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October 23, 2008 In Transcripts By Advent

xmt-009: Design with Heart by Robyn Waters [transcript]

[This is a tran­script of the free audio pro­gram, Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today. The audio ver­sion of this con­tent is avail­able at: Episode 009: Design with Heart by Robyn Waters]

Announcer:

Wel­come to Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today.

[intro music]

Luke Flener:

Wel­come to this episode of Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing Today. This show is about the the­ory and prac­tice of using expe­ri­ences to engage audi­ences with the authen­tic nature of a brand or com­pany. We believe that it may just be the most pow­er­ful tool mar­keters have, but it′s also some­thing of a mys­tery. My name is Luke Flener. I′ll be your host for this episode.

Episode 9: Design with Heart by Robyn Waters.

The sixth stop on the 2008 Event Mar­ket­ing Inno­va­tion Tour was in our back­yard of Nashville, Ten­nessee. The venue was the Per­for­mance Hall of the Musician′s Hall of Fame. The Event Mar­ket­ing Inno­va­tion Tour is a nine city tour, show­cas­ing the lat­est tools in inno­va­tions and event mar­ket­ing. Atten­dees are typ­i­cally exec­u­tives with some level of respon­si­bil­ity for marketing.

The keynote speaker for all nine stops of this tour was Robyn Waters. The fol­low­ing is her com­plete pre­sen­ta­tion from the Nashville event, which is about an hour long. We′ve also included some of the visu­als from her pre­sen­ta­tion, which you will be also to see if you are lis­ten­ing to the enhanced ver­sion of this con­tent. These images are also avail­able in the show notes on our website.

We now join the event in progress as John Rober­son intro­duces Robyn.

[music]

John Rober­son:

Robyn Waters is a noted author and for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent of Trend, Design and Prod­uct Devel­op­ment for Tar­get. She is the author of the Trend­mas­ters Guide: Get a Jump on What Your Cus­tomer Wants Next, and the book she′ll be sign­ing tonight, The Hum­mer and the Mini: Nav­i­gat­ing the Con­tra­dic­tions of the New Trend Land­scape.

And she′s a con­tribut­ing author along with Tom Peters, Seth Godin and Mal­comb Glad­well for The Big Moo from port­fo­lio, which is a mem­ber of the Pen­guin Group.

Robyn has over 30 years expe­ri­ence track­ing and trans­lat­ing trends into sales and profit. And as Target′s for­mer VP, she helped a small regional dis­count chain become a national fash­ion destination.

Fast Com­pany mag­a­zine in 2004 fea­tured Robyn as one of the top 20 “Cre­ative Mav­er­icks” in their June ′04 Mas­ters of Design Issue. I′ve got to tell you, we searched the coun­try for a speaker for our mer­chant event whose last name was Waters.

[laugh­ter]

John:

And you are the bene­fac­tors. Ladies and Gen­tle­men, wel­come to the stage–her first time in Nashville–Robyn Waters.

[applause]

Robyn Waters:

Thank you very much. Well, good evening every­one. It is great to be here in Nashville. And this is my first visit here. I′ve been to a lot of cities and a lot of coun­tries and I had the morn­ing to explore and I really enjoyed it.

I′m also lucky because this is the sixth city out of nine; I have three more left to go. What I′ve been doing is trav­el­ing around talk­ing about two of my favorite sub­jects. And that would be inno­va­tion and design. You know, in order to inno­vate, you have to do some­thing dif­fer­ent. You have to reframe your per­spec­tive. You have to change how you look at things.

And that′s one of the rea­sons why I love this visual, which was one of the pro­mo­tions for the tour that I′m on, the inno­va­tion tool for the ADA. It′s this guy in this chair look­ing upside down. And I talk about how do you turn things upside down or inside out. And in order to inno­vate, you need to do that.

But then you need to con­vince peo­ple to change their behav­ior. And to con­vince peo­ple to make a change is very dif­fi­cult. And so I′d like to quote Aris­to­tle. He said, “You don′t per­suade peo­ple through intel­lect; you do so through emotion.”

And that′s what the idea of this event that you′re immersed in tonight is meant to do, is to engage you emo­tion­ally. And that′s also what ′Design” is all about, which is the title of my talk.

I want to talk to you about refram­ing things, first of all, and give you an exam­ple. You heard me refer to as a trend­mas­ter. That means that I track and trans­late trends into sales and profit. But when I started in the trend world, trend used to be about find­ing the next big thing. Every­body was on this Holy Grail search for what′s next.

And what I did at Tar­get, and what made me suc­cess­ful and help the com­pany become Targt, is I turned that inside out and said… And I actu­ally landed on Star­bucks cups around the world with my quote, and I′ll share that with you in a minute. But I was Office Quote Num­ber 110 in Starbuck′s White Cup Author Series. And I was in between Herby Han­cock and Alice Hoff­man, so I was in really nice company.

Not only that, that was at the time when Star­bucks was pour­ing four mil­lion cups of cof­fee every sin­gle day around the world. That′s really nice mar­ket­ing. And so here′s my quote: “Trends are sign­posts, point­ing to what′s going on inside the hearts and minds of the cus­tomer. These days if you want to be on trend, it′s more impor­tant to fig­ure out what′s impor­tant, not just what′s next.”

Now that′s a sub­tle refram­ing. Prior to my com­ing with this “trend from the inside out” phi­los­o­phy, trend was always about what′s next, what′s out there. And I′ve turned that around, I′ve turned that inside out. And so what I′m really going to do is take you on jour­ney into the heart, today.

And my pre­sen­ta­tion “Design with Heart” is built around the idea that in order to con­nect with the cus­tomer or a client or an audi­ence, you have to engage with them in an emo­tional way. You have to open up your heart and you have to deliver good design.

That design can be a well-designed event, such as your enjoy­ing tonight. It can be a beau­ti­fully designed prod­uct. It can be a fab­u­lously designed mar­ket­ing pre­sen­ta­tion. And it can also be a beau­ti­fully designed cor­po­rate mis­sion. And I′m going to talk about all of those and how they relate to “Design with Heart.”

A cou­ple of com­ments about design: Good design can make your life bet­ter. It can solve prob­lems. It can fix things. It can deliver on your needs. But great design can truly make your life bet­ter and make you hap­pier. And “Design with Heart” can deliver beauty, not just to a prod­uct or an event, but to the bot­tom line. And that′s what we′re all here for. We′re all here to make money.

And so even though I′m going to talk a lot about the soft stuff today, I′m still going to deliver ideas that will help gen­er­ate a very strong bot­tom line.

So first, I want to talk about the state of the mar­ket. We are going to go out there and look out into the mar­ket­place and just talk about what′s going on out there in the customer′s mind in the mar­ket. First thing I want to talk about is a claus­tro­pho­bia of abun­dance. This is what we′re all faced with.

When you go to the mall and you have so many choices, or you go to the gro­cery store and have so many options, the pun­dents call this claus­tro­pho­bia of abun­dance. There′s a lot of stuff out there. And where do we get that stuff? Well, we shop at a mall, we go to a store. There are big-box stores on every cor­ner. The malls are get­ting big­ger than ever.

In my back­yard in Min­neapo­lis, we have the Mall of Amer­ica. There′s 4, 000 miles of square footage, in terms of store fronts. And it′s so big it has its own Zip Code. So we have big stores, but you know if you can′t get to a store, you don′t want to get in your car and drive? Just sit down at your desk, access the Internet.

The Inter­net shop­ping has made the whole click and mor­tar busi­ness really impor­tant. And it′s the idea that all you really need is a credit card and you have access to the world. And you can pur­chase and select from just about anything.

To give you an idea of what I mean by “claus­tro­pho­bia of abun­dance, ” let′s say that you woke up this morn­ing and you decided you wanted a new break­fast cereal. You were tired of the one you′ve been eat­ing for the last sev­eral years or months.

So you go to the gro­cery store. How many options would you think that your aver­age gro­cery store you have in order to select from, to select a new break­fast cereal? Any thoughts in the audi­ence? How many options?

Audi­ence:

70.

Robyn:

70.

Audi­ence:

50.

Robyn:

50. 300; 300 and that′s your aver­age super­mar­ket. That′s not your big-box super­mar­kets. So let′s say you′re this woman and you′re stand­ing there and you′re look­ing at 300 options of break­fast cereal. How do you decide what you′re going to buy?

What hap­pens for a lot of peo­ple is they look at all those options and they freeze. They freeze because there′s too many options and they′re wor­ried that they′re going to make the wrong choice, so they decide not to decide. And they walk away.

And that′s a missed oppor­tu­nity and a missed sell. And it′s the idea; it′s called “para­dox of choice.” Too many things to choose from, don′t want to make the wrong choice, so I′ll just stick with my usual.

How do you get peo­ple to make a change? How do you get them to inno­vate? You reach to them, to their hearts. And I′m going to talk about that in a minute.

But first I want to talk about the con­tra­dic­tory con­sumer. Who is this cus­tomer that we′re talk­ing about? My book is called “The Hum­mer and the Mini: Nav­i­gat­ing the Con­tra­dic­tions of the New Trend Land­scape.” And here′s what I mean by contradictions.

I have a girl­friend, Lori. She wears Prada shoes and she dri­ves a Mer­cedes, but she goes to Costco every other week to buy her bulk paper goods. That′s con­sid­ered nor­mal con­sumer behavior.

Here′s another exam­ple of the con­tra­dic­tory behav­ior, and this might be some­one that you know. I have neigh­bors that are pas­sion­ate about recy­cling. Every week they take their recy­cle carts down to the end of the dri­ve­way, and they are all neatly sorted. Then, when it′s been picked up they push the carts back up, open the garage doors, and there are two gas guz­zling SUVs sit­ting there in the dri­ve­way. That′s con­tra­dic­tory, but it is also human behav­ior. We are deal­ing with the very con­tra­dic­tory con­sumer with con­tra­dic­tory needs, and we are deal­ing with a mar­ket­place full of abundance.

Now, I am going to take a look at the state of inno­va­tion, the state of inno­va­tion in busi­ness and in the world today. I am sure you have all been fol­low­ing the news and all of the very tough eco­nomic times that we are deal­ing with. I think that there′s not a time in our country′s his­tory when we could use inno­va­tion more than right now. We need to inno­vate a lot of new sys­tems and structures.

It turns out that every five years there is a meet­ing at Har­vard. It is an inno­va­tion meet­ing, and lead­ers from the top For­tune 500 com­pa­nies are invited to attend. It is polling them and ask­ing them about innovation.

Allen Weber, who is the founder of Fast Com­pany, attended one of the meet­ings. This was a cou­ple of years ago. This was the last time the econ­omy was crunch­ing, and he came away a lit­tle dis­il­lu­sioned. What he said was, “When it comes to Amer­i­can busi­ness, the vision­ar­ies are the ones who are dying or, at least, los­ing their jobs. We are enter­ing the sea­son of the bean counter”.

To many peo­ple that might feel like what we are enter­ing right now. It′s time to cut back. It′s time to hold back, but as you just heard John say, it might be an oppor­tu­nity to really move ahead. It′s the idea that you have to be a vision­ary to get us out of the times that we′re in.

At this con­fer­ence of busi­ness lead­ers they were asked, “How do you feel about inno­va­tion?” And they said, “Absolutely. Inno­va­tion is to be encour­aged but only if it pays off in six months”. Well, most lead times are a lit­tle longer than six months.

The next ques­tion the lead­ers answered was, “Yep. Yep. We value prof­its but not ideas”. Well, where does inno­va­tion come from? Where does the next oppor­tu­nity come from? They come from ideas. If you don′t value ideas and inno­va­tion, you are not going to get to the next level of profits.

One of the rea­sons that I saw things change a lot out there in the cor­po­rate land is Sic Sigma. In my book, “The Hum­mer and the Mini”, I talk about trends and counter trends. We have inno­va­tion and mov­ing for­ward, and then we have Sic Sigma in cut­ting back.

For those of you that may not be famil­iar with what Sic Sigma is, it is a mil­i­tary term. It has to do with cut­ting out defects, and it has to do with the left brain ana­lyt­i­cal side of things. It′s the idea that you mea­sure, you ana­lyze, you look for a best method or process and then that′s how you do something.

That works really well in run-of-the-mill assem­bly line pro­ce­dures, but it doesn′t work so good in cre­ative busi­nesses or in a mar­ket where you really need to get cre­ative and really need to inno­vate. What Sic Sigma does, this empha­sis on left brain mea­sure­ment and analy­sis, is it leaves us some­thing that I call analy­sis paralysis.

You know, when I was at Tar­get we had all of these stud­ies, mar­ket bas­ket reports, sta­tis­tics, data that we could look at, and we would pore over the num­bers. We would try to deter­mine what busi­ness deci­sions we should make. Who are we design­ing a prod­uct for? What should it look like? How many should we make? What should we charge?

Often­times, I used to feel that by look­ing at the num­bers so closely we got so out of touch with the cus­tomer that we couldn′t use our intu­ition and use our gut. That was some­thing that wasn′t often val­ued in the cor­po­rate world, and I am see­ing that change. I′ll talk about that a lit­tle bit.

What this led to, all of this empha­sis on left brain and Sic Sigma, was some­thing that experts call analexia. It is a term you may not have heard. It is a soci­etal dis­ease accord­ing to experts, and it means if it can′t be counted it doesn′t count.

What does that look like, and what does that mean? Well, it means that if you can′t give some­body a defin­i­tive, numer­i­cal answer or rea­son to make a deci­sion or buy some­thing, then you are not going to make the deci­sion and inno­va­tion is going to be cut. So, if it can′t be counted it doesn′t count, but I really like the way that Albert Ein­stein said this a lit­tle bet­ter. He said, “Not every­thing that can be counted counts, and not every­thing that counts can be counted”.

A lot of the expe­ri­en­tial aspects of an event can′t be counted. They can be mea­sured, but there are things that go even deeper that you can′t really explain with num­bers or mea­sure­ment and analysis.

I love this exam­ple of this ad of a choco­late chip cookie. It was for a con­sult­ing com­pany. It was about the opti­miza­tion of choco­late chip cook­ies in the 21st cen­tury. If you were using num­bers and mea­sure­ment and you were try­ing to explain how good this choco­late chip cookie was and why some­body should buy it, what would you be able to tell them?

Well, you could tell them how many calo­ries were in the choco­late chip cookie; how many choco­late chips were in it; how much it weighed; how many were in a bag. What the ingre­di­ents weighed; how long it was cooked; what it cost, but none of those things could com­pare to the expe­ri­ence of smelling that choco­late chip cookie as it came out of the oven; tast­ing it as the choco­late chips were still melt­ing in your mouth. It is really the expe­ri­ence and the opti­miza­tion of that that will encour­age and con­vince peo­ple to try that choco­late chip cookie. You have to immerse them in the experience.

Some­times, this was a tough sell at Tar­get. When we were try­ing to pro­mote a new idea, invari­ably a mer­chant would say, “Yeah but show me the num­bers. Show me the num­bers. Explain to me why this would work”. You can always give some data. You can always show some analy­sis. That′s like a base­line, but you have to go beyond that, and that was what I became a cheer­leader for.

Some­times, I tried to inject a lit­tle bit of humor into my pre­sen­ta­tions where I was try­ing to con­vince them to try a new idea, and I gave them this quote. It′s from W. C. Fields. He said, “Sta­tis­tics are like biki­nis. What they reveal is impor­tant, but what they hide is vital”.

So, think of that the next time you go to the beach, but think of that the next time you are sit­ting in your office and you are look­ing at a report. You are look­ing at num­bers. You are look­ing at data, and you are try­ing to fig­ure out, what do I do. What deci­sion should I make? How do I know what direc­tion to go in?

Look at the num­bers, absolutely. They will help you make a deci­sion, but then look fur­ther. Ask your­self what they are not telling you. What are the num­bers hid­ing? What are they not reveal­ing about what′s really impor­tant in their insight to the cus­tomer? I think that′s where you′ll really be able to immerse your­self and find some inno­v­a­tive solu­tions and get to design with heart.

What I′m going to talk about now is the idea that we have two sides of the brain. I′ll talk about ana­lyt­i­cal left brain mea­sure­ment analy­sis, and then talk about the right brain which is the heart and the gut and the instinct. That′s our senses, and that′s our cre­ativ­ity. The other side is our logic and our ratio­nale and our reasoning.

What you really need is to bring both together, but in truth in the busi­ness world this is how things are val­ued. The left brain has been very much val­ued. MBA′s com­ing out of school tend to be hired at higher salaries. The cre­ative world has not fared so well, but thank­fully that′s begin­ning to change. I feel that I was on the cut­ting edge of that at Tar­get, and what we′re really get­ting to is that we have to use both sides of the brain. You have to even things out.

Now, we′re going to do an inter­ac­tive test, and this is called the F test. This is a lit­tle glimpse of a test of obser­va­tion. I want you to read the sen­tence in the box qui­etly to your­self and count how many F′s are in that sen­tence in the box. Then, just kind of keep that num­ber to your­self. Maybe, look at it again. How many F′s are inside that sen­tence in the box?

OK, show of hands. How many peo­ple found three F′s? Raise your hand. At least, half the audi­ence. How many found four F′s? Raise your hand. Eight to 10 peo­ple. How many peo­ple found five F′s? Raise your hand. Five or six peo­ple. How many peo­ple found six F′s? Raise your hand. Seven, eight. We are all look­ing at the same thing. It′s right there in black and white. It′s a sentence.

Why did we all see some­thing dif­fer­ent, and most peo­ple didn′t find all six of the F′s. Here they are. What hap­pened? What hap­pened was you were mov­ing pretty fast, and your left brain weighed in, and it lis­tened to o-f and it heard o-v, even though it′s o-f.. This is just a great exam­ple of how we observe things. We are all look­ing at the same thing.

Remem­ber this the next time you are at a meet­ing, and you are dis­cussing options or try­ing to con­vince some­body of some­thing, and you all really see some­thing dif­fer­ent. That′s what hap­pens when the left brain is too heav­ily val­ued. You miss some of the things sur­round­ing it, and you jump to conclusions.

This is what I want to advo­cate for. This is where the design with heart begins to play in because you have to put some of that intu­ition and sen­sory and feel­ing into the busi­ness deci­sions beyond the mea­sure­ment, the analy­sis and the logic.

That′s a lot of what drove Target′s suc­cess. If you think about it, prior to Tar­get becom­ing the upscale dis­counter, you had two forms of shop­ping basi­cally. You had a depart­ment store which was high end, and you had the dis­counter that was low end and bud­get. There was really not a whole lot in the middle.

What Tar­get decided to do was carve out, reframe the retail land­scape. I will tell you that Tar­get, Wal-Mart and Kmart were all started in the same year. When I came to Tar­get in 1992 it was a three bil­lion dol­lar retailer, and Wal-Mart was 10 times big­ger and Kmart was three times big­ger. So, we were the small, unno­ticed, regional retailer out there.

What hap­pened at this time in ′92 was a really big refram­ing of the oppor­tu­nity, and it was the idea that the CEO said, “We have to cre­ate a dif­fer­ent kind of retail­ing expe­ri­ence”, so it became about the expe­ri­ence. We are going to cre­ate this world in between what we call the upscale dis­counter space. If you think of the brand promise at Tar­get which is ′expect more, pay less′ that′s a dis­con­nect in many ways although they man­aged to make it a con­nect. It′s the idea that you can expect more trend, more design, more qual­ity, more fash­ion at Tar­get, but you are going to pay less for it than you would at not just a dis­counter like Wal-Mart or Kmart but if you were buy­ing the same thing at a Gap or a Banana Repub­lic or a Crate & Barrel.

Peo­ple often ask me, “How did that bulls-eye become the love mark?” That′s the high­est thing a brand can aspire to. How did the Tar­get bulls-eye become a love mark, and how did Tar­get become Tar­jay? It was really pretty sim­ple, and it′s no secret formula.

There were three legs to the stool that really was the foun­da­tion of Tar­get becom­ing Tar­jay. The first is that they decided they would be trend right, not trend for­ward but trend right. We had teams of peo­ple that trav­eled the world track­ing trends. But the sec­ond was that they would be guest focused. This came out of the Dis­ney tra­di­tion. It was about focus­ing on the cus­tomers in the store as though they were guests in your home.

The idea was to track the trends but trans­late them for the guests, and then design became the secret sauce. Design was the tool. It was the pen­cil. It was the col­ored crayon that we usde to dif­fer­en­ti­ate and cre­ate a unique prod­uct that helped an upscale dis­counter become as well known as Tar­get and drove a lot of sales.

Dur­ing my years there I hired the first designer. I hired the hun­dredth designer. Many more have been hired. These are prod­uct design­ers, peo­ple that design all that cool stuff when you see, when you go into a Tar­get. We hired a lot of young peo­ple fresh out of school, and we needed to instill in them the idea that we want their pas­sion. We want their love of design to come through because when a young designer comes out of design school, they just want to light the world on fire with all of their great ideas.

At the same time we had to get across the idea that you have to sell a lot of this. We are a dis­counter. We need to sell a lot. This is a mass mer­chan­diser, so I came up with this phi­los­o­phy that ulti­mately in-house became known as Robyn′s 3H Design The­ory. The idea behind this is that we would talk about what would bring peo­ple into Tar­get to buy some­thing. What would moti­vate a shop­per to come to Tar­get on any given day?

The 3H′s stood for Head, Hand­bag and Heart. The first H was for Head, and it was about need. You wake up, and the tooth­paste tube is empty so you have to run out and buy new tooth­paste at Tar­get. The Hand­bag was about value. It was about, “Oh, it′s in the cir­cu­lar. It′s on sale”. Maybe, you push that red cart by a price cut sign and it was a great value so in the shop­ping cart it went.

The third H was for Heart. That was about–you see some­thing that you didn′t know existed that you don′t need but you see it and you look at it and you go, “Oh, look at that. I love that. I have to have that. I want that”. That′s falling in love with a product.

Peo­ple often, in my years of travel, that I′ve trav­eled around the coun­try when I was at Tar­get, peo­ple would say, “Why is it that when I go to Tar­get and I have three things on my list and I′m plan­ning to spend 10 dol­lars, and I walk into the store and I go around all those nicely lighted, clean, broad aisles. Why is it when I get to the check­out I′ve spent– what, aver­age hun­dred dol­lars, right?” Ten dol­lars, planned to spend; a hun­dred dol­lars in the cart when you check out. What is that? What is the magic? How does that happen?

Well, how that hap­pened is that Tar­get cre­ated this incred­i­ble expe­ri­ence built around design with heart. It con­nected on an emo­tional level with cus­tomers about things that they didn′t even know they needed and never even knew before that they existed. So, it′s this design with heart: the 3H, Head, Hand and Heart the­ory that lit­er­ally brought me to this idea, this con­cept that I am talk­ing about tonight which is design with heart. Again, it is an emo­tional con­nec­tion with the customer.

I am going to talk about sev­eral cat­e­gories: how you can design a prod­uct with heart; how you can design a ser­vice, an expe­ri­ence, a mar­ket­ing mes­sage and a social mis­sion with heart. And I am going to give you some exam­ples from my his­tory and from just look­ing at the gen­eral world of trends out there.

Tom Peters is a man­age­ment guru. He is one of my heroes, and in his lat­est book, “Re-imagination”, he said design is the fun­da­men­tal soul of a man-made object. It′s why we love something.

This was my favorite object in the 10 and a half years I worked at Tar­get., my favorite prod­uct that we designed. This is a Sippy cup from Philippe Starck. If you notice, it is on a pedestal, and it looks like it is made out of cut crys­tal, and it has lov­ing cup han­dles. I will tell you that innovation-wise this was pretty out there because Sippy cups don′t come on pedestals; they are not clear; and they don′t look like that.

When Philippe Starck rec­om­mended this prod­uct to the Tar­get buy­ers, they were totally neg­a­tive on the idea. They just, you know, the eye­lids went down. They were, like, “No, no way. We′re not doing that prod­uct”. But, he was very pas­sion­ate about this.

So, he cre­ated a pro­to­type, and he filled it with grape juice. He put it on the table in front of the buy­ers at Tar­get, and then he acci­den­tally spilled it over. He cre­ated an expe­ri­ence for them. What hap­pened was the grape juice didn′t spill. The buy­ers pushed away from the table afraid that the grape juice would spill, and noth­ing hap­pened. He looked at them and he said, “See it′s func­tional. It works. The Sippy cup didn′t spill, but that′s not why you should buy this”.

Then, he took a pic­ture out of his pocket of his lit­tle girl, a daugh­ter who was two years old, and he says, “This is why you should buy this”. He said, “Every lit­tle girl should feel like a princess. When she drinks her apple juice out of a Philippe Starck Sippy cup she should feel just like mom and dad do when they drink their Vous Le Coq cham­pagne out of a cut crys­tal, Water­ford cham­pagne flute. It′s how you feel. It′s not what the prod­uct is or what it does. It is the expe­ri­ence that she has drink­ing this apple juice.

Well, a lit­tle bit of his­tory behind this prod­uct; it retailed for $3.49. We unveiled this prod­uct in Milan at a major inter­na­tional design show. There were no Tar­gets in Europe. There were no inter­na­tional Tar­gets. Actu­ally, there still are not today, and we really had no busi­ness being here at this very high end design show, but we wanted to show the world how we felt about design.

We cre­ated this box. It′s a very sim­ple ply­wood box, and it sat in the mid­dle of the fair­grounds at the Fiera where if you got out of a taxi or came out of the mass trans­porta­tion sys­tem you had to walk by this box in order to get into the entrance hall where this big inter­na­tional design fair was playing.

You can see the ques­tion. Is design an elit­ist exer­cise or a demo­c­ra­tic state­ment? That stopped a lot of the design­ers and a lot of the press imme­di­ately in their tracks. The lit­tle win­dow that you see there had a slide show, and all 50 prod­ucts of the Philippe Starck design pro­gram were shown on the screen with a price point.

The Sippy cup was one of 50 items in that show, and the last slide said, “Visit our booth at such-and-such sta­tion in order to get a press kit”. We still knew even with that great box it wasn′t all that attrac­tive. It was meant to be very low key that we had to attract people.

So, the design­ers did some­thing very inter­est­ing. They injected sound into the expe­ri­ence. When you got out of your taxi and you were walk­ing towards the Fiera you heard this ′ba-boom, ba-boom′. It was a heart­beat, and it lit­er­ally worked like a mag­net. It just drew peo­ple over to the win­dow. Then, you hoped they would stay long enough to see the whole slide show, see all the prod­ucts and then go to the booth to pick up the press kit.

How did that work? What were the results? How did we mea­sure that? Well, when I got home from my two-week trip over­seas I was inun­dated with emails from around the world. I had emails from New Zealand. I had them from Den­mark, from the UK, from Van­cou­ver, from all over the world–people that had seen the slide show, stayed to watch the end, gone in, got­ten a press kit and found my name buried in the back of the kit.

They emailed me and they said, “Dear Miss Waters, I have to have one of those Philippe Starck Sippy cups. Now, Target.com wasn′t up and run­ning. We were just a brick-and-mortar retailer. We weren′t in the Inter­net busi­ness. Even if we were, log­i­cally, you take a $3.49 item, con­vert it to Euros or Deutschmark, or British Pounds, and then charge some­body $20.00 or ship it over­seas? That makes no log­i­cal, numer­i­cal, ana­lyt­i­cal sense.

So what I did, since we weren′t set up for inter­na­tional retail, was I went out with my assis­tant and I bought sam­ples for as many peo­ple as I had got­ten emails from and I sent them a sippy cup.

And I wrote them a hand­writ­ten note on really cool Tar­get bull′s eye sta­tion­ary and I said, “Dear ′so and so, ′ thank you for your love of Tar­get and your inter­est in great design. I hope your niece, nephew, daugh­ter, grand­daugh­ter — fill in the blank — will enjoy this lit­tle gift from Tar­get. And maybe some­day there will be a Tar­get in your part of the world.” And I sent them off.

What′s inter­est­ing is that I used to have a sam­ple that I would bring to my talks around the coun­try and I used to put it on the podium. And a cou­ple months ago I fin­ished a talk, and it was a very large audi­ence in an audi­to­rium, and I went down off the stage after­wards to talk to peo­ple in the audi­ence. And ten min­utes later I went back up to get my lap­top and it was still there, but my sippy cup had dis­ap­peared. It was stolen.

Some­body had to have that so bad, they fell in love with that so much that they stole it off the podium. Now I′ve since been told I can go on eBay and I can find…I can replace it if I′m will­ing to spend at least $50.00. So I think $3.49 to $50.00, that′s the value of design with heart.

So what would that look like for other prod­ucts? This is one of the rea­sons why I named my book “The Hum­mer and the Mini.” I′m just infat­u­ated with, not only the prod­uct, but the mar­ket­ing behind this.

I shot this pho­to­graph in Times Square the year that the Mini Cooper announced…brought to the U.S. And you may remem­ber that when they were first brought to our coun­try, there weren′t a lot of deal­er­ships where you could go to a Mini Cooper, pay your money, and ride one out of the store — drive one out of the store.

Instead, you went online and you custom-designed your own car. You chose from 150 dif­fer­ent options. What the Mini Cooper com­pany did was they cre­ated a vir­tual con­nec­tion through the Inter­net with you where you could cre­ate your own car and make it unique, make it totally for you.

But in order to do that, you had to wait eight to 12 weeks to get your custom-designed car. And you all know in Amer­ica we don′t like to wait for any­thing. We don′t like to wait an extra two min­utes for a cup of cof­fee. So the com­pany cre­ated an online pro­gram where the guest, the cus­tomer, could go and any­time of the day or night, find out where their car was. They could see the new paint job. They could see when it was being put on the ship to be sent over­seas. They could see when it rolled into the dealership.

I have a girl­friend who is await­ing the arrival of her new Mini Cooper. She got an email last week from her car. Her car emailed her from the ship with a pho­to­graph say­ing, “I′m here on board. We′re par­ty­ing. Hav­ing a great time. Can′t wait to meet you.”

[laugh­ter]

Robyn:

Can you imag­ine how that made her feel? And what′s cool is that now when you order a Mini Cooper, the last email you get is a jpeg of your car and birth announce­ments so you can send out birth announce­ments to all your friends to announce the new arrival in your garage.

What′s inter­est­ing is that now they call this pro­gram “Where′s My Baby?” because the research after­ward showed that when they polled the peo­ple that ordered the Mini Coop­ers, they found out that over half of them, dur­ing this eight to 12 week birth canal process, ended up giv­ing their car a first name. Is there a bet­ter way to cre­ate an emo­tional con­nec­tion or bond with a prod­uct than to be able to give it a name?

And so I think it′s just a stel­lar exam­ple of a com­pany that took the design of a prod­uct and the mar­ket­ing of it and the inter­ac­tive aspect of it to cre­ate a prod­uct that had great heart.

This is Stan the Singing Starfish. This is a tooth­brush holder that a young designer at Tar­get cre­ated. It was her first design project. And when she came up with the idea, most bath­room col­lec­tions were made out of wicker or stain­less steel, chrome, maybe bamboo.

And she came up with the idea to make it out of plas­tic and she called the whole col­lec­tion “Below the Bub­bles.” This was long before Sponge­Bob Squarepants or The Lit­tle Mer­maid. And so she gave each one of them a name. And this was Stan.

And the buy­ers, when she unveiled this idea, were sort of like, “Oh, I don′t know. That′s kind of crazy.” But she had the num­bers. She had the left brain sat­is­fied. She had done research that showed that over half the homes in Amer­ica have bath­rooms that are ded­i­cated just for chil­dren. And so she had some num­bers to sup­port it.

And then she did some­thing really inter­est­ing: she demon­strated the prod­uct and she had the buyer push the but­ton in the tummy of the singing starfish and Stan started to sing. And it sang, “Brush, brush, brush your teeth. Brush them every day.” And it was a lit­tle song that Jill had com­posed and it went for one minute, which is the length of time the Amer­i­can Den­tal Asso­ci­a­tion sug­gests that kids spend brush­ing their teeth.

And when she pressed that but­ton and the sound came out, the buy­ers′ faces lit up in a big smile and that′s…I think right at that moment that they decided, “Yeah, we′ll take a risk. We′ll do some­thing inno­v­a­tive. We′ll try some­thing dif­fer­ent.” And that prod­uct retailed for under $8.00 and it was some of the best “grandma bait” that we ever had at Tar­get. It flew off the shelves.

A quick exam­ple about the power of pack­ag­ing. You′re in a beau­ti­ful room envi­ron­ment that′s been pack­aged for every aspect of your com­fort and your delight. But how you pack­age a prod­uct can pro­vide that same expe­ri­ence. This is a per­fume designed by Prada. Prada is a very fashion-forward, cut­ting edge, designer line for men and women.

And when they came out with their first fra­grance, they decided to put it in this heavy, rec­tan­gu­lar, clear, iconic glass bot­tle. But they went to the addi­tional expense to put out this old fash­ioned atom­izer. It was just like the per­fumes from the Hol­ly­wood glam­our era of the ′30s and ′40s.

And, of course, the per­fume was a lovely scent and was researched well. But what′s inter­est­ing is that the mes­sage it was giv­ing to the woman who bought this was “you can be cut­ting edge and mod­ern, but you can still be nos­tal­gic and glam­orous. You can have both.” It′s the con­tra­dic­tions it played to.

The fra­grance went on to become one of the top five sell­ers in the coun­try and around the world. It still is in the top rank­ing. And this is at a time when 99 of the top 100 of the fra­grances that are launched every sin­gle year dis­ap­pear a year later. It′s like the celebrity dujour — they just fall off the radar. And this has become an icon, just like Coco Chanel or Chanel No. 5.

And I′m not say­ing it′s exclu­sively because of the pack­ag­ing, but the expe­ri­ence that the pack­ag­ing cre­ated had a lot to do with the emo­tional con­nec­tion of the woman to that fra­grance and it kept her com­ing back.

I′m going to talk briefly about design­ing a ser­vice with heart. And I thought about all dif­fer­ent kinds of ser­vices I could talk about: I could talk about bank­ing. I could talk about car washes. I could talk about…well, how about a hos­pi­tal? So this is an inter­est­ing arti­cle from Fast Com­pany Mag­a­zine. You may have heard the term “med­ical tourism.” It′s some­thing you′ll be hear­ing more about. It′s the idea that your next heart surgery could well be in Bangkok, but don′t worry, it may well be in network.

So what is this all about? Imag­ine the ser­vice you go to get. Your health is on the line when you go to a hos­pi­tal. This is a hos­pi­tal in Bangkok, Thai­land. It′s called Bum­rund [sp] Grand Hos­pi­tal. It was fea­tured on 60 Min­utes last year. On the left is the lobby. The lobby looks like an upscale mall or a five star hotel when you walk in. And on the right is the wait­ing room. Not too many hos­pi­tal wait­ing rooms look like that. And I′m told that the out­pa­tient clinic is ritzier, even, than the bar at your local five star hotel.

So here′s a hos­pi­tal expe­ri­ence that has all the out­ward rig­ging of a great expe­ri­ence, but inward, it′s also stel­lar because what hap­pens is peo­ple come from around the world to have a treat­ment — it could be any­thing from a hip replace­ment to open heart surgery — and I′m sure that′s sound­ing a lit­tle bit crazy to you. So here′s a hos­pi­tal that′s built around that. They were the first hos­pi­tal in the world to con­vert all of their records online so that any doc­tor had instan­ta­neous training.

In this hos­pi­tal are doc­tors that were trained in the U.S., did their res­i­dency in the U.S., and are deal­ing with the tip notch med­ical equip­ment that is cre­ated around the world. And I′m bet­ting that you′re still think­ing, “Yeah, but I′m going to go to Bangkok for a pro­ce­dure?” Well, here are some sta­tis­tics for you: a colonoscopy, the aver­age cost in the U.S. is $3, 500.00. At this hos­pi­tal, which is one of the top ranked in the world, it′s $750.00.

If you think about the dif­fer­ence and you think about what you could do with that difference…you could add a trip to Phuket on to the back­end of your surgery or your pro­ce­dure. And it′s the whole idea of rein­vent­ing, refram­ing the world of health­care. This is glob­al­ized healthcare.

And if you′re sit­ting in the audi­ence say­ing, “You know, I′m not ever get­ting on a plane to go to Bangkok to have a pro­ce­dure done, ” I′ll tell you two things: One is that our hos­pi­tal sys­tem in the U.S. is ranked num­ber 37 by the WHO, World Health Orga­ni­za­tion.. Sin­ga­pore and Costa Rica are the top two. There are other places in the world that have great health care.

First of all this might inspire us to deliver bet­ter health care, but beyond that, I′m sure that, again, there are peo­ple say­ing, I still wouldn′t go out of the coun­try to have this done. I would be that many of your par­ents when they were dri­ving Fords and Chevys never thought they′d be own­ing a car made in Japan or Korea or any other place around the world.

So, it′s the ser­vice built around this hos­pi­tal, and the patients rave about the bed­side man­ner. They also rave about the entire expe­ri­ence. It′s a ser­vice as well as an expe­ri­ence that′s been delivered.

Mov­ing into an expe­ri­ence, I want to talk a lit­tle bit about Steve Jobs and Apple. Of course, any time you are talk­ing about design, Apple as a brand is at the top of the list. There are a lot of Steve Jobs′ sto­ries out there that you′ve prob­a­bly heard, but I′m bet­ting you haven′t heard this one.

When Steve intro­duced the Apple OS10 Oper­at­ing Sys­tem at Mac­World in San Fran­cisco, he was asked by a reporter, “So Steve, what makes using this OS10 Oper­at­ing Sys­tem a bet­ter expe­ri­ence than Win­dows or any­thing else?” And He said, ” What did you tell your design­ers when you were think­ing about design­ing this?” Steve said, “I told them to make the but­tons on the screen look so good that you′d want to lick them.”

Inter­est­ing. Look at the iPhone. It looks like a box of fine, high-end Euro­pean choco­lates. The term on the bot­tom of the screen is French. It′s lit­eral trans­la­tion is “lick the win­dow, ” but the French trans­la­tion means “Win­dow Shop­ping.” The idea of win­dow shop­ping is about desire. You′re walk­ing along and you see some­thing in the win­dow. You stop, and you prac­ti­cally drool; because you desire it. You want it. That′s the essence of what he was com­mu­ni­ca­tion about the design behind the expe­ri­ence he wanted the user to have when they used the OS10 Oper­at­ing System.

Some of you may know about Apple′s One to One pro­gram. For $99 you get an hour instruc­tion each week of the year. This could be at any Apple store around the world. A cou­ple of weeks ago I wanted to learn Keynote. I′ve been using Pow­er­Point, and I went for my one on one hour demon­stra­tion where you sit right next to an instruc­tor. You bring your lap­top, and you learn this new sys­tem on your computer.

At one point my instruc­tor was try­ing to show me some­thing to do that I couldn′t do on my lap­top. He went right to the big screen right next door — this is a right there inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence — and with one click of the mouse he showed me this incred­i­ble short­cut that was so cool and so snazzy that I just looked at him. I go, “How can I do that?” He said, “Well, you have iWork ′06 and this is iWork ′08.” It was like, “How do I get that?”

Two min­utes later it was off the shelf, installed in my com­puter. They′d swiped my credit card, and the receipt had been emailed to my email address. The whole idea is that if I hadn′t been sit­ting there he could have told me… I could have read about it, but see­ing it there right in front of my eyes, know­ing that I could have it instantly was prob­a­bly the best use of that $99 that I′m still enjoy­ing the learn­ing from. Cre­at­ing that inter­ac­tive one on one expe­ri­ence has a lot to do with the pol­ish behind the Apple brand.

Some of you may have gone to Build-A-Bear. Any­body taken kids, grand­kids? Build-A-Bear? It′s the idea that a child can go in and select, stuff, stitch, and wardrobe their very own Teddy Bear. What′s the last thing, those of you that have done it, that hap­pens when you do this? You select a name, and you insert the heart.

It′s that whole idea — Max­ine Clark, the founder of Build-A-Bear, said it′s that inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence of going to the store and cus­tomiz­ing it and insert­ing the heart and watch­ing the bear being sewn up and the name being given to it — that makes that com­pany such a pow­er­ful brand. It is in fact one of the most prof­itable per-square-foot mall anchors in the coun­try. It′s just a lit­tle toy store.

I want to tell you an exam­ple now from your back yard here. This is a project that was actu­ally done by Advent for Health­Way. Health­Way asked Advent to cre­ate a total expe­ri­ence just like John was talk­ing about. They wanted the trade show exhibit. They wanted the brand space, and they wanted the event. What they were doing was mar­ket­ing, unveil­ing a new Gallup-HealthWays Well-Being index that I will tell you a lit­tle bit more about in a moment.

What the com­pany Health­Ways was try­ing to do was to pro­mote the cul­ture and val­ues of their com­pany and their brand not just the prod­uct that they deliv­ered. Here are some of the things that were done. This is the front entry, the brand space that John talked about when you walk in. By the way, I should tell you that Health­Ways is known as one of the top 100, in the For­tune 100, places to work in the coun­try. So they have a very excel­lent work­ing team­mate culture.

When you walk in this is what you see. You see this inspir­ing space with a per­son on the top of the hill. It′s about pos­si­bil­i­ties, about all the end­less pos­si­bil­i­ties and bring­ing your entire self to work and giv­ing your all to the com­pany and what they will deliver back. You can see on the right-hand side there′s a wall that′s lit up.

What that is is this is that Tom Sigerun [sp] award for value and cul­ture. It′s about the employee-of-the-year award in essence. It embod­ies the val­ues of the com­pany. The idea that the Chair­man and CEO wanted to give behind this is they wanted to make this really big. This wasn′t a small plaque on a wall in a lobby or a front entry.

So you can see this is taller than a per­son, and the names are lit­er­ally up in lights. They are sig­ni­fy­ing how much they value the con­tri­bu­tions of the indi­vid­ual team mem­bers, the peo­ple that were selected. That this is a com­pany ded­i­cated to the whole idea and phi­los­o­phy behind giv­ing your best and being inspiring.

Speak­ing of inspir­ing this is a con­fer­ence room. I would have given my eye teeth to have a con­fer­ence room like this at Tar­get. Each of the con­fer­ence rooms has a dif­fer­ent theme and is named after a dif­fer­ent value that the cul­ture of Health­Ways wants to pro­mote, in this case inspiration.

You can see every­thing from the mate­ri­als to the col­ors, the light­ing, the screens that are over the win­dow give you an atmos­phere that is meant to be con­ducive, inno­v­a­tive. I love the quote on the wall. It′s from John Adams. It says, “If your actions inspire oth­ers to dream more, to learn more, to do more and become more then you are a leader.” What this com­pany is say­ing is that any­body can be a leader if you can inspire oth­ers. I think that that′s… I can just imag­ine what it would be like to come to work in a place where those were the values.

The other leg of what Advent pro­vided for Health­Ways is the inter­ac­tive booth at the tradeshow. It was the AHIP, the Amer­i­can Health Insur­ance Plan con­fer­ence. The booth was meant to con­vey an out­door feel with the car­pet­ing that looked like grass. On the right you see trees that were pro­vided by the Arbor Day foun­da­tion, lit­tle Ever­green trees.

What this did was make the dis­play more inter­ac­tive. Because the peo­ple that were man­ning the tradeshow exhibit for Health­Ways would give one of the trees to the peo­ple that entered the booth and talk about how we have to take care of our bod­ies and nur­ture them just like we have to nur­ture a tree in order for it to grow strong and become mature. So they had some­thing to take away that then they had to nur­ture and care for. They had to take it home and plant.

You can see this whole immersed inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence is being built, but this was the ulti­mate event. They wanted to announce the Gallup-HealthWays Well-Being Index. If you′re not famil­iar with that I′ll do my best to explain it. It′s called the “Dow Jones” of Health Index for the coun­try. It was a project that Health­Ways and Gallup spon­sored where 1, 000 peo­ple are inter­viewed every­day, seven days a week about the state of their health.

Health is defined not just as lack of prob­lems or dis­ease, but are you happy? Are you liv­ing a good life. So this is a way for com­pa­nies and the coun­try lit­er­ally to mon­i­tor their well-being. This was a big con­cept to get your arms around. It needed a really big event to pro­mote it, so they did a red car­pet event. It was build around the idea of when Harry Win­ston deliv­ered the Hope Dia­mond to the Smithsonian.

They wanted a big event, red car­pet. This was in San Fran­cisco at the con­fer­ence. So they had a movie pre­miere night. They had red car­pet­ing with fab­u­lous light­ing, and then they had clips from old movies that were being played on the wall. I think this is a lit­tle bit of the expe­ri­ence you′re going to have tonight after­wards when you get to inter­act in all the fun things that are planned here.

What′s cool is that they also had inti­mate spaces for cock­tail where peo­ple could meet and talk. They had peo­ple that were look-alikes of celebri­ties that would inter­act. They had peo­ple draw­ing car­i­ca­tures, and they had this inter­ac­tive ele­ment where they lit­er­ally let you par­tic­i­pate and be polled in this Gallup-HealthWays Index. It is a big idea, as I said, to get your arm around, and it was a big mem­o­rable event that peo­ple are still talk­ing about.

I think it is a great exam­ple of this total pack­age of the brand space, the tradeshow exhibit and the event, the mem­o­rable event that pulls every­thing together and deliv­ers a big mes­sage that con­nects right to the heart.

I am going to talk about design­ing a mar­ket­ing mes­sage. For those of you that are inter­ested in design or the power of cre­ativ­ity in busi­ness, this is a great book I rec­om­mend from Dan Pink called “A Whole New Mind”. It′s about the left brain and the right brain work­ing together. He said, “A new con­cep­tual age is dawn­ing. We′ve entered the age of art and heart”.

Here′s a great exam­ple. This is a Star­bucks mar­ket­ing cam­paign for their hol­i­day drinks. It came out a cou­ple of years ago. On the cup down the side, famil­iar Star­bucks cup in red has the white boxes that say Shots, Syrup, Decaf. But, the one that is checked says “One moment to myself′.

Star­bucks isn′t sell­ing you cof­fee. They are not sell­ing you pre­mium, fair trade, expen­sive, envi­ron­men­tally friendly cof­fee. They are giv­ing you a five minute vaca­tion. They are deliv­er­ing an expe­ri­ence, a cof­fee­house expe­ri­ence, that they want you to feel is a lit­tle bit of peace of mind.

There is a great book by Melinda Davis. It is called “The New Cul­ture of Desire” as in desir­ing things with your heart. She says that if you are a mar­keter these days you are not just sell­ing some­thing, you need to be heal­ing. You are a healer, and that′s the idea. It′s by giv­ing some­body this one moment to your­self, that is con­tribut­ing to the well-being of this indi­vid­ual. That is a much big­ger mar­ket­ing promise than just a great cup of coffee.

This is an ad that I just found this week from my home town. Gab­berts, it′s a fur­ni­ture store. What is fur­ni­ture? It is a couch to sit on. It is a tele­vi­sion to watch. It is a new bed. What I think Gab­berts did here was reframe it, and I′ll read it. It says, “Invest in your nest in time for the hol­i­days. Make your home a warm, enter­tain­ing and nur­tur­ing refuge for your company”.

It′s the whole idea that it′s not the stuff in it. It′s how that stuff makes you feel and how, lit­er­ally, you are in a nest and you′re pro­tected and you′re nur­tured. And you invite peo­ple into your home and you open your heart to them. That′s a sub­tle com­mu­ni­ca­tion that is not just about rush in and buy a couch today but more about cre­ate a world that appeals to you and con­nects to your heart.

This is a very inter­est­ing cam­paign for Harley-Davidson. Any Harley rid­ers, any Harley-Davidson rid­ers? A cou­ple. Great. You may have seen this ad. When I first heard about it–so screw it; let′s ride–I was like, oh? I don′t know about that, but I want to read this to you. You can read along with me because I changed my mind after I got the essence of the message.

“We don′t do fear. Over the last 105 years in the sad­dle we′ve seen wars, con­flicts, depres­sion, reces­sion, resis­tance and rev­o­lu­tions. We have watched a thou­sand hand-wringing pun­dits dis­ap­pear in the rear view mir­ror, but every time this coun­try has come out stronger than before. Boy, do we need to hear that right now, edi­to­r­ial, because chrome and asphalt put dis­tance between you and what­ever the world can throw at you. Free­dom and wind out­last hard times, and the rum­ble of an engine drowns out the spin on the evening news. If 105 years have proved one thing, it′s that fear sucks and it doesn′t last long”.

So, I′d ask you. Do you think they are sell­ing motor­cy­cles here? Is that what they are sell­ing? Are they heal­ing? They are offer­ing hope. This is a mes­sage about hope. It′s in a dif­fer­ent way. If you think about who their audi­ence is, they have the rub­bies, the richer than bik­ers, and they have the rebels, you know, the guys with the long hair and the tat­toos. And they are all part of this Harley world. It′s very inclu­sive. How do you deliver a mes­sage that both ends will res­onate with? You go right to the heart, and you deliver hope, not just the idea of c′mon in and buy a new bike.

This exam­ple is a fun one. This is an exam­ple of a brand that is a mar­ket leader because they own the mar­ket­place. They are first to mar­ket. Pam­pers, a P&G prod­uct, came out with the first dis­pos­able dia­per, and they owned the mar­ket for two years. That was the only brand on the mar­ket. Their mar­ket­ing cam­paign was ′Pam­pers makes mom happy′. It was about con­ve­nience, and it was about mak­ing her life eas­ier, and it was a well designed product.

Two years later Hug­gies is intro­duced by Kimberly-Clark, so this is a com­peti­tor enter­ing a mar­ket totally owned and dom­i­nated by an exist­ing brand. They are going to try to make some head roads. They cre­ated a bet­ter prod­uct. It had elas­tic legs. It had Vel­cro tab clo­sures. It had bet­ter absorbency, but they were smart enough to know that those were only incre­men­tal design improvements.

Even­tu­ally, P&G′s design­ers and engi­neers would go to work and cre­ate a prod­uct just as good, maybe a lit­tle bet­ter, so Hug­gies and Kimberly-Clark knew they had to cre­ate more behind the brand. Their mar­ket­ing cam­paign became ′Hug­gies makes babies happy′.

What hap­pens when babies are happy? Moms are happy, too. The whole idea of–even the idea of a hug and putting your arms around some­body; the brand came from nowhere and beyond and went on to dom­i­nate the mar­ket­place. Now, they play back and forth, but when­ever Kimberly-Clark goes back to mak­ing the babies happy and the prod­uct is equal, the brands accel­er­ate. It′s the whole idea of being very care­ful how you craft your mar­ket­ing mes­sage. How can you con­nect it to the heart?

This is my favorite exam­ple, though; the Lon­don Under­ground. For years Lon­don had been a city with a pre­mier mass trans­porta­tion sys­tem, but right after 9/11 the rid­er­ship was falling off. Every­body that had a vehi­cle was dri­ving into Lon­don. The park­ing spaces were full. The air was pol­luted. The roads were con­gested, and the city fathers said, “You know, we need to dust off and pol­ish up our trans­porta­tion sys­tem. We need more peo­ple to take mass transportation”.

They spent a lot of money. They cleaned up the cars. They cleaned off the graf­fiti. They put new uphol­stery in. They installed wire­less on the com­muter cars that came in from the out­ly­ing towns. They took the old cof­fee and plas­tic cups away and estab­lished an espresso bar in the din­ing car. They did every­thing they could to raise the level of the expe­ri­ence of com­mut­ing mass trans­porta­tion into London.

When they were done, they came out with this new mar­ket­ing cam­paign. It said, “The new Lon­don Under­ground. We get you to work faster” and noth­ing hap­pened. Rid­er­ship stayed the same. They had spent all of this money, and they had no improve­ment in rid­er­ship. So, they had a lit­tle bit of a problem.

Some­body said, “Maybe, we should talk to the cus­tomer. We just did all this. Let′s find out what′s impor­tant to them”. They hired teams of ethno­g­ra­phers, ethno­graphic researchers and cul­tural anthro­pol­o­gists, who just go out and talk to people.

A cou­ple of months later they came out with a new mar­ket­ing cam­paign. Noth­ing else changed. The mar­ket­ing cam­paign was this: “The new Lon­don Under­ground. We get you home faster”. Rid­er­ship soared; same cars on the same track, going back and forth every day. What mat­tered was not get­ting to work. That′s going to hap­pen anyway.

What mat­tered was get­ting home, and what that really was was a nod to the rider, con­nect­ing to the cus­tomer, the rider, and say­ing, “We know what′s impor­tant and we′re going to help you take care of that. We′re going to get you home faster”. I think it′s just a great tes­ta­ment to the sub­tle power that a mar­ket­ing mes­sage with heart can have to do in terms of mea­sur­able results.

The last sec­tion is talk­ing about design­ing a cor­po­rate mis­sion, and I want to talk about some­thing called social cap­i­tal­ism. It is a term you prob­a­bly are famil­iar with. It′s the last chap­ter in my book, “The Hum­mer and the Mini”, that you are all being given tonight. It is a term that I didn′t make up. It has been coined by For­tune, Forbes, Fast Com­pany, all the busi­ness mag­a­zines talk about it but it is a new idea, a fairly new idea. It is the idea that you can do good and make money. It is about bring­ing good­ness into a cor­po­ra­tion, not just prof­its out of it.

This is a visual from For­tune Mag­a­zine, and I love the visual because it shows a heart at every place in the board room. This is the board room, and the arti­cle went on to talk about, “We brought every­thing else into the board room. We brought cul­tural diver­sity. We brought effi­cien­cies. We brought Sar­banes Oxley. We brought all of these aspects into the board room, but now maybe it′s time to bring heart”.

How do you bring heart into a board room? How do you bring heart to work every day? How do you cre­ate a great expe­ri­ence for your employ­ees and your customers?

The exam­ple that I write about in my book is Paul Dolan who was the fourth gen­er­a­tion in a fam­ily of wine mak­ers. Fet­zer Vine­yards, who you may be famil­iar with from Cal­i­for­nia. Paul con­verted early to all nat­ural organic wine­mak­ing meth­ods. He had biodiesel trac­tors and every­thing was all nat­ural. What he did was, he wanted to run his com­pany in a dif­fer­ent way.

And so, he used and lever­aged some­thing called the triple bot­tom line. You may or may have heard of this. It′s also called E3 or E^3. E3 stood for Eco­nom­ics, “can we make a profit?”, Envi­ron­ment, “Can we leave the envi­ron­ment as good as we found it or maybe even bet­ter?” and Equity. Equity was about pay­ing peo­ple a fair wage, giv­ing them great ben­e­fits, and giv­ing them a rea­son beyond a pay­check to come to work, “Can we make this a great expe­ri­ence for everybody?”

I just tell from all the peo­ple I′ve met at Advent how great it is to work for a com­pany like this. It′s the idea of tak­ing care of their employ­ees. Every ques­tion he makes, every mar­ket­ing deci­sion he looks at, every cost analy­sis that he has to make a deci­sion around he puts against these three ques­tions. And if he can say yes to all of them, he goes ahead and make the decision.

The E3 or triple bot­tom line is now being taught at Kel­logg, at Stan­ford, at the Lon­don School of Busi­ness. It′s now part of the MBA pro­gram. I think that that′s an amaz­ing tes­ta­ment to the fact that we have entered the age of art and heart.

Just a cou­ple of last quick exam­ples: Anita Rod­dick founded The Body Shop. Horst Rechel­bacher founded Aveda. Rox­anne Quimby founded Burt′s Bees. Ten years ago, when the busi­ness press talked about these guys they referred to them as eccen­tric herbal­ist hip­pies. Today, L′Oreal owns The Body Shop, Estee Lauder has bought Aveda and Chlorox just bought Burt′s Bees.

Now the big guys are buy­ing these lit­tle mav­er­ick rebels who had a dif­fer­ent way of doing busi­ness. Do you know what the busi­ness press now calls each of these three com­pa­nies? They call them savvy busi­ness marketers.

These were the com­pa­nies that were first to under­stand about car­ing for the employee, about fair trade, about tak­ing care of the envi­ron­ment, and about giv­ing peo­ple a great place to work, not just a pay­check. So, I think it′s a great tes­ta­ment to social cap­i­tal­ism hard at work in our economy.

Howard Schultz, when he founded Star­bucks, it was a two-store startup, and he′s going to ven­ture cap­i­tal and needs a lot of money to grow it into the pow­er­house that it has become today. In the first page of his busi­ness plan, he said, “I want to make a profit in a benev­o­lent man­ner.” That was unheard of in busi­ness plan lingo.

Here was his ratio­nale. It was about mak­ing money. It wasn′t just about being altru­is­tic. He said, “There will come a time in our world when the cus­tomer goes to choose cup of cof­fee X, Y, Z.” So, in my neck of the words that would be Dunn Bros, Cari­bou and Star­bucks. Maybe the fourth option is a local restau­rant or diner.

When the cus­tomer is walk­ing down a street and they decide they want a cup of cof­fee, how do they decide where they′ll to buy that cup of cof­fee? He said, “All the cof­fees are good, all the ambiances are good. What will prompt their deci­sion?” And he said that it will come down to a cul­tural audit.

By “cul­tural audit”, he meant that before the deci­sion is made where to buy that cup of cof­fee, the cus­tomer will ask them­selves three ques­tions: how does the com­pany treat their employ­ees, how do they give back to the com­mu­nity and how do they take care of the envi­ron­ment. And based on those ques­tions, that cul­tural audit, that′s how they′ll decide where to buy their cup of coffee.

I think Star­bucks has grown tremen­dously. They′re strug­gling now, as they′ve grown a lit­tle too big. But the foun­da­tion of the com­pany and the prin­ci­ples it was founded on are intact.

So, I′ve given you a lot of food for thought and a lot of exam­ples from all dif­fer­ent aspects. And these are the three ques­tions I′d like you to take back in your mind with you when you go back to work tomor­row or Monday.

Every time you have a project, you can ask your­self not just “How do I sell more of this?”, or “How do I make this bet­ter?”, but how do you inspire desire, how do you deliver some­thing that peo­ple just have to have, because they′ve fallen in love with it.

The sec­ond, are there any rules that you need to break in order to cre­ate that desire, inno­vate and mar­ket that prod­uct? Most of the exam­ples that I′ve given you tonight are about peo­ple who broke the given rules of how some­thing was done, or how a busi­ness was run.

And then tomor­row, what′s the one thing you can do to reframe, to look at some­thing dif­fer­ent, to put it in a dif­fer­ent con­text that you can look at and go back and just approach a lit­tle dif­fer­ently tomor­row morning.

Gary Hamel, who′s at the Har­vard Busi­ness School said, “The accoun­tants and the engi­neers are going to have to learn to love the poets and the dream­ers.” All of the exam­ples I gave you tonight, and every­thing in this room is about poetry and dreams, and deliv­er­ing a bet­ter experience.

And so, hope­fully what will come from all of this is that thriv­ing ver­sus sur­viv­ing in today′s mar­ket­place man­dates that you inno­vate in a way that con­nects on an emo­tional level. That′s design with heart, design­ing a mes­sage, a prod­uct, a social mis­sion. Design with heart will help you do that.

And the last thing is, it′s not how much you spend, but how well you con­nect. It′s con­nect­ing in times like this that really make the dif­fer­ence. So, thank you very much.

[applause]

I′d be happy to answer any ques­tions that you might have. I′ve thrown a lot of infor­ma­tion out at you. Any ques­tions? Yes?

Audi­ence:

[off mic]

Robyn:

Yeah. The ques­tion is about the eco­nomic times and pay loss. Of course peo­ple want to pay less for what­ever they get, but within that there are still choices to be made. Some things will drop off, but still when a pur­chase is made it will have to be more emo­tion­ally engag­ing. It will have to con­nect on a higher level.

Things will drop by the way­side, and peo­ple will forgo cer­tain things, but this is the time, I think, in terms of mar­ket­ing where peo­ple can stand out and deliver an expe­ri­ence, because every­body else is drop­ping off and falling out. So, you can turn this around and look at it as an oppor­tu­nity, or you can just say “I′m going to pull back.”

There′s a great quote from Robert Red­ford. He said, “Growth is a cre­ative process, not an account­ing process.” Even in these times you have to be cre­ative, and you can′t cut your way to great­ness. You can trim, you can still find more effec­tive ways.

I think the essence behind the whole idea of design with heart is, what­ever you have to spend, it needs to con­nect on an emo­tional level. It can′t just be about more media, cooler things or more stuff out there. It has to be more mean­ing­ful, not just more. That′s part of that “expect more, pay less.”

Even though Tar­get may be pro­mot­ing more of the “pay less” aspect of their brand promise, that cus­tomer has been trained to still expect more. They′re still talk­ing about their design for all, and a lot of their cool new prod­ucts. But it will bal­ance out a lit­tle different.

I think that those com­pa­nies that stand out in this time, it′s con­nect­ing to what′s impor­tant. “We get you home faster”, not just “We get you to work faster.” Those are the things that, when times are tough, peo­ple res­onate with more strongly. It′s a very soft, sub­tle con­nec­tion, but it′s one that I think is emi­nently more pow­er­ful than just “more stuff.”

Any other ques­tions? Great. Well, I will be sign­ing books here after­wards and will be happy to answer any ques­tions as well, so thanks very much.

[applause]

[music]

Luke: We hope you enjoyed Robyn′s pre­sen­ta­tion. If you have any ques­tions or com­ments about any­thing she dis­cussed, you can email those to us using the address feedback@experientialmarketingtoday.com. You can also leave com­ments on the web­site using the space pro­vided at the end of the show notes. Our web­site address is www.experientialmarketingtoday.com, where you′ll also find links to resources related to Robyn′s presentation.

If you pre­fer speak­ing over typ­ing, you can leave your com­ment on our voice com­ment line. That num­ber is 615–690-6796. We hope you′ll join us for the next episode.

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