Design to Grow: How Coca-Cola Learned to Combine Scale and Agility (and How You Can Too) - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

David Butler is the Vice President of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at The Coca-Cola Company and is responsible for Coca-Cola’s Accelerator Program designed to generate early-stage, high-growth startups. Under David’s leadership, Coca-Cola has been recognized with numerous design awards, including the prestigious Grand Prix from the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. In 2009, David was recognized by Fast Company as a “Master of Design” and by Fortune for its 2013 Executive Dream Team. David is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Design and Innovation.

Linda Tischler is an award-winning editor at Fast Company magazine, where she writes about the intersection of design and business. She helped launch Fast Company’s design website, FastCoDesign.com, which is now the web’s largest design site. Prior to joining Fast Company, Tischler was an editor at Boston Magazine, where she initiated the New England Design Awards. She has also written for Metropolitan Home, The Boston Globe, and Huffington Post and held editing and writing jobs at the Boston Herald and Microsoft’s Sidewalk.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Design to Grow

CHAPTER 1

Design

The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to “tidy up” the mess, as opposed to understanding it’s a “day one” issue and part of everything.

Tom Peters

If you ever thought growing your business was tough, try selling water.

In first-world countries, clean, drinkable water is ubiquitous and, for the most part, feels free. Turn on the tap, and you’re good to go.

What’s more, most people think water basically tastes the same no matter where you live. Eau de Grand Rapids, in their minds, is not that much different from Stuttgart H2O. Hardly a potential business model there.

Put it in a bottle, however, and suddenly you’ve got something: It’s convenient. In developed countries, when people are on the go, many like to take their water with them: phone, keys, water, check. In developing countries, where most tap water is not safe to drink, bottled water is critical. It’s essential for everything from cooking to brushing teeth. Bottles give water economic potential.

In the past decade, bottled water has become big business all around the world.

For a beverage company, that makes it an attractive addition to a portfolio. Compared to, say, juice, being in the bottled water business seems simple. No weather catastrophes, no crop diseases, no worries about bee colony collapse. But it’s not. The margins are razor thin, and differentiating your brand is extremely difficult.

So, if you’re in the bottled water business, the way you design everything from your supply chain to your packaging is critical. Design can create a powerful competitive advantage.

You may be surprised that a company best known for billion-dollar sparkling brands like Coca-Cola, Sprite, and Fanta also has two billion-dollar water brands. But, then, few people know that Coca-Cola’s portfolio includes over 3,500 products, ranging from milk to juice to coffee, with over five hundred brands, such as Core Power, Qoo, and Love Body.

Around the globe, the company owns about one hundred water brands, including Dasani in the United States, Bonaqua in Hong Kong, Ciel in Mexico, and Kropla Beskido in Poland. Even though the main ingredient in all of Coca-Cola’s products is water, it was a relative late-comer to the bottled water business. However, with its bottling capacity and distribution network, it was a logical category for the company to move into.

Bottled water subsequently has become one of the company’s most significant businesses. Coca-Cola sold 5.8 billion liters of bottled water abroad and 253 million liters in the United States and Canada from 2007 to 2012.

Even for a company as big as Coca-Cola, creating competitive advantage for its water brands is an ongoing challenge.

Several years ago, in Japan, for example, its biggest brand of water, Minaqua, began showing signs of fatigue. It had never been a rock star in the company’s portfolio but had chugged along delivering reliable results for a long time. Yet, over the years, Minaqua’s market share had gradually dropped to the lowest in the category. In 2010, the company decided to do something about it. It wasn’t clear what was to blame: Price? Availability? Packaging? Advertising? Customer relationships? A survey of the business yielded the most dispiriting of answers: “Likely, all of the above.”

It’s at this point—when different elements of your business don’t connect to drive your growth strategy—that a business problem turns into a design problem.

That may be a surprising assertion, if you think of design only in terms of the color of the label or shape of the package. Those are all important, but design also has a much greater capacity to help your business if you think of it as the thread that connects all the dots. Once you get beneath the surface, and understand how design can help make all of the aspects of your business relate to each other, you can begin to really understand its power.

Before we talk about how Coca-Cola tackled the myriad, interconnected problems plaguing Minaqua, let’s drop back for a moment and get clear on one of the most frustrating issues bedeviling any discussion of design. Namely, what, exactly, is it?

What Is Design?

Put this book down for a minute and look around you. Maybe you’re reading this in a cozy armchair in your living room, or in the scrunched middle seat of an airplane. No matter. Survey your surroundings as if you were an archeologist who just unearthed all the things in your environment from the bottom of a pit.

Everything you see is designed by somebody.

That coffee mug you’re holding, or the plastic cup holding your airline O.J., the lamp beside the chair or the one above your seat, the chair itself, the tray table, the ottoman, the carton the orange juice came from, the pattern of the fabric on the seat, the uniforms of the flight crew, the plane’s engines, the gizmo that controls the entertainment center—all have been designed by somebody.

Most of us don’t design smart phones, electric cars, or skyscrapers, but each of us designs stuff every day. We design meetings, presentations, deals, our plans for the weekend, the configuration of stuff on our (literal and virtual) desktops, children’s birthday parties, the menu for dinner, and so on. In fact, we’re all designers—we all design, all the time. It’s just that each of us is better at designing some things than others.

Most people understand that there’s a difference between good and bad design. And the same goes for companies—most people understand that companies are also better at designing some things better than others. So the challenge is not whether or not we should design.

The challenge, for all of us, is to design better—to get the most value out of the way we design.

However, is that possible? Can regular people—people without the word design in their title—really understand the difference between good and bad design so they, or their team or company, can actually be better designers? The answer is an unqualified Yes!

LESSON LEARNED #1

Start by Losing the D word

The word design can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. But design is just a means to an end, not the end.

After my first few months at the company, I tried to stop using the word design as much as possible. It just got in the way of the conversation.

Instead, I tried engaging people on things that drive our business and talked about the impact that design could make, stuff that everybody was interested in and could understand. We found we had lots to discuss.

Here’s the point: The precise language you use to talk about design is not important. The critical thing is to communicate the value that design can create by connecting things to solve a problem. If using more familiar language is part of that, don’t sweat it. There’s nothing magical about words like user-centered, hierarchy, or interaction. (If you don’t have design in your title, chances are these words don’t mean anything to you anyway. Don’t worry about it.)

When I’m talking to a group of people internally—marketers, finance people, sales guys, accountants, or even some of our scientists, I focus on how design creates value. I try to stay focused on how things connect, in their...