiliness of the butter cream are the pink.  Thus I eat the pink as I see the sugary.”

–(Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Hole,” in Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1993), 89)

What do successful brands and innovative products/services have in common?

Hint: The solution comes via Sartre’s thoughts.

Answer: Consistency.

Think of it…

What would you do if you bit into an elegantly frosted, pink cake and it tasted of garlic?

How consistent is the message that comes from the experience of your company, service or product?

Do the textures, shapes, smells, sounds, flavors, and colors harmonize in creating the emotional experience that you want?

If your product is pink, does it taste pink?

How Not to Brainstorm – Lessons from Suburgatory

If you ever find yourselves in brainstorms like this one, drop me a line…

Want to Uncover New Product Opportunities? Try Archaeology

I recently read this wonderfully provocative piece on how archaeology can be used as a tool for new product research.  The crux of the paper is that insights into new product opportunities can be gleaned when we shift the focus off the consumer, and onto the products themselves, as this graphic shows.

While this perspective is fascinating, it’s not entirely new.  Certain industries have, for years, been focusing on products in a unique way that others don’t. One of these is the medical device industry.

In this industry, once a product is sold it isn’t forgotten.  If, at any time, there is a problem with a product, the Manufacturer is supposed to be notified of the failure.    It is then incumbent upon the Manufacturer to look into the failure, and based upon the results of the analysis, undertake corrective and/or preventative actions to ensure the failure doesn’t happen again.

When investigating medical product failures, scant, helpful feedback from clinicians is not uncommon.  When asked about the problem, often the response is, “Your product failed.”  Specific details of who did what, when,  are difficult to tease out.  As a result, medical device failures are, in many ways, much like an archaeological dig.  The product has to speak for itself…

The package landed on my desk with a thud.

“What is it?” I asked.

A Trio of Manifesto’s For Creative Inspiration – Rock the World with You!

Over at Revive Your Creativity I found the following manifesto, and was struck by its simplicity.  Replace the words, ‘storytellers’, ‘story’, etc., with ‘designer’, or ‘innovator’ or ‘musician’, and it still applies. Great bits of wisdom.  (An Audience does exist for what you do!)

The storytelling manifesto was inspired by two other brilliant compositions.  The first is from Expert Enough.  The other is from Holstee.

Soak it all in and live…

 

Steal Like an Artist (Or a Blues Musician)

Mississippi John Hurt

I recently came across the book “Steal Like an Artist” bu Austin Kleon. The title is what grabbed me first.  Being a musician I know that Blues artists, especially in the first half of the 20th century, did a good deal of borrowing, sometimes, outright stealing of other musicians’ music and lyrics. 

Guess what…

When it comes to cool innovations there’s often a collision of different ideas/metaphors that results in some new idea being spawned.  Steal like an Artist gives these guidelines:

I really like number 3.  This could just as easily say, “Design the product YOU want to use”, or, “Play the music YOU want to hear.”

Is there bad theft?  Austin Kleon puts it like this: 

 

Blues artists did a lot of the “Good Theft”.

One last bit of wisdom for those artists, in fact, all people, that think they need to bring a cohesiveness to their lives and their work. 

 

I’m really looking forward to diving in to this book more deeply.