Design_at_the_edge

Can't innovate. Don't innovate. Go nowhere.’

high wire 2
Originally uploaded by _gee_

Sir George Cox has stated that in Britain

"We don't understand the relevance of design, suffer from lack of imagination and aren't ambitious enough.”

Yet if we look at the spend on design it is evident that whilst many organisations invest in design they do not see a significant return for it, which is hardly an incentive for them to continue, or for others to take the plunge themselves, which explains why Sir George suggests that our mantra is

"Can't innovate. Don't innovate. Go nowhere."

A key strategic role of design is making ideas tangible, telling the story of alternative futures, and defining the actual products and services to make those stories become experiences. therefore, it should be a strategic imperative that we use appropriate technologies, techniques and capabilities of design in the most effective way, maximising the return on our innovation investment. Yet, as we have said,many organisations invest in design through in-house resources or external agencies, without gaining much traction. I remember talking to an advanced projects team that were tasked with coming up with longer-term radical solutions and their complaint was that they're projects were judged by the same criteria as near term incremental projects which meant they didn't stand a chance. The project leader observed:

"Our project teams have previously carried out work creating visions of the future and identifying new customer opportunities, which has generated a substantial amount of new ideas. However we have lacked a process to convert these creative ideas into radical new concepts and prototypes that are tangible expressions of business opportunities and marketable products. We need to develop processes that support fledgling ideas and enable breakthrough ideas to be realised. A key issue is to work differently across all our disciplines (such as Research, Design, Development, Manufacturing, Marketing, Human Resources, partners and sub-contractors) as a continuum in order to deliver inspiring solutions to the marketplace that pack a  sustainable competitive clout.

In a nutshell, ideas must be allowed to break through barriers and present themselves to decision makers.“

Picture uploaded by sekimura. Used with thanks under CC.

Several challenges are contained in this statement that are essential to delivering a sustainable stream of winning new products and services. These challenges include better up-front design processes that support the emergence of more substantial concepts that are not killed by an inappropriate response to the uncertainty that is often the outcome of conventional risk management techniques. Collaboration between specialist disciplines that enable concepts to be assessed against the capabilities available in-house and outside. stronger links between strategic intent and project ambitions. Working differently means adopting different tools or adapting those we already have to achieve different ends.

Picture uploaded by MoonSoleil . Used with thanks under CC.

Collaboration:

If we look in a dictionary we will find it is defined as:

1. A joint intellectual effort

2. Treasonable cooperation with an enemy

Derived from: (Latin) com (with) + laborare (work) = work together

To elaborate is to extend an idea; to co-laborate is to do so with partners.

The problem is, that in the past conventional business models assumed the second definition was more likely to be true and so information was closely guarded and so no leverage came from sharing and discussing it.

Picture uploaded by fatal Cleopatra . Used under CC.

Real collaboration involves being open and frank, sharing information and knowledge to maximise the opportunity for the whole team to co-create motivating insights and a common vision of a winning product or service. We need to set our radicals free and be bold enough to reveal all our cards at the beginning of the process when maximum leverage is derived from the act of sharing.

Picture uploaded by ralphunden . Used with thanks under CC.

Today we must approach design from a different perspective. Truly sustainable design is based on a wide range of complex criteria; human experience, social, global, economic and political issues; physical and mental interaction, form, vision, and a rigorous understanding of contemporary culture. Manufacturing is based on another collective group of criteria: capital investment, market share, ease of production, dissemination, growth, distribution, maintenance and service, performance, quality, ecological issues and sustainability. Services are delivered through the application of products by the service providers. Experiences evolve where these services are the stage and products are used as props to engage the people. The combination of all these issues- of validity for our consumers and viability for our organisations- has come to shape our objects, informs our aesthetic, our physical space and culture, and our human experiences.(apologies to Karim Rashid)

To achieve great products, services and experience collaboration between all the key players needs to go up a gear and really engage in creating something special because of their knowledge and expertise and despite their functional positions and organisational loyalties. But if all the top team are not committed to changing the process of creating new 'stuff' then both definitions of collaboration might come into play with functional heads seeing collaboration as an act of disloyalty. But designing something memorable for the consumer may be all we have left to differentiate ourselves from the competition... and that means people discovering, adopting and exploiting processes, technologies and techniques to  collaborate effectively across barriers between all the people who can produce something special.


Picture uploaded by Yodel Anecdotal. Used with thanks under CC.

"In a world of largely saturated markets and many alternatives, astonishing the customer [through superior design] is the path to exceptional growth." -- Robert Heller, marketing guru

A peep into the future

A peep into the future
Originally uploaded by timtom.ch

'Virtually any technology that is going to have a significant impact over the next five to 10 years has already been around for about 10 years,' Bill Buxton said. So our challenge must be: how do we stumble across them?

The Christmas edition of The Economist in 'Face value' writes about the accidental innovator Evan Williams; extracts below

"AT SOME point in the decade after he moved from the farm in Nebraska where he grew up to the innovation hub that is the San Francisco Bay Area, Evan Williams accidentally stumbled upon three insights.......

"So, having already had two accidental successes—one called Blogger, the other Twitter—Mr Williams is now trying to make accidents a regular occurrence for his company, called Obvious............

So Mr Williams started Obvious, determined to go back to good accidental stumbling. One of its side projects—Mr Williams loves side projects so much that his main projects seem to exist mainly as placeholders—was something called Twitter. If blogs were difficult to explain in 1999, Twitters are well nigh impossible. You might call them micro-blogs or nano-blogs, as Twitter lets users write only 140 characters at a time, albeit from any device, or using an instant message or text message. Twitter imposes another restraint: each post must be an answer to the same question: What are you doing?

.....All of this has made Twitter the third “next big thing” in Silicon Valley in 2007—after the iPhone, Apple's innovative new mobile handset, and Facebook, a social-networking site. The proof is that copycats have sprung up, that Google has bought one of them and that Facebook has made its “status” updates, in effect, internal Twitters. (Facebook also works with Twitter itself.) Exactly how to make money from Twitter remains an open question......He would like to make Twitter as mainstream as Blogger. But what he really wants is to make stumbling on accidents into a culture, habit, process or speciality. That is why he has spun the 12 people working on Twitter out of Obvious ......

The irony of trying to plan accidents, and orchestrate their frequent occurrence, is not lost on Mr Williams. So he tries mental tricks. One is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” A decade ago, you could have started with Yahoo! and taken away all the clutter around the search box to get Google. When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things."

Depending on your point of view we too could have had the idea for Twitter if we blogged a lot and used SMS a great deal and saw that a lot of the traffic is about 'What are you doing?"' Our iPhone could then 'twit' at us.

The Economist September 2003 Technology Quarterly introduction refers to Carl Franklin (Why Innovation Fails) and Jacob Goldenberg and David Mazursky (Creativity in Product Innovation) and writes of how to Expect the unexpected citing the highest innovation success rate as Random event spotting (92.9% successes), whilst referring to several techniques including Evan Williams mental tricks referred to above.

Twitter is interesting as it has proved to be a valid idea (some consumers like it) whilst its overall success is not proven yet as it has not demonstrated viability ( will it make money-directly or indirectly- for its producers?). Winning products and services are a balancing act between validity and viability; risk taking is allowing valid ideas to travel long enough to confirm, or otherwise, the viability of the tangible outcome of that original energising insight or idea. Many established organisations would have killed Twitter by now, but look at the odds of success in Designs on innovation.

The challenge for successful actions energised by the discovery of consumer  insights that become winning innovation is not to look around us but to travel in unfamiliar territory, to look from different points of view, reflect on what we observe and recognise in other words as William Gibson put it

Picture uploaded by david.alliet . Used with thanks under CC.

"The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed."

He finds small groups of people doing revolutionary things and then imagines what it would be like if everybody was doing those things.

So our 2008 challenge is going the location of what is unevenly distributed, and on reflection knowing we have been there!

Picture uploaded by Joe Shlabotnik . Used with thanks under CC.

Pipelines and funnels

palm_foleo_50_hi2
Originally uploaded by thomcochrane

The Palm Foleo is killed before launch.. a tough decision but one that needs to be made before the device is launched and soaks up time and attention without much return. The O'Reilly blog breaks the news here. One could argue it is a product before its time, but like many ventures it suffers from being only part of the story, and a story that has not been fully scoped out let alone written. One characteristic request from senior executives is to ask for "a product that is the iPod of our market sector!" which can be done but might fail if one hasn't done the upfront homework to put in place iTunes, fast connection to computer, iTunes Music Store, not to mention agreements with key players in the music industry, etc. It seems to me that Foleo was not very user inspired as the point of an instant on pc is that it behaves like the pc...  if fast networks were universal then a virtual hard-disk that emulated the disk in a pc would be a reasonable idea, but a hobbled pc with instant on access to not a lot if the network isn't there is daft.

The original Palm pda was successful because Jeff Hawkins and his team realised that the product they were creating was a rival to a diary not a pc;  the Palm had characteristics necessary to compete with a pocket diary not a pc, unlike the Newton. The design of the Palm V connected at an emotional level with its users satisfying a desire for relatedness and personal growth, moving it up Maslow's hierarchy to create a very desirable product .

It intrigues me that Giuliana Bruno, professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, in an interview -Aria, June, 2005- about her book Atlas of Emotion, cites the Palm Pilot:

[Question on page 27] These landscapes between cinema and architecture, arts and life, seem to claim a precious bond with the past. How would you insert the new communication technologies in this discourse? The current idea of connecting, for example, favours without exception the speed we need to virtually reach the other: don’t we run the risk of inhibiting, in the long run, the form of tactile knowledge which plays such a pivotal role in your emotional geography?

[Answer] Absolutely not. Cinema has laid the foundation upon which the current communication technologies have developed and strengthened: the possibility of reaching places and people with-out really moving. The term “con-tact” stands for the need of human beings to stay in touch, and it does, indeed, emphasize “tact”-the tactility favoured by the desire for closeness. The new terminology of communication indicates better than anything else how something which at first appears to be aseptic and abstract is, now more than ever, tactile. Think for example of the chat room where the idea of the room frees the imaginary, providing a feeling of closeness both physical and tangible. In the e-mail address, somebody’s address is in fact more intimate than the real one, because there you are certain to find that particular person, and no-body else. In terms of communication, we are gradually getting to the most emblematic ex-ample of all: the palm pilot, which is one with the hand itself, with its palm. At first, there is al-ways a moment in which you fear that the medium itself can get the “upper-hand” and over-whelm the human spirit. But it is not so. Time has shown, again and again, that desire does not die. Once you master the medium, what you tangibly do is continue to look for other ways to keep contacts.

Taken with this extract from Harvard Magazine

While Harvard waited, visual culture exploded. When the Lumière brothers projected the first motion picture show in Paris in 1895, “the stillness of representation was forever broken,” says Bruno. Today, such images have “infiltrated every single square inch of our lives,” Lorelei Pepi says — computers, televisions, cell phones, handhelds, planes, trains, minivans. They’ve become the “way in which we see our world,” says Bruno: “There are screens on the façades of buildings. If you walk into any art gallery, it’s no longer only painting, it’s also moving images. When you go to a doctor, you get a screen of your body — they literally penetrate inside of you.” Visual art has become “the currency of our world,” she adds, “the way in which ideas circulate — and films are very important as that kind of language.”

.....Bruno works with many students in the Graduate School of Design who can “no longer think of buildings in a static way,” she says. “Look at Frank Gehry’s buildings — these buildings move.

Picture uploaded by Heinz Theuerkauf. Used with thanks under CC.

So the history of cinema represents for [design students] a way to create a space in motion, a space that tells stories.” As Marjorie Garber notes, there’s “tremendous interest in using film information” across the University. “To be literate is to be film and visually literate as well as to be book literate: that is the culture that we’re living in right now,” adds Garber, a Shakespearean scholar who’s been using film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in her classes for years.

If we put this together with Louis I. Kahn

"Architecture is the making of a room; an assembly of rooms. The light is the light of that room. Thoughts exchanged between one and another are not the same in one room as another.

Picture uploaded by Allan Ferguson. Used with thanks under CC.

A street is a room; a community room by agreement. Its character from intersection to intersection changes and may be regarded as a number of rooms."

If we agree with Rich Gold's words,

"Design is the most successful social science ever created",

then we will realise that to fill our innovation funnel with motivating ideas and turn them into new products and services that win- for everyone, means connecting with our users, customers, consumers, suppliers in a different, insightful, way... making sure that the tools we use are relevant for what we are trying to achieve... and a good place to start is with ones that allow us to visualise what we are trying to do, interact with the right people and iterate to success! Success that looks more like a Palm V than a Foleo, that is innovation based on a deep insight to do with the life of our potential customers not innovation based on hubris!

picture uploaded by gadjoboy. Used with thanks under CC.

As Gary Hamel puts it

"In the age of revolution it is not knowledge that produces new wealth but insight – insight into opportunities for discontinuous innovation

……discovery is the journey

……insight is the destination"

A costly 'Ring of Death'

Ring of Death
Originally uploaded by Spoon Monkey

Following on from the post on Innovation and Change-frozen in Time I read in the Guardian yesterday:

Andrew Clark in Chicago
Friday July 6, 2007
The Guardian

Microsoft is paying out more than $1bn (£497m) to repair chronic problems with its Xbox 360 games consoles, which break down in a fault known as the "red ring of death". The Seattle-based company said last night it had been forced to make an "unacceptable number of repairs" to the machines, which went on sale in 2005.
The fault triggers three flashing red lights on the console, indicating a general hardware failure. On internet messageboards, the problem has been dubbed the "red ring of death", or "bricking", because the machine becomes no more useful than a brick. Microsoft has decided to extend warranties free of charge to cover a period running for three years from the date of purchase, following widespread complaints. The company will reimburse anyone who has paid for repairs to date.
Microsoft said the clean-up would involve a charge of between $1.05bn and $1.15bn to its earnings for the financial quarter which ended in June.
Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, offered "sincere apologies" for the problem. The company has not revealed the number of failures, but such was the volume of repairs that one British firm, Micromart, recently announced it would not take any more Xboxes, saying it was getting a "phenomenal amount" of machines coming in with the same issue.

The write-off is a big blow to Microsoft's efforts to diversify from its traditional strength in software with products such as games consoles and a music player, the Zune, a competitor to Apple's iPod.

A productive way of exploiting Design Space is to drive a risk-mitigation project plan out of it. Consider the Design Factors on the 8 sides that can contribute to or detract from a successful outcome. We can list "Must-haves" on each side, followed by "Nice-to-haves". We can also go round each side asking "what can go wrong?".
The classic risk worksheet:

By creating one of these worksheets with a cross-functional team with knowledgeable people for each factor ( and one or two "renegades" to challenge orthodoxy) we can rapidly raise AWARENESS of triggers that can lead to risk; by being REALISTIC about the risks with evidence of similar events and consequences we can build PRIORITIES and discuss likely ACTIONS and assign ACCOUNTABILITY to see that they get done.

If we take each risk and assign a value representing Low(1), Medium(2) or High(3) to the impact and likelihood of the risk, we can plot them on a matrix and assign the priority to addressing each one. Each square represents the result of multiplying the Impact score by the likelihood score to get a maximum score of 9, (=3*3).

The matrix shown has likelihod as horizontal axis; the high impact-low likelihood square in top left is a "political minefield". Floods don't happen often but if you are not prepared for them the can attract huge media scorn!

We can then drive a Gannt chart for managing these risks as part of the normal project activity, because if we regard most risks as a lack of information to aid knowledgeable decisions they are tasks on the critical path if their impact means they need to be addressed.

We can then manage risks like the "Red Ring of Death" in a rational way, and avoid denial that things might occur and therefore not treat them as seriously as they merit. As someone once said "we can pay now, or we can pay later but we will pay." ....To the tune of more than $1bn (£497m) plus cost of the damage to the brand and competitive advantage to the competition.. all of which are factors in Design Space...Design 4 Consumer, Manufacture, Competitiveness and Sustainability.

[update on 12/7/07: Item from Guardian online: Where the Xbox 360 went wrong

Whoops, there is a problem with the console failing in significant numbers after all, said a reluctant Microsoft this week. So what is the cause? Charles Arthur investigates]

Topshop - Risking it?

Topshop - Kate Moss launch
Originally uploaded by loungefrog

Sir Philip Green, self-made billionaire and boss of Bhs and Arcadia, talks of advice for nascent wheeler-dealers in an article in yesterday's Independent. He lists eight items of gilt-edged advice:
1. Stick to what you know
2. Plug in
3. Get a feel for trends
4. Take risks
5. Don't think about what you can't do
6. Say: 'Come And See Me'
7. Work hard
8. Even tycoons need R&R

The advice for Take Risks is really fascinating as it shows how the concept of iterative capital can be deployed to mitigate risk whilst not diluting the opportunity. His advice on risk is:

The Kate Moss line has launched successfully in the US. Now Green is planning to take Topshop proper into a market where other British brands have tried and failed to expand. It's different there, isn't it?

"It's got people. With two legs, two arms. Which bit's different?" he retorts.

OK, they're not familiar with the idea of fast fashion in America.

"Well," he says, slowly, for the benefit of this simple-minded business student. "Let's put our entrepreneurial hat back on? Is that a negative or a positive?"

Well, it makes it risky.

"I didn't ask you that. Is it negative or positive?"

OK, let's say it's a negative.

"OK, fine. Let's follow that track. Do you like salmon?" He points at a plate of half-eaten smoked salmon.

Not especially.

"Why?"

I find it a bit oily.

"Have you eaten it, tried it?"

Yes.

"You've tried it. Didn't die from it? On the basis we've got 2,500 shops, and assuming we're semi-intelligent, we're not going to die if we open a shop in New York. We might die if we open 500 without testing it. I was trying to give you an analogy. I think we're a big enough business that we've got to stretch the boundaries to teach ourselves. Will we make some mistakes? Course we will. Do we need to do it? No we don't. So that's the time to do it. I've worked out how to get in. You write a cheque, right?"

That gets you the property?

"Right. That's easy. You just think: 'I'm gonna do it.' Is it slightly advanced for America? Yes it is. Is it too advanced? We think we'd know how to temper it. To add a bit of... American to it. You probably can't translate a pure European business [there]. But you can translate it by probably adding a couple of young American designers. Like we do here.

"I'm already on the case. Americans jog. They do fitness. You've got to add in a little bit of what works locally into the pot. You can't be arrogant enough to think you can just pick up your shop and just move it. 'Cos it won't work. But that's the learning curve."

The idea of taking Arcadia to the Yanks enthuses him a lot more than taking it carbon neutral. Will it ever happen? "Well. I suppose we've all got to try and do... environmentally friendly things," he says slowly, " Carbon neutral – who knows? It's got to be deliverable. But, yeah, we've got to be part of what's gong on. Can't disengage yourself from the world, can you? But you read that Prince Charles took 64 people to America. I mean, what's he supposed to do, swim there? Laughable. Where's it end? What, so nobody's going to travel, go on holiday? It's bizarre. But no doubt over a period of time, it'll all evolve. This is going to take years, isn't it? It's not an overnight, don't put the lights on after 9pm, is it? Live in the dark? There's a balance isn't there? You've got to be positive about these changes, haven't you?"

In yesterday's Daily Telegraph I read about change and the retail banking sector Under the headline Barclays focus on transparency and value, Philip Aldrick writes:
There is a danger that, as Barclays dreams of transformation with an audacious £41bn bid for Dutch rival ABN Amro, the bank will miss the revolution in its own back yard.
The UK retail banking market is evolving fast. Regulators are investigating everything from penalty fees to payment protection insurance. Current account charges remain firmly on the agenda, and - behind the scenes - banks are preparing a new suite of products that will compete on interest rates and extras, such as travel insurance........
Consumers are at war with the banks. The principal battle is over excess overdraft charges....
Ms Deana Oppenheimer (chief executive of Barclays retail banking) makes no excuses. "It's all about the idea of transparency," she says. Penalty charges underpin the UK's almost unique "free" current account system, which ensures customers in credit pay no fees on transactions, but the loss of clarity has also wrecked the relationship of trust between customers and banks.

She says: "It's about 'What's the real deal here - where's the real value for me?' " The upshot, she believes, will be a revolution - the biggest shake-up in UK banking since Midland introduced the free current account in 1984. "What this will cause is the industry to not do business in the same way it has done in the past," she adds.

The Office of Fair Trading is lurking in the wings with the threat of price regulation as part of its investigation into current account charges. But, if the banks prove they are willing to compete on value and so end customer inertia, it may be persuaded to stay its hand in favour of improved transparency and easier account switching.
Crucially, banking must be made more "simple". Ms Oppenheimer says: "The customer is saying we want transparent, we want understandable, we want responsive, we want value and we will be willing to pay for value in some areas."

She declares the changes "a real opportunity". It's an enthusiasm rivals should not take lightly. As marketing director at Washington Mutual she was not afraid to shake the tree, becoming a pioneer of free current accounts in the US in the early 1990s. "The idea was that if you removed monthly fees, you would have the opportunity to garner more share of wallet and attract record amounts of customers. It worked."
In the meantime, Ms Oppenheimer plans more small but significant changes. She is proud of reducing the 58 steps it took to originate a Barclays mortgage down to seven and cutting to 10 minutes the time it takes to set up a current account.

So both companies are engaged in exploiting opportunities and both executives have a reputation of facing up to the risks. Sir Philip Green talks of how to grasp the opportunity and to mitigate the risks. No doubt Ms. Oppenheimer's track record would reveal a similar attitude to risk. Neither of them regard risk as a barrier

[Picture uploaded on by GypsyRock. Used with thanks under CC.]

but as something to be managed in a way that maximises learning whilst keeping the potential downsides in proportion.. as Sir Philip might say "Open one shop at a time not 500!"... so how does this play out in practice?

A few years ago I looked at the rate of growth of Starbucks coffee bars... their timeline starts with the first test bar in 1984; 17 open by 1987; 33-1988; 55-1989; 84-1990; 116-1991; 1994-425, which is a really healthy growth. Contrast that with a UK experiment with an equivalent concept in the called Cha. As the name implies it was based around tea. A sophisticated Tea making device, to do for tea what the espresso machine did for coffee was developed and put into the first tea house... over the next 2 years 2 more opened so by year 3... and here it stuck. The machine won an award in the ID Magazine 46th Annual Review but as we can see compared to Starbucks the initiative is 14 "shops" behind and there it stuck... for whatever reason. So either the feedback said the concept was not going to take-off, or the backers were risk-averse, or...? But it does show Starbucks and Cha-like experiments can be conducted, concepts tweaked, investments managed and risks mitigated along the journey to success.

P.S. In the UK, apparently around 113 million cups of tea are drunk every day!

T-Bird Tea brewing machine in I.D. Magazine July/August 2000

Mars Bar, Messed up?

Mars Bar, East Village, New York
Originally uploaded by racoles

Messing with popular mass market icons can be very risky. It may seem a good idea to improve the reliability of supply of one of your ingredients but it can lead to unexpected consequences.

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The Telegraph published this headline

Mars blunders on chocolate recipes

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent, Sunday Telegraph

Last Updated: 1:09am BST 21/05/2007

The food company that makes Mars Bars has been forced to change its chocolate recipes and ditch the use of animal products after a backlash from vegetarians. Mars has admitted it "made a mistake" by switching a key ingredient in its confectionery to one that came from the stomachs of slaughtered calves. Thousands of consumers complained after the company admitted that it was using animal rennet, the enzymes from the stomachs of livestock, to make whey used in their chocolate products. It meant that Britain's three million vegetarians and some religious groups would no longer eat popular brands such as Mars Bars, Snickers, Galaxy and Maltesers. Fiona Dawson, managing director of Mars UK, has ordered all recipes to be changed to make them acceptable to vegetarians. She said: "At Mars UK we have recently changed the source of some of the whey which is used in our chocolate products. We made a mistake. We apologise." Later the article states: The company will tomorrow publish adverts apologising for the change and explaining future plans, which come at the start of National Vegetarian Week.   Any bar with a 'best before' date after October 1 2007 can no longer be classed as vegetarian

Statement on Current Vegetarian Status

At Mars UK we recently changed the source of some of the whey which is used in some of our chocolate products. We have received lots of feedback that this decision has made it difficult for some of you, especially those of you who are vegetarians, to continue to enjoy our products.

We made a mistake. We apologise.

The consumer is our boss. Therefore we listen to you and your feedback.

As a company we value openness, honesty and diversity and we believe that anybody should be able to choose freely from our range of chocolate brands.

But being sorry isn’t enough. Therefore we commit to you today, that we at Mars UK will ensure that a selection of your favourite brands – Mars bars, Snickers bars, Galaxy and Maltesers, will be suitable for vegetarians in the near future. To this effect we are starting to change our manufacturing process today.

We will keep you informed of our progress against this commitment through regular updates on this website.

Please accept our apology and keep talking to us, via......

She went on to publish her email address and ask for feedback.. which left me feeling positive about the way the company handled the situation.

When I was involved in the risk management of packaged products we divided issues into two types... consumer perceivable and consumer transparent.  Using Design Space factors we could run round what the issue meant from each of the eight points of view. In one case we reduced the weight of plastic in a flip top cap by 10%. This was argued to only affect the price paid to the supplier. In fact we passed round some samples and realised we had lost the audible click as it shut, deemed not to be important until we argued it was an emotional cue to reassure the consumer that the cap is closed. A debate followed whether this was a consumer negative or an observation. We gave a pack with the new cap to a consumer group that had broken for coffee nearby... the instant feedback was "does tha cap work?" The instant reaction from the team leader was "we can't do it." Our design reaction was .. "What do we do to put the click back in, without increasing weight?" Some simulation work showed how we could actually move plastic about and put the click back in, whilst not putting the weight back on, and as a bonus improving mouldability!

If I had been working on the Mars activity, the brand team would have to do a risk identification and sensitivity analysis around the Design Space and a gap analysis on the Design Pyramid to ensure we had covered off issues that we can easily and quickly  do, with the right team in a room for 2-3 hours. Which would have saved a great deal of resource consumption after the fact.

The point is: a proper risk assessment can yield positive returns and avoid the Mars effect. In fact it might have been possible to see the trend to vegetarian-based ingredients and actually sort out a sourcing policy based on the trend.