Inspired by Everyday Magic

I once set a personal goal of travelling to the same number of countries as my own years of existence.  It is a ongoing goal, and today, I have visited thirty-two. 

Seeing other countries provides a priceless view of precious sights.  Seeing the expansive Forbidden City in Beijing made me imagine the thousands of people at court for whom the complex was built.  Climbing the steep portion of the Great Wall made me question why the people then designed it to be the worst OrangeTheory Everest workout ever.  I remember seeing the Disney Land castle for the first time and how happy I was that it looked exactly how a fairy tale castle should look like.  In Germany, I remember walking through the cobblestone streets of the prettiest old towns; I was in awe at the consistent look and feel of the German architecture.  And of course there’s Rome – where everything is both historic and just beautiful – even if they are only ruins of the majestic structures that they once were.  And then there’s Santorini in Greece where everything is in the shape of a dome and the only color of paint allowed on houses are either white or blue – and that provided gorgeous selfie backdrops for millennials like me.

 

Seeing the world has given me views of very impressive design.  As I reflect on design that has inspired me, I find myself coming closer to home.  As I wrote in my previous blog post, I have found that good design, at least to me, is 1) Intuitively useful; 2) Appropriately simple; 3) Aesthetically engaging.  Good design does not have to be located in the far east.  It need not be relics from early civilizations.  And it certainly does not have to be playing “It’s a Small World” when you see it.  

Inspiring design, as I have experienced, can also come in objects and experiences that we might think of as ordinary or mundane.

Reading about the work of Gianfranco Zaccai made me conscious about the wonder, or I would even daresay, the magic of ordinary things around us.  I previously wrote about the magic of the Toilet Wand and how that contraption has drastically improved my domestic life.  It is the design philosophy of people like Zaccai that conjures such magic in designing everyday objects.  And that, to me, is very inspiring.

An article by Wallstreet Journal entitled “The Engineer of Everyday Objects” finds him literally laying in a hospital bed, trying to discover the next big object design that hospital patients need.  He has pretended to be other things in order to feel the real consumer pulse.  I find this very fascinating as a marketer.

Prior to coming to business school, my marketing experience got me doing market and consumer research for brand strategies.  We gathered countless data and went through them back-and-forth to come up with decisive insights about our consumers.  This divergent thinking continued even as we zeroed in on what the data tells us.  As we come into convergent thinking, we look at the numbers and observations and continue to interpret what these insights really tell.  It really is a continuous divergent-convergent thinking process that involves looking at data.  Business school elevates further the need for data and interpreting what they say (ask any first year MBA taking the core).  And that is exactly why Zaccai’s approach is moving.  In a marketing world that is proliferated with data, and where marketers fall into the temptation of developing products from a distance, Zaccai provides a philosophy that gives personal touch to the design process.  And don’t get me wrong – it is not at all inaccurate.  In fact, it may be more accurate than any because it empathizes with consumers on a totally different level.

To illustrate my point about how this philosophy allows for inspiring marketing and product development, I’ll be talking about four different everyday products.

I wrote about the magical Toilet Wand, but a close runner-up to that was the Swiffer WetJet.  The WSJ article also mentioned that this other simple, effective, and highly insightful tool was born out of living the process by which people washed their floors.  Designs like these are inspiring in the daily sense.  While it does not elicit childhood dreams like the Disney Castle, it makes everyday cleaning easier.   If it weren’t for that, we’d still be cleaning our mops in a pail.  And that’s an everyday design is simply inspiring.

In Design Thinking class last week, we talked about the Pillpack.  I’m pretty sure that no regression model directly suggested that idea.  It is with a deep understanding of the consumer that we marketers really get to empathize with them and discover what they need.  The Pillpack, for instance, is something that inspires me greatly.  With parents who are now in their 70s, the inconvenience of having to sift through pill cartridges and boxes is very real.  I am so comforted by this everyday solution, knowing that my parents can take their meds with so much less worry.  I’m very happy that the philosophy similar to that of Zaccai exists to pave the way for this kind of wonder product.

During a training session in Unilever, I also remember a presentation about our toothpaste packaging.  Whereas in the past, the tubes were covered by a screw cap, it was discovered that a very annoying but strangely unarticulated pain point was that this cap always feel to the floor.  Always.  And that’s why the flip cap was introduced.  Simple wonder – derived from empathy with the customer. 

Finally, in my previous job, I managed a laundry brand.  Unlike 95% of the other laundry brands in the market, our product was a detergent soap that was made from natural ingredients.  Made from coconut oil (while all others are petroleum-based surfactants), the product I was handling was actually hypoallergenic.  It was a good product and our focus groups said that.  But it was hard to articulate to our agencies how exactly that made the product better.  And that was when I started doing laundry using fifteen different soap brands.  In the Philippines, laundry is usually washed by hand, so I washed clothes using different laundry detergent bars. That’s when I found out that after using most synthetic detergents made my hands itch, sting, and strangely hot.  In contrast, our product felt like you just washed your face with soap.  And right then, I understood what consumers preferred about our product – and how exactly that felt like.

Gianfranco Zaccai is truly a modern inspiration for design.  He has not designed massive landmarks in the far east.  He certainly did not come up with thousand-year-old structures that have withstood time.  And he definitely does not put up a fairy tale castle.  However, he is in inspiration to young marketers like me.  It is his philosophy of personal experience that takes empathy with the consumer to an entirely different level.  It is this kind of philosophy that paves the way for everyday products that create daily magic for us consumers.