Products' Friendly Front End

Strong design can lure people toward your company's offerings -- but make sure you have the fundamentals in place to support it

by Dev Patnaik

Recently, Delta announced that it would shut down Song, its foray into the world of chic, low-cost carriers. Both Song and United's TED were experiments to see whether major carriers could compete with the likes of Virgin and JetBlue (JBLU) on their own turf.

In both cases, the carriers attempted to use design as a major differentiator. United retained marquee-name agencies to help design and brand TED. For Song, Delta completely revamped its cabin interiors and partnered with designer Kate Spade to create stunning new crew uniforms. Delta even set up a pop-up store in New York's SoHo to create buzz for the new brand. Yet, less than two years later, both TED and Song have wound up colossal failures.

It's easy to infer from this that design has been over-hyped as a strategic business tool. But in fact, both Song and TED point to an underlying dynamic that companies need to understand to fully leverage the power of design. At its essence, design is most effective when it plays the role of a front end for a more comprehensive strategy and back-end system.

More than Just a Bottle

To better understand this relationship between strategy, systems, and front-end experience, it's useful to look at a few instances where design has been successful. One recent success has been Target's (TGT) Clear Rx prescription bottles. The centerpiece of Target's strategy here is an innovative bottle that's easy to read, store, and use.

But what's sometimes overlooked are the other elements that had to be put in place for the bottles to be successful. To start with, Target realized that pharmacies drive sales in the rest of the store. Folks come in to pick up prescriptions and then spend a few moments browsing in other departments for things they might not have written on their shopping list.

Armed with this info, Target figured out how to drive demand. Like most pharmacies, one of the primary demand drivers at Target is prescription refills. Of course, folks only refill their prescriptions when they've gone through all of their pills -- but just getting people to take their pills when they're supposed to is a surprisingly hard thing to do. It's what the pharmaceutical industry calls "compliance" (a detestable term if only for the Skinnerian lab-rat imagery that it conjures up). Target recognized that people might be more likely to take their medicines if the dosage instructions were easier to understand and remember.

ICONIC POWER.

Then, Target worked in conjunction with its pharmaceutical suppliers to develop a system that would accommodate the myriad varieties of medicines and prescription instructions that the average pharmacy has to deal with. Moreover, the information-technology infrastructure had to be modified to accommodate a new prescription system. Targeteers who worked on the project note that one of the most complicated aspects of the new system was refitting all of the store laser printers to accommodate the new labels.

Finally, the new bottles were implemented as a singular iconic artifact of Target's pharmacy. New prescription bottles caught people's eyes and even ended up on BusinessWeek Online (see "Design on Drugs"). But those beautiful bottles might not have seen the light of day without a lot of other factors coming together behind the scenes.

A Front End for Both Strategy and Systems

The Clear Rx program is fascinating because it's a great example of how some of America's most visionary companies are using design for maximum effect. Like Target, these outfits are identifying attractive new models to expand their business. They're discovering the key factors that get people to buy more and setting up the partnerships, sourcing agreements, and infrastructure necessary to make the system work.