This sent Whirlpool on a mission of creating visual brand distinctions, beginning with differentiating their own many brands. The world's largest manufacturer of household appliances, Whirlpool markets products under Whirlpool, KitchenAid, Brastemp, Bauknecht, Consul and other major names in more than 170 countries. It also is a significant supplier to Sears, which owns the Kenmore name.
To execute its brand-focused strategy, Whirlpool wooed Chuck Jones away from his position as head of design at Xerox to take on the job of design chief. At first, Jones dismissed the idea of moving from a cutting-edge technology giant to "a rust-belt kind of industry," but an interview with Whitwam convinced him of senior management's sincerity in elevating the role of design in Whirlpool's transformation, a commitment that continues under current CEO Jeff Fettig.
Whirlpool's reputation during its 94-year history was that of a very strong engineering manufacturing culture. Design was viewed as an appendage of the engineering discipline. "Products would get thrown over the wall to design, and they'd have a week to make it look good," Jones recalls.
In evaluating how to bring innovation to the forefront, Whirlpool came to recognize that design had to be a key element. "It's not all about product features; it's about how the consumer perceives your product," says David Swift, Executive Vice President of Whirlpool North America. "This was viewing design in a different way than we had perceived it before."
Swift adds that Whirlpool's acceptance of design as an innovating force freed Jones to "hire people who understood color, space, the psychographics of interfacing with products, and ergonomics." While these issues had been discussed within the context of engineering before, now the customer experience was considered from a broader perspective.
Jones' first job at Whirlpool was running a program called Advanced Product Concepts — a unit charged with turning conceptual innovation research into products that could actually be taken to market. This led to the formation of a new organizational structure in which human factors and usability experts worked side by side with Whirlpool industrial designers worldwide and, ultimately, became an entity renamed Global Consumer Design, headed by Jones.
It also paved the way to establish a strategy to speed up new product introductions. "If we were going to continue being the leader in our industry, we needed to have an overall brand architecture that we could then inject with new innovative products that fit within a specific brand family," Swift says. "The design group was able to take our customer data and data from our branding organization to create what we call a Visual Brand Language, VBL, and then translate that into a brand architecture. Anything that was KitchenAid, Whirlpool, or our other brands — you could tell by seeing the product that it would fit within that family. That then enabled us to come out with products at a more rapid pace and do it more cost effectively."
Jones compares VBL to a pyramid with the brand's core values at the base, the visual positioning at the next level, design principles at the third level, and signature elements at the top. "The focus of VBL is to differentiate itself from the competition and our subbrands by leveraging the power of the brand itself to develop distinct and appropriate visual personalities for each of our 28 global brands," he explains. "In the past, independent Whirlpool product teams started from scratch with regard to what a product should look like with every new project, a practice that was costly, wasteful, inefficient and eroded any kind of visual equity for the brand — everything was 'one off'." The result was a tangle of schizophrenic product lines that missed the opportunity to build brand equity through coherent appearance and operation.
That visual coherence allows consumers to replace appliances and still maintain a single look in their kitchens. It also helps retailers anticipate how to effectively merchandise new Whirlpool products because the units already have a design aesthetic that fits with what retailers have on the floor.
Swift uses the company's various kitchen brands to explain the influence of VBL. The Whirlpool brand primarily targets the needs of busy women, "active balancers" who look for cooking appliances that produce the best quality of meal for the least possible effort. That contrasts with the company's KitchenAid line designed for the "home enthusiast" who is passionate about cooking and would rather have total control over the experience than ease through automation. A Whirlpool microwave has one button for popcorn which does the whole thing in a single step, while KitchenAid has a butter-melting button for coating popcorn, but can also be used in the preparation of other dishes.
Whirlpool's most dramatic success linking design and innovation through VBL was the global launch of the company's entry into the front-loading washer and dryer market, introduced as Duet in the U.S. and Dreamspace in Europe. For Whirlpool, Duet was a breakthrough in design, ease of use, energy efficiency and low-water consumption. The solution propelled Whirlpool from a 0% share in front loaders to 40% share within the product's first year on the market. Whirlpool introduced the machines with a distinctive point of difference: a pedestal option that raises the drum height and thus reduces strain from bending and stooping. The optional pedestal, with space to store detergent and bleach, adds an extra $200 to the cost of each unit. "What it does for us as a company is provide a whole separate stream of revenue," says Jones.
The attractive design of the units also changed another industry paradigm. Prior to the launch, about 20% of consumers bought washers and dryers in pairs. After Duet, that number immediately rose to 80%. "Through the use of design, color, finish and material, we've now even driven certain sub-models within the front loader family up to almost 98%," say Jones.
Duet, begun in 1999, illustrates the change in the way Whirlpool now views design as a combination of both science and art. Jones expanded the talent base at his global design organization: Before initial Duet concepts were even considered, small teams of usability anthropologists, industrial designers, engineers and marketing people went into consumers' homes to watch how they do their laundry. Whirlpool also has created "living labs" where the company installed working kitchens so Jones' team can videotape consumers interacting with Whirlpool products.
Jones, himself, anonymously goes on Whirlpool service calls to observe consumers. "There's this one lady in Indiana that was talking about how [Duet] was like a Ferrari. She wished it was in red," he recalls. "Who would have thought a consumer would be equating their washing machine to a sports car? There is that kind of intelligence we pick up. Some of this work has spurred additional development around the pedestals. That is unexplored real estate that is ripe for further exploration."
Indeed, Whirlpool's current design innovations underscored by VBL are already having impact on the company's future.
"VBL is an architecture that is more than just appropriate for today. It has legs into the future," Swift concludes. "We have twice as many innovations in our pipeline today than we did three years ago, and the time to develop them has been cut in half. We're getting twice as productive with half the time to develop. Design architecture and the VBL work have been enablers of that."
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Provided by Corporate Design Foundation - reprinted from @issue: The Journal of Business & Design |
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