Tom Fishburne: Marketoonist

always in beta

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Beta releases used to be restricted to small groups of Beta testers. A Beta release allowed you to work out the bugs before a general market release. When a product shipped, it was considered final until the next release. 

Nowadays, many products are in perpetual Beta (and we're all Beta testers). Gmail, Flickr and del.icio.us carry the Beta designation for years at a time as the products are developed and refined in the open. This creates a mindset of continuous improvement and treats users as co-developers. The pace of innovation happens so quickly that traditional release cycles don't apply. 

This perpetual Beta mindset was born in web-based product development, but it's instructive for anyone in business. As Olivier Blanchard outlines:

"What does being in Beta mean? It means being in perpetual test mode. It means constantly asking “how could I do this better,” even when this worked just fine. How can I listen better? How could I improve customer service? How can I make my billing process smoother? How could we improve the UI/UX of our websites? How can I engage my user community even better? How could this brochure have been better?" 

When I worked at Dreyer's, we talked about "Ready, Fire, Aim" as our development philosophy. We fired quickly for speed to market and then perpetually improved our aim. The overlooked word is "ready", which is important to avoid shooting yourself in the foot.

Apple recently discovered that their are limits to what consumers will tolerate in bleeding edge products. While Apple never describes its live product launches as Beta, consumers often put up with bugs as the cost of being an early adopter. When the antenna failed on the iPhone 4, the consumer backlash was deafening. Apple learned that consumers may be prepared to put up with shoddy battery life, but the antenna snafu crossed the line. They also learned that their blame-shifting response to the crisis (asking consumers to hold their phone differently) only fanned the fire. 

Russell Davies shares this example of how Flickr positively handles the inevitable mistakes in bleeding edge product development. 

"One of the other interesting characteristics about always being in beta is accepting that mistakes are going to happen. And preparing for them. And thinking about, maybe, trying to turn them into opportunities. Flickr's attempt to turn a 'we're down' message into fun probably annoyed some people but I liked it are clearly so did lots of other people. When you're moving at the speed that the modern world demands mistakes are inevitable. Being surprised by them shouldn't be. Mistakes are also when the veneer tends to slip, if there is a veneer. The authentic voice of a brand or organisation is exposed when something goes wrong, if it's not the same as the voice you normally speak with people will notice." 

One of my favorite new brands is designed entirely around an "Always in Beta" mindset: BetaBrand, in San Francisco. Every Tuesday at noon, they announce a new limited-edition fashion invention to their mailing list. This week, it's the World's First Farmer's Market Backpack. BetaBrand continually releases new products and invites consumers to participate. Only selling online allows them to have weekly limited-edition launches as a physical product. Small-batch local production allows them a product development cycle that is only six weeks long. 

Every brand should have a new idea of the week. 

new-featuritis

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The very first Saturday Night Live in 1975 featured a mock-commercial with George Carlin making fun of the Gillette Trac II, which was the first two-blade razor. SNL spoofed it with a fake three-blade razor called the Triple-Trac, and closed with a tagline, "The Triple-Trac. Because You'll Believe Anything". 

Twenty-three years later, in 1998, Gillette launched the Mach3 razor, the first three-blade razor. I heard a Gillette executive give a talk about the Mach3 soon after launch, and he talked in gushing terms about the innovation. When it came time for questions, someone in the audience asked, "What's next? 4 blades? 5 blades?" Everyone in the room laughed ... except for the guy from Gillette. He replied in complete seriousness, "I can't comment". 

As it turns out, Wilkinson/Schick launched a four-blade Quattro in 2004, which prompted The Onion to poke fun at the Gillette president with a mock-commentary, "Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades". And then three years later in 2006, Gillette actually launched a five-blade razor, the Fusion, along with a motorized five-blade version called Fusion Power. Truth is stranger than fiction. 

Feature proliferation is the name of the game in new product development. Most innovation in the market is composed of incremental improvements to what's been done before. Yet those new features often outpace what the consumers actually want. In the case of the Fusion, Gillette had to launch a marketing campaign specifically targeted to their own Mach3 consumers. Instead of campaigning to steal share from competitors, they had to practically beg their own consumers who were plenty happy with the earlier Mach3 to upgrade to the more expensive Fusion.  They over-served the market. 

As Clayton Christensen argues in the Innovator's Dilemma, the best move when the market is over-served is to innovate from below, not to join the new feature arms race.  Less can be more.  Simplicity is the killer app. 

The Economist ran a recent article on this effect in consumer technology, "In Praise of Techno-Austerity": 

"There are signs that technologists are waking up to the benefits of minimalism, thanks to two things: feature fatique among consumers who simply want things to work, and strong demand from less affluent consumers in the developing world. It is telling that the market value of Apple, the company most closely associated with simple, elegant high-tech products, recently overtook that of Microsoft, the company with the most notorious case of new-featuritis". 

This feature fatique carries to every consumer market, which creates opportunity for brands that think outside the new feature arms race. My favorite recent innovation is Vibram Five Fingers, a barefoot running shoe. Rather than engage in the feature one-up-manship of Nike and Adidas, Vibram launched a minimalist product that completely rethinks the nature of a running shoe. 

How can you launch the Five Fingers, Wii, or Flip for your category? Focus your energy there, not on adding a sixth or seventh razor blade.

after the brainstorm

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Last week I joined one of the better idea generation exercises I've experienced in a while. We split into small groups and toured the San Francisco Ferry Building to scout out retail merchandising ideas. The Ferry Building is packed with novel, funky shops like a Far West Fungi, which only sells mushrooms: dried mushrooms, fresh mushrooms, mushroom ice cream -- everything conceivably mushroom-related except for the psychedelic variety. You can learn a lot from experimental retail concepts like that. 

As we debriefed afterwards, it struck me that the real challenge is the period after the brainstorm ends. When you distill your notes and pack away the flipcharts and sticky notes, how do you bring the ideas to life without losing momentum and creativity? 

As we return to the realties of our day jobs at the end of a brainstorm, we run into road blocks, inertia, committees and other hazards that can water down ideas or shut them down entirely. That's what organizations do well. They are designed to minimize risk. Bringing an idea to life can feel like making it through a circuitous maze. So much emphasis with innovation is placed on the up-front brainstorm, yet the real acid test is in the day-to-day shepherding of the idea through the organization. 

Thomas Edison famously observed "genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration". Scott Belsky was inspired by this insight to launch a think tank and conference series called The 99 Percent, which has very useful guidance on making it through that maze without giving up.  Business creativity is not about brainstorming.  It's about persevering.

law of the brainstorm

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We can thank adman Alex Osbourne for the Brainstorm (he's the O in the agency BBDO). Alex invented the Brainstorm in 1939 as an alternative to the usual meetings of "discouragement and criticism which so often cramp imagination". 

Alex Osbourne realized that an environment is needed where judgement is suspended and ideas have space to grow. As part of the attitude adjustment, Brainstorm facilitators run through the same set of stock Brainstorming rules: there's no such thing as a bad idea, quantity counts over quality, encourage wild ideas, etc. These rules help attendees shift mental gears from their regular work state of mind. 

Tom Kelley, co-founder of IDEO, frames the best rules in this classic 9-year-old Fast Company article, "Seven Secrets to Good Brainstorming". 

Those Brainstorming rules everyone agrees to at the beginning of the Brainstorm evaporate the moment we leave that conference room door at the Hilton. Idea generation is one part of the creative process, not the entire process. Brainstorming a mountain of sticky notes with ideas will not overcome the organizational cuts that occur as the ideas are developed. 

I toured an IDEO office recently and it's clear that they live the spirit of suspended judgement each and every day, not just during a scheduled Brainstorm. It's in their DNA. Imagination continues as the idea develops all the way to completion, even as options are narrowed and choices are made. This everyday business creativity is inherently more enduring than what most companies accomplish in a one-day offsite. 

Instead of focusing on the quantity of ideas developed at the front-end of the process, organizations should apply effort to continued creativity as ideas are developed. We should question why our regular office environment promotes "discouragement and criticism which so often cramp imagination". 

Until we solve that more glaring issue, any Brainstorming rules to suspend judgement are superficial are short-lived. The real goal afterall is not just creative ideas at the end of a Brainstorm, but more imaginative products and services that reach consumers and customers. It's idea development, not idea generation, that counts.   

quality (out of) control

 

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I’m enjoying Rework, the entrepreneurial handbook by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson, founders of 37signals.  I was inspired to read it after meeting Mark Rohde, who drew all of the illustrations.

One of the brilliant riffs in the book is titled, “Nobody likes plastic flowers”. Jason and David lobby for the beauty of imperfection and advocate the Japanese principle of wabi-sabi. They illustrate wabi-sabi with a wonderful quote by Leonard Koren:

“Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered, but don’t sterilize.”

This flexible philosophy often conflicts with Quality Control, which prizes consistency over “poetry”. The Six Sigma Quality Control movement in particular clamps down on variability.

Strict discipline may be crucial in many forms of product development (otherwise you wind up with the Toyota brake recall). Yet strict quality control standards also sand out the more interesting attributes of product experience. Product development becomes a constant tug-o-war to standardize, not sterilize. How do you write a Quality specification for “poetry”?

When I worked on Häagen-Dazs, we had a lot of internal debates on Quality. We had two US factories, one in California and one in Maryland. The milk came from local farms. East coast milk inherently tastes slightly different from West coast milk because the diet for the cows is different. Yet, our goal was to ensure that West coast ice cream tasted the same as East coast ice cream. Why exactly? Why does Quality Control have to mean absolute consistency? Consumers expect wine brands to taste different from year to year because of crop variability. Why not other products?

Our Mango ice cream created tension because the mango pieces were not consistently sized. Each pint had large pieces and small pieces, as if they were hand-cut, not machine-cut. Consumers liked the variability. Yet, Quality Control wanted to pick one consistent size. It was easier to design a specification that way.

Why can’t mass-produced products accept some variability? Jones Soda features different labels each time you drink them. It is those differences that create drama and interest. Quality is important. But that doesn’t mean that brands should become plastic flowers.

the new product waterfall

Most products are developed like a waterfall. Waterfall development is the classic sequential linear process where you finish one stage before moving on to the next one. You aim never to revisit a stage once you’ve finished it, so you’d better get that brief right the first time.

When I worked in web development in the late 90’s, we adopted the waterfall process by default. We even hired a 30-year career military project manager who was an expert in waterfall development with construction projects like bridges. We could have wallpapered our offices with his Gantt charts.

We discovered that this command-and-control process was a horrible fit for web development. We couldn't predict all of the potential issues when we first wrote a brief. So, requirements would inevitably change and we’d uncover issues too late to do anything about them. We would then either stubbornly hold to our original plan or scrap a lot of hard work to start parts of the process over.

Waterfall development also stifled great ideas that came mid-stream. It clamped down on “feature creep” to the expense of creating more remarkable innovation.

I recently discovered the Agile Manifesto, written in 2001 by a group of software engineers to invent a new process better matched to software development. It has a lot of variations (iterative, scrum, lean), but at the core, it’s a more innovative approach designed around short sprints and iterative prototyping, not a long linear slog.

I found their principles inspiring not only for software development, but any form of product development, even consumer products. The most recent method product launch included at least 44 rapid prototypes that all evolved the product beyond what we could have ever imagined in the original brief. 

I think that any form of product development can benefit from the tenets of the Agile Manifesto:

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. 

mission: impersonal

Last year, I heard Swedish axe maker Gabriel Branby speak at the DO Lectures. Gabriel’s company, Gränsfors, makes the finest forged axes in the world. He spoke about the essence of product development as craft. His company takes axe-making very personally. To underscore that commitment, each of his axes is forged by a smith who stamps his or her personal initials in the axe head next to the company logo. 

Contrast that sense of personal ownership with the professional detachment that is part of many forms of product development. Rarely is product development seen as craft. Most products launched are not meaningfully different than what is already on the market. 

When Steve Jobs launched the original Mac, he had the entire team sign their work, literally. If you open the case of a Mac 128k, 512k, or Plus, you’ll find the signatures of the entire team that worked on it. 

Imagine the sense of personal ownership you’d feel in signing that Mac before the first one even rolled off the production line. Those developers put their names on the line, in advance, whether the product succeeded or failed. You can imagine the attention paid of every small detail. No wonder that Apple is known for crafting “insanely great” products. 

I like the idea of collectively signing your work. I think it’s a powerful statement of commitment that runs deeper than any mission statement. It forces a higher standard. It signals that each and every person on a development team has the responsibility to make that product more remarkable with their individual touch. A product is a composite of thousands of decisions and actions. If everyone takes these decisions and actions personally, products become stronger, not weaker, as they move from concept to launch. 

No one wants to put their name on something mediocre. 

I also think that signing your work encourages the creation of products with lasting value. Not only are most products designed to be disposable, very few innovations are still on the shelves five years after they launch. Gränsfors axes come with 20 year guarantees. Rarely do we think further out than the next financial year. 

Welsh clothing brand howies created a special Hand-Me-Down line that is specifically designed to last long enough to pass on to others. Their messenger bag comes with a tag to track the names of different owners that will inherit the bag. Taking the long view transforms how we see the products that we develop and the products that we consume.

David Hieatt (who founded both howies and the DO Lectures) expanded this concept further recently with an interesting idea called The History Tag. Similar to a bar code, The History Tag would track the development and story of individual products. It stamps each product with the history of who made it and who consumed it. It thereby encourages those who make products and those who consume products to take those objects personally. 

As he writes, “The reason I like The History Tag idea is because people like to know the history of things. I like the fact that there's a reward for making something last. It becomes a badge of honour for the people who own it and the people who made it. And it’s nice that its usefulness takes time for it to reveal itself. Which runs against the current need for instant gratification, which may not be such a bad thing.”

this little piggy

As Jerry Garcia once said, "You do not merely want to be considered the best of the best. You want to be the only ones who do what you do." That quote was part of Rule #24 in Alan Webber's inspiring Rules of Thumb book, and partly inspired this cartoon (except I played with toes, not thumbs). 

The vast majority of innovations launched each year are "me too's". It's very tempting to drive by the rear view mirror, with your eyes on the competition rather than on the consumer. I blogged a few months ago that companies can be classified either as Rule Makers, Rule Followers, or Rule Breakers. Most companies duke it out amongst themselves as Followers, trying to gain share against the market leader by playing the rules of the market leader. 

When I worked at Nestle ice cream, we acted as Rule Maker in launching a new "Slow Churned" technology that dramatically improved the taste of low fat ice cream. Unilever followed quickly with "Double Churned", based on the same technology. Because Unilever didn't have the same R&D investment, the Unilever launch was more efficient, even though they weren't first. Both strategies have their pros and cons. 

However, the worst position is to be a timid number three or four. Yet many companies jump on the bandwagon of a new idea only when the presense of competition has endorsed the idea. The thinking is that is must be a good idea because everyone else is doing it. 

A few companies like Unilever excel at fast following (they call it "stealing with pride"), but most companies that consider themselves fast followers are actually slow and timid followers. 

The real opportunity is to be the Rule Breaker and change the game entirely. Skinny Cow took the challenger brand approach, launching tasty lowfat ice cream sandwiches that attracted a cult following. Skinny Cow fanatics identified themselves, not with the lowfat ice cream category, but with Skinny Cow. Skinny Cow generated so much value that Nestle ultimately paid a premium to acquire them. Rule makers recognize the value that rule breakers create. The slow followers rarely create value at all. 

Instead of obsessing about market share, think market creation. Become "the only ones who do what you do".

sxsw talk: innovation lessons from cartooning

(3/18 update: I just replaced the short montage with the full-length talk below)

I’m returning now from a few thought-stirring days in Austin at SXSW. On Friday, I gave a talk on what you can learn about innovation from cartoonists. This is a topic I’ve been evolving since I spoke at conferences in San Francisco and London last year. 

SXSW created a short video montage and I just uploaded a full 17-minute version of the talk below.  it was really cool to see it picked up by Huffington Post and PR Week this week: 

SXSW talk: Innovation Lessons from Cartooning from Tom Fishburne on Vimeo.

I started with the story of Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin & Hobbes, arguably one of the most successful cartoonists of all time (and a major reason I started drawing cartoons in the first place). After ten years, Bill quit the strip and largely disappeared from the public eye. I was struck by this quote he gave around that time at a commencement address at Kenyon College: 

“It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I'd be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions.”

Since Bill quit, traditional newspaper cartooning has only gotten worse. If it was difficult then to break through the clutter on the shrinking newspaper page and allow your material to thrive, it’s even more difficult today. Traditional cartooning is one of the most savage markets around. Launching a new cartoon successfully has far lower odds than launching any other kind of innovation. 

Yet there are cartoonists who are bucking the odds and making it work today. In the talk, I described these modern cartoonists as “lead users” that any of us who work in innovation can study. Any market where we launch innovation has similarities to the traditional newspaper cartooning path, in that both are cluttered and dominated by entrenched players. Launching something mediocre that tries to appeal to everyone simply won’t break through the clutter. 

As one of the lessons, I shared the story of xkcd cartoonist Randall Munroe, who thrives because he is deliberately exclusive. Unless you’re a Unix programmer, you wouldn’t get the following cartoon because you wouldn’t know that “sudo” is a superuser-level command in Unix programming. This cartoon is not funny to most, but it’s screamingly funny to a few. In fact, when I gave this talk in London, someone in the audience stood up wearing a t-shirt with this cartoon on his chest. 

I think that being deliberately exclusive is one of the ingredients to successful innovation. Who will wear your innovation on their chest?

game changing innovation

I'm gearing up to speak at SXSW in Austin on Friday, so my mind is racing. My talk is called "Drawing Board: Innovation Lessons from Cartooning". I'm sharing the many ways that cartoonists come up with ideas and find ways to break through the clutter. I think these lessons can apply to any form of innovation. 

Last week, I met a semi-retired cartoonist who once had his cartoon strip in 150 newspapers. I told him that I dreamed of someday cartooning full-time. He replied, "Are you kidding? How the hell could you do that nowadays?" I told him I certainly wouldn't bank on the traditional route of newspaper syndicates. 

Cartoonist Hugh Macleod gives this advice: "Your plan for getting your work out there has to be as original as the actual work, perhaps even more so. The work has to create a totally new market. There’s no point trying to do the same thing as 250,000 other young hopefuls, waiting for a miracle. All existing business models are wrong. Find a new one." 

Hugh blazed a new trail where he gives his cartoons away for free but makes his living selling original art made possible because he gives his cartoons away for free. Illustrator Marc Johns is finding success here too. 

Even legendary Matt Groening got his start by finding a new business model. Long before he created the Simpson's, he created a provocative series called Life in Hell, which he sold in the book corner of a record store where he worked. The material was too edgy to go the traditional newspaper syndicate route next to Dagwood Bumstead. So, Matt went after alternative papers. No broad syndication options existed for alternative papers, so Matt started one. Today, Matt's company, Acme Features Syndicate, syndicates Life in Hell in over 250 weekly alternative papers. 

Cartoonists have to find new ways to go to market by necessity, but it's important to question your go-to-market approach for any form of innovation. Most new products every year are launched the same well-worn way as everything else. New products land on the same over-crowded shelves "trying to do the same thing as 250,000 other young hopefuls, waiting for a miracle". 

In 2002, I interviewed Richard Tait, co-founder of Cranium, one of the the fastest selling board games in history. I asked Richard what led to their success. He told me, "Starbucks". Every other board game maker followed the traditional path of game expos and mass channels. Richard and Whit Alexander didn't know a thing about board games when then started, so they missed the traditional retail buying windows. Running out of options, they naively pitched Howard Schultz about selling their game in their cafes, which had only had coffee merchandise before then.  

This nontraditional launch gave Cranium an edge over every other game launched that year the traditional way. Sure, the game itself had to be brilliant to be successful. But, finding a completely new path to market was just as important to their success. 

Businesses often treat their latest innovations like commodities the moment the product is out the door. They bring them to market the same-old tried-and-true way. They resort to the same price discount strategies to drive trial. They forget that being innovative doesn't stop once the product ships.

If we don't want our brands to become commodities, we shouldn't treat our brands like commodities.