Design for value and growth in a new world
Customer
choice has never been greater, so terrific design is essential for outstanding
products and services—and to build lasting customer relationships.
Because customers demand compelling
experiences, successful companies create products with a “hook”—a certain look
or unique features that meet customer desires and build brand loyalty. At a
time when demand is restrained in many sectors and geographies, such products
can be a source of differentiated growth. The most successful designs achieve
this growth in a commercially viable way by juggling the trade-offs of
maximizing customer value within constrained costs.
For many years,
manufacturers have used the design-to-value (DTV) model to manufacture products
at lower costs while retaining the features needed to compete. These principles
have now evolved into design for value and growth (D4VG), a new way of creating
products that provide exceptional customer experiences. Under D4VG, design not
only creates value but also generates growth, through products with the
features, form, and functionality that turn customers into loyal fans and
leading to above-trend sales.
In addition to
generating badly needed growth, well-designed products can also raise
margins—even if, initially, D4VG products can cost more to build. That sounds
counterintuitive, but makes sense if considering how a design can evolve over
time. The upfront investment in a design that includes extra features or more
costly materials pays off if those design choices are based on a clear
understanding of a product’s core brand attributes, deep insights into consumer
motivations, and innovative design thinking. These are the designs that hook
customers. Once hooked, redesigns that focus on clever cost reduction lead to
second- and third-generation products that are significantly more profitable.
The impact of this approach is highlighted in research by the Design Management
Institute. Over a 10-year period, from 2004 to 2014, design-led firms delivered
returns 219 percent above those of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.
Apple is the poster
child for the D4VG-led approach. When the iPhone debuted in 2007, its sleek
metal case, sharp screen resolution, and easy user interface set it apart from
any other phone on the market and created a massive fan base. Since then, Apple
has not only managed to increase customer value through each generation of
iPhone, it has also steadily cut costs. The features of the iPhone 5, released
in 2012, dramatically improved on those of the original 2007 model, yet
estimates suggest that bill-of-materials costs (including 26 percent lighter
packaging with 41 percent less volume) were 8.6 percent lower (Exhibit 2). The
iPhone 5 was followed by the iPhone 5S and 5C. The former, using a lower-cost
polycarbonate casing instead of a metal one but offering similar functionality,
was built to attract more cost-conscious customers.
Apple is not unique.
Design-led value creation is being used across industries, including in CPG, by
some of the largest global players. Still, most companies have not seized the
D4VG opportunity. Despite the evolution of design-led product development, many
companies still see it as a cost-reduction approach, often as part of a
procurement cost-saving drive. Or they tinker around the edges, making minor
changes they perceive will do no harm to the integrity or appeal of the
product, such as thinning package walls or reducing the number of color
variants. But they aren’t thinking about design that enhances the user
experience and improves the desirability of a product, which would lead to
higher sales and stronger customer loyalty.
Building capabilities for design-driven growth
The key to
design-driven growth is blending traditional design-to-cost principles with
consumer insights and specialized product-redesign expertise to create a
winning combination of lower costs and more desirable products. This enhanced,
reinvigorated approach requires an end-to-end perspective on D4VG:
·
knowledge of the
competitive landscape to frame the product space
·
insights about
competing products to understand potential alternative offerings and learn from
companies facing similar design challenges
·
insights from customers
to determine what makes them desire a product and what they are willing to pay
for
·
a complete
understanding of a product’s cost drivers and of production capabilities and
constraints to ground discussions about feasibility and cost limits
·
design teams that bring
together this knowledge in desirable product options
For the purposes of
this article, we will focus on generating consumer insights and using design
thinking. Other steps in the standard DTV process, such as competitive product
teardowns, factory walkthroughs, and supplier workshops, are core parts of the
D4VG diagnostic framework but much has been written on them previously.
A D4VG toolkit
Fundamentally, the
customer must be at the heart of successful D4VG. The head of R&D at a
major food producer notes that D4VG’s importance lies in how it leads with an
understanding of customer desires, which it combines with customer and
competitive insights for product designs that deliver improved quality and
customer experience at a lower cost. Furthermore, the alignment D4VG produces around
customer needs helps resolve what the company should prioritize in new designs.
Critical to D4VG is a
set of six next-generation customer-insight tools that avoid the unconscious
bias inherent in classic interview or survey questions. They provide a more
sophisticated way to look at customers’ behavior and assess their reaction to
different product features.
·
Use
it or lose it analysis
systematically maps choices against consumer preferences to understand whether
customers value specific features or attributes, which can be omitted if they
do not make the cut.
·
Technical
testing uses competitive
benchmarking to clarify the performance-versus-cost trade-offs of design
choices.
·
Buzz
analytics researches
customer opinions captured on websites and social media about product features
and attributes, then maps the relative importance of each feature to the
brand’s overall performance.
·
Product
testing via mock shopping
experiences determines if consumers notice premium attributes in blind testing.
·
MaxDiff
surveys help companies
understand the relative importance of product features and attributes by asking
participants to make trade-off choices.
·
Conjoint
or other kinds of quantitative analysis help identify which attributes are the most
important to customers and how much value they attach to each attribute.
Organization for D4VG
To succeed at D4VG,
however, companies need more than just new capabilities—they also need the
organization and mind-set to use them fully. All too often, we see clients
requiring help with problems that result from unresolved conflicts between
different functions, such as marketing, R&D, and product design. Marketing
wishes to please customers with a “gold standard” product at a competitive
price, or want to avoid any impact on a successful brand; product design and
R&D are under pressure to keep down costs. Despite the best intentions,
these cross purposes can lead to a stalemate that delays new products. For
example, at a leading fast-moving-consumer-goods company, the design team
couldn’t make changes without explicit agreement from marketing, which meant
that someone from senior management had to weigh in before design changes could
be seriously considered.
D4VG counters these
effects by relying on cross-functional teams that bring together the core
stakeholders: purchasing, manufacturing, R&D, quality, marketing and sales,
finance, and design. Team members hammer out their differences within the
group, reaching alignment by focusing on the customer needs in question. For
example, a European dairy producer set up an intensive, four- to five-month
product category review process led by cross-functional working groups.
Comprising about ten people, with expertise in product development, production,
packaging, marketing, and distribution, the groups created a suite of
product-redesign initiatives that were then validated and implemented, as
appropriate, by the product-development team.
That approach needs
strong leadership to bring together a diverse range of stakeholders. For
example, when a global electronics manufacturer went through a two-year D4VG
program to save more than $1 billion while intensifying its products’
desirability, it set up a clear governance structure to oversee the work. A new
global head of D4VG, reporting to the global chief procurement officer, led a
team of D4VG project leaders who had a specific mandate to partner with
stakeholders across the company’s markets and businesses to promote the
development and implementation of ideas.
Many companies that
wish to embed D4VG in their processes have invested in dedicated design
organizations, which may be led by a chief design officer. In CPG, a North
American food company sought to ensure sustained impact from its D4VG group by
following three principles for organizational alignment:
·
Define clear role
boundaries between D4VG and R&D.
·
Have the D4VG
organization report directly to a senior leader (initially the COO) to give it
a seat at the table when decisions are made.
·
Help the design
organization move beyond a design-to-cost mentality and find opportunities to
add value.
To this end, the
company used D4VG to maximize margins and optimize prices, with a new focus on
understanding customer desires, enhancing existing products, and developing new
ones to meet unmet needs (such as through ingredient substitution). To keep the
customer central to its design approach, it developed a new method for testing
ideas jointly with retailers prior to product launches. These changes, together
with a more traditional DTV approach to redesigning its current portfolio,
enabled the company to review and tweak its product line—enhancing customer
experience while eliminating costs. Now repositioned against its competition
the company has generated significant margin benefits over a sustained
four-year process.
We see a bright future
for D4VG. With consumers increasingly influenced by design, we believe that
design-driven companies will continue to outperform their peers in both sales
and profit growth. D4VG is a critical tool for growth-oriented companies that
want to exploit consumers’ unmet needs by creating new features, appealing to
their aesthetic sensibilities, and building strong customer loyalty.
By Ankur Agrawal, Mark
Dziersk, Dave Subburaj, and Kieran West
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/design-for-value-and-growth-in-a-new-world
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