At the heart of innovation is a critical contradiction.

We have been spending time talking and working with folks who have been using Mechanical Turk.  So we finally put it to some good use as part of a project to learn more about people’s desks. 

So we asked 28 people (we inlcluded 10 of them above), to share pictures of their workspace along with something they would like to change about their desks.  We asked them not to tidy or change anything and so we received responses throughout the day, from a variety of countries. The whole process took less than 12 hours. 

I guess everyone’s desk accumulates drinks over the day.

MUJI was conceived to be different from the start. The complete name MUJIrushi Ryohin means “No Label. Good Products”, which is at the core of what the business is about.  MUJI was conceived to be different from the start. It was one of the first brands to spell out a Japanese word in English (English characters are not uncommon in Japan, but usually they are used to spell English words).

Beyond the name, the process of creating products was different. MUJI product developers would survey 1000s of customers to understand what they needed. And then they would try to meet these needs in the simplest, cheapest ways possible. The slogan for “R&D” was to “make what you want, as a customer”. 

The approach proved very successful. During Japan’s recession, MUJI flourished while other floundered. But between  1999 and 2001, the company suffered through a spectacular financial crisis. The company had expanded quickly into new lines and abandoned much of the focus on customers. Towards the end of the decline and just before their remarkable comeback, the product development team was ordered to oversee the dumping  of their unsold  product inventory as a sign that they would be starting again to refocus on what customers wanted. 

Today, the focus on the product development is evident in a number of ways, from Investor messages to the unbranded products which are increasingly recognizable by their simple forms and deliberately absent logos. Beyond the products themselves is a focus on the experience of buying these products. 

MUJI is not just a creator of products, they also take great pains to provide the right environment to show and sell their products. Many people who visit the stores, have commented on the sense of calm they feel when entering and walking around the stores. Try visiting MUJI online – its an experience unlike any online retailer, conveying the same peaceful this-is-enough-not-too-much philosophy of its products and stores. 

Perhaps most interesting, is what evokes the fanatical following they have developed, which caused much chatter and celebration in NYC when they finally launched their store here. Although not everyone believes MUJI’s approach will work in the US against the likes of Target and Walmart. We’ll see – MUJI’s prices are higher since they dont have much footprint in the US yet. Companies like Zara have had similar market entry economics issues. 

Perhaps most interesting is that MUJI shares openly their design philosophy at their core of their success. And they encourage others to help them create according to these rules. They actively seek out ideas from anyone who touches their business and then work hard, with employees and partners alike to design products to instantiate these ideas. 

The Best Ideas from Everyone

MUJI has a systematic way to constantly harvest the best ideas and present them, ultimately to the design team, for he creation of new products. The process makes use of all touch points. In stores, employees are encouraged to make and collect notes. MUJI.net has almost 500,000 members and is used as another source of ideas. And then anthropological opportunities are presented when people go to MUJI camps where people can be observed using products so that additional insights might be gained. 

Enough Design

At the core of the MUJI culture, is simple design – or more specifically, just what is necessary, simultaneously creating beautiful, simpler to manufacture and therefore cheaper, products. The cutting board example, explains nicely how MUJI approaches design to reduce products to their essential functions. 

Can you spot the difference? Its still a cutting board, just more so, or less so, depending on your perspective, but for sure it is likely cheaper, or for the same price, it can use better materials. 

I see some parallels with some of Apple’s recent work, as they talk about their latest Macbook in terms of simplifying, reducing the unnecessary and the focus on materials. Unlike Apple, MUJI will not allow disclosure of their designers, in keeping with the strong no-branding policy. But there is much speculation that many of its items are designed by some of the best desigers in the world. 

Finally, to get even more ideas, the Muji Award has been running for 3 years (although MUI ran prior competitions, I believe). The entries are solicited globally and has resulted in a number of products that have found their way into stores. 

If We Build It, Will You Come?

MUJI takes advantage of many opportunities to figure out what people want. But it goes a step further. Even when MUJI has a design, it takes the final step of checking who will by it, before it is produced. Easy way to avoid a complete flop.

In 2006, business week covered how MUJI.net, is used to solicity and select new product and design ideas.  And then:

MUJI then tests the market by soliciting customer pre-orders rather than conducting a focus group or survey, or using other traditional market research methodology. Simply put, if 300 customers pre-order an item online, it goes into production.

As the MIT Sloan researchers point out. MUJI in effect collaborates with customers to plan their products. By getting commitments upfront to buy, MUJI gets a definitive commitment beyond anything they might get through surveys and estimation. One might suspect that these initial commitments might correlate with lifetime value much like opening box office weekends can be good predictors of the lifetime value of movies. 

So enough with the boring analysis, lets just see what all the fuss is about. Buinessweek has a good slide show featuring some of the better known products. 

Special thanks to Makoto Arai (fellow Berlin School participant) for his help in researching, analyzing and translating coverage of MUJI in Japan. 

To paraphrase “I am sorry this product is so hard to use, I did not have time to simplify it”. Its not just about design, but also business and life.

John Maeda has published a beautiful treatise on simplicity, in 100 clear concise pages.

Calls for simplicity abound. From the “elevator pitch” that should be all that is required to describe a great business, to the idea that great advertising ideas should fit into one sentence. From remote control designs to services such as Zipcar. We are increasingly being asked to invest the time to simplify and make things easier to use.

One of the longer term goals is to understand the impact of simplicity on business. I would hesitate to guess that is it profound – beginning with simplicity of purpose that aids communication and ultimately execution and evaluation. I’m looking forward to the results.

Achieving simplicity is more complicated than complexity.

[image from John Maeda's "The Laws of Simplicity"]

Pluribo launched their summary engine yesterday and has been quite widely covered.  The first implementation is based on a Firefox plug-in, which you can use when browsing Amazon.com. Rather than having to read reviews, Pluribo summarizes the reviews and shows how the product compares to other products along the most critical dimensions (as determined by use reviews).

Another Firefox plug-in. Great, hopefully they will add a Facebook app, too. Does the world really need another plug-in, widgety thingy? Why would I use this thing?

The Pluribo team identified an interesting issue – that is, while there are more and more reviews on sites like Amazon, Newegg and even Walmart (powered by Bazaarvoice), you still have to read them to figure out what people think.

Now you might want to find the best. But is your best the same as my best? What happens if your version of best is “lightest” or “fastest”. The star rating doesn’t tell you this, so you cant cheat and look at that. You have to read through reviews which might not even talk about your best.

What Pluribo does is figure out criteria – i.e. what dimensions are people talking about. So if people offer their thoughts on weight, you can find the lightest. If people weigh in on other issues, such as “scratchiness” or the likelihood that the product will scratch – thats there too. So you might want to take that carry case after all.

This seems like it could make life really easy. Imagine standing in best-buy and asking – is this the lightest? You could summon Pluribo and get short summary, readable on a small screen.

Or what about manufacturers. If I am a product designer, wouldn’t it be nice to know the most important attributes which people are talking about? And which products score best for these attributes? Pluribo already knows. You have a permanent, always available focus group and Pluribo is constantly summarizing the results.

I’m excited to see what is next. Maybe Pluribo will summarize their reviews to see which dimensions users think are most important.

Alexa, WordPress is the top line, this time in the blue.

So, why did it take me so long to make the switch? Well, I had realized that I might be missing out. Certainly if I took the time to play with WordPress, more could be done. But I have tried desperately not to tinker of late and free up some time to focus on other things. And I have likely become a little dumber, technically, in the process, I suspect. But wordpress.com seemed like it might be worth a look.

But what pushed me over the edge this weekend, was quite simple. I had a CSS problem. Seemed obvious- was pointing to the wrong place, but it wasnt clear how it was changed or in fact how to fix. Help was helpless. Contacts failed to provide a number. I really am cheap to support- I try to figure stuff out first. In fact, I am often embarrassed to call. But I needed to call, to avoid the embarrassment of a non-functioning site.

When help did come, over e-mail. I was told, politely, that there was no problem. Ok. Contrast this with todays response from folks at WordPress.com (thanks Nick). When I mistakenly mapped my domain twice and paid twice, I sent a note asking for one of the mappings to be removed and credited – Shazzam! Quick response, all fixed.

I’ve never felt happier about a change.

I’ll be adding WordPress.com to my research about why great products and services dont need advertising. I would be interested in understanding from the Six Apart folks what they are doing to respond.

Disclosure: we have absolutely no relationship with either WordPress or Typepad. Just trying to keep the blog up to date and make a few changes here and there. And avoid some embarrassment (we always manage without technical difficulty, to achieve this on our own).

There remains much to do, but we think that this can bring the type of measurement and control from online marketing to out-of-home which is usually limited to estimated impressions. To date, most of what we have seen for proximity marketing has focused on branding, which is interesting but harder to express in terms of ROI because it will be compared to other traditional options, but closing the loop with point of sale data to show ROI, makes this an easier sell for CMOs. One doesnt need to look at impressions, but can now look at sales tied directly to the campaign.

We think Google is already pointing the way, by finding more and more ways to bring online and offline together, particularly for local – whether using QR codes for print ads or coupons for local listings. And of course, the proximity tools built into Google Maps and Local Search, are already changing local search marketing.

Intera’s Bluetooth-based approach augments these new local marketing options because it enables targeting down to a few feet (so within a specific location such as a mall, for example), doesnt cost the user anything and is faster and more reliable than most 2.5g connections in the US. Mobile Marketer has all the details.

Some clues:
1. grown men shout with excitement
2. you outperform products which cost almost 10x yours
3. even the most cynical reviewer expresses disbelief and admit that the liked your product

Its interesting, but there seems to be a growing recognition that less is more. I have been a longtime fan of 37signals because they do less. They focus on what you really need and throw away everything else. The end result is astonishing – people use and enjoy using the product. Sure other will claim they can do things that 37signals cannot. But who cares? Nobody really needed these things and they undermine the main purpose.

So what garnered the best product review ever. In this case its a car. Now I have mixed feelings about this given that I dont believe in encouraging people to drive more, much less for fun. At Mutopo, we like Zipcar. But if we werent saving the planet we would want one of these. Or we would simply want to rent one for a day – the Atom.

It follows all of our ideals
1. features had to fight to be included (windshield is optional)
2. built by a small team (7)
3. not expensive (relatively)
4. beautiful design, resulting from an inspired way to solve a problem

The result – the best product review ever. Words dont do it justice, at least not mine. So to see what we are talking about and hear the response it evoked, take a look at the video (I would have embedded, but the Beeb seems to have asked us to stop this, according to Youtube).

First, we have become unhealthily obsessed with reviews. It seems that everywhere we look, we hear about reviews. In fact, we have been making more and more decisions about what to buy based on what others had to say, for a long time with Amazon and more recently Newegg.

Amazon still seems to have cornered the market with customer reviews and were probably one of the earliest to understand their value. But when Walmart.com embraced online reviews almost 9 months ago, it was clear to many that something big was happening and today, if you look at walmart.com, customer reviews feature almost as prominently as price reductions or “roll backs”.

Looking at this from another direction, is there increasing focus on customer service or more broadly customer experience and making better products?  Almost 2 years ago, Adage ran a piece of how US R&D spending had been steadily catching up to advertising spending (not in all industries mind you, but certainly many high growth, competitive ones). The article is not directly accessible, but Joseph Jaffe was kind enough to capture the key ideas. This trend seems to be continuing, but we plan to investigate further.

From a less product centric perspective, important to the growing service section, Zeus Jones created a nice graphic showing the convergence of 2 previously siloed functions – namely marketing and operations (for example, call centers). Some companies have had this as religion for some time – for many years Intuit has made extensive use of their call centers to better understand what their customers need and what their product designers should be doing. But more recently, the CEO of one of the fastest growing online retailers, Zappos, explained how “…Zappos takes the money it would have used on paid media and pours it into the customer experience”.

We think what this means is that companies are finding that their products and services, simply need to be better. Because it is increasingly difficult to support bad experiences with great advertising. And competitors have to spend much less to rapidly gain market share – they just need great reviews!

(image from www.ivoshaap.com)