Overview of Article: This is Part 2 of an interview with David Butler that is a follows up on the Fast Company Article and Business Week article that have drawn so much attention.

Thoughts on this Article: I like the questions that are raised and David Butler’s honesty in his answers.  This is a great “rest of the story” to go with the original interviews.

Part 2 of Designing on Purpose: An Interview with David Butler, VP of Design at Coca-Cola

by Henning Fischer

Welcome to part 2 of our interview with David Butler, VP of Design for the Coca-Cola Company. Part 1 is available here. When we left off we were talking about the different roles that design fills within Coca-Cola. This part of the interview shifts gears a bit and talks about one of the major themes we’ll be exploring at MX: designing in a down economy.

[Henning Fischer] How do you design with purpose in a down economy?

[David Butler] That’s a good question. It’s all in how you look at it. That sounds kind of trite, but there’s a similar discussion about the value of design. Is part of the value of design driven towards productivity? Doing more with less? Or is designing to do more with less thought about in terms of sustainability? They’re both sort of the same thing. In a down economy, doing more with less is exactly the focus of the company. In reality it’s what we do every day. As designers it’s always about how we can provide more value or more enduring experiences. It’s not that different from what we do in an up economy.

[Brandon Schauer] Design is easily seen as a cost center in a tough economy. What advice would you give to people who are feeling that?

[DB] When I got here, people asked, “What do you do?” and I worried a lot about trying to define design and tackle everything that we could impact. Soon I realized we should just focus our design efforts on the things that really matter for the company and provide the most value: the way people are going to actually touch the package and experience our brands. Most of what we do focuses on retail and the retail experience and that is never going to go away in an up or down economy. What I have done and what we continue to do is focus on the highest value that our function and capability of design can provide to the organization.

One more thing…let me say it in a different way. Everyone is tightening their belts, right? What that means, simply, is that we need to design more accurately, and we need to leverage our scale more proficiently. The projects we work on have not changed dramaticaly, they’ve just become more important.

[HF] I like the phrase designing with accuracy. In some ways it’s what we’re going to be struggling with over the next couple of months as well. We’re seeing changes in our business and I think we will have to increase the accuracy of the things and the engagements that we step into as well.

[BS] Yeah, if budgets are smaller and you’re doing fewer projects, you need to raise the chances of each project’s success that much more.

[DB] Linking projects directly to the value to the business is critical. If you can prove that value, it’s not a big discussion. You can see the impact.

[BS] Can you give is an example of ways you have helped to explicitly connect to that value? Have you been able to get down to bottom line dollar impacts and things like that with some of your projects?

[DB] Let me answer that in two ways. One is around cost avoidance. We can design something and talk about the scale and hypothesize what the cost avoidance could be. Another way is through the pure, old fashioned business case- the levers that drive the value and provide the return on investment that we have. Nothing new, just a straight-ahead business case. For example, if we design something to be durable over time, we can avoid a lot of the costs in the future. A great case study is the Coke contoured bottle. The basic form was designed in the 1920s. It has been basically untouched since then. Imagine all the costs that we have avoided around that design by designing a classic, enduring design.

[BS] You didn’t even have to create a new icon. You’ve just had to embellish something that was already in people’s lives. How about partnering within Coke? How have you worked with others in the organization to make design more effective?

[DB] As designers we’re intuitively equipped to adapt and integrate than perhaps other functions or parts of the organization. For us we have never had a problem integrating. It has always been the opposite. The demand has far outstripped the supply from day one. Once people understand the value that designers can bring to their part of the organization, it’s not a sell in at all. It becomes more about capacity discussion.

[BS] You’ve had a great career going on from brand director at Sapient to some really successful years at Coke. Who do you look to for inspiration and insight for where you’re going to take things next?

[DB] I’m actually very passionate about design theory. I’m a big fan of the publication, Design Issues. I’m really motivated by theory. I’m interested to see how design theorists are creating the idea of public policy around design in mass culture. That links into sustainability and other issues that we’re facing as a society. Keeping up with the thought of having this culture of design rather than focusing just on the profession of design. When you have a global view, you see the developing economies of China and Brazil and Russia. All these economies are advancing a global middle class and are seeking to develop into something that we here in the United States are familiar with. You see the opportunity and future for design and its almost overwhelming .

[HF] I don’t know if you have seen the recently published design manifesto that was sent to the Obama Administration…

[DB] That’s exactly where my fascination is. That’s where I see design going. For me personally, that’s exactly the path that I see before designers. It’s quite fascinating…

[HF] We’re definitely a few years behind people like the UK Design Council.

[DB] Not just that. If you think about it- I just saw this statistic the other day- roughly speaking we have about 10,000 students in design schools in the US. That sounds like a lot until you understand that China has over 100,000. You quickly see that Asia is going to be the source for design strength and leadership in the not too distant future. When you look at India and China, it causes you, as a Westerner, to rethink where design is going and your influence on that.

[HF] One last closing question: what will you share with us at MX?

[DB] I’d like to share how we developed our strategy and how we’re executing that design strategy here at Coke.

[HF] David, thanks for your time. We’re looking forward to seeing you at MX.

Register for MX 2009 here and use the code BLOG for 10% off.

ShareThis

Overview of Article:

Thoughts on this Article: I like the questions that are raised and David Butler’s honesty in his answers.  This is a great “rest of the story” to go with the original interviews.

Original Post and Comments HERE at Adaptive Path

by Henning Fischer

Photograph by Jake Chessum

Brandon Schauer and I (Henning Fischer) recently sat down with David Butler, VP of Design for the Coca-Cola Company and MX 2009 speaker. Here’s part 1 of “Designing on Purpose.”

[Henning Fischer] Could you tell us a little about yourself, your team, what you do for Coca-Cola and where you sit within the organization?

[David Butler] We have a global design function and that entails four design centers around the world: one in North America, one in Europe, one in Asia and then on in our corporate headquarters. I personally sit in our corporate headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.

It might be interesting to understand a little more about the company. We have over 450 brands in our portfolio, operate in over 200 countries, the largest in the world, 900 plants (7x Procter and Gamble), 500,000 trucks (5x UPS), 20 million customer outlets (McDonalds, etc.), 10 million coolers and vending machines, 1.5 billion packages sold every day and almost 1 million employees world-wide.

Another thing that’s sort of interesting is the relative state of our global brands. For instance, the Coca-Cola brand has been in China for less than 25 years, which creates a different scenario when we’re designing for a lesser known brand in that market versus a market like the US or UK, which is a very established market. The challenges that we face as a design organization really vary depending on the area that we are taking about.

[HF] There was a big Business Week article on you a while back. You were given a mandate early on that you needed to “do more with design, go figure it out.” Where did that mandate come from?

[DB] At the time, the directive came from the Chief Creative Officer as well as the CEO, indirectly. We have a long legacy of design as a company but it had lost its focus without a clear vision, strategy and plan. I was fortunate enough to be tapped to figure out what to do with design.

[HF] That’s a hell of a question to get in a career.

[DB] Yeah. The Business Week reporter asked me the question and I said it sort of jokingly, but it’s true: the objectives I got were literally on a Post-It note, and they basically said “I know that you can figure out what we need as a company, so go figure it out.” Not a lot more direction than that. It was literally, “walk out there and figure it out.” So that’s what we’re doing.

[HF] The article talked a little bit about a manifesto for design that you laid out. Can you tell us a little bit about that and the vision that you sketched out and perhaps a bit on how it’s changed? It was four CEOs ago. Has it evolved and changed since then?

[DB] The manifesto was more of a reaction, which led to a strategy. The reaction was very Jerry Maguire like. Once I had been here for a few months, I wrote this manifesto. It was simply called “Designing on Purpose.” What I meant by that was that we as a company design literally millions of things all around the world, but a lot of it was without purpose and really not driven by user needs and opportunities that would build our business. That was a really new concept for the company—to think about design as a business strategy. I sent it out, and honestly, I wasn’t trying to do anything, but it stuck a chord, and everyone resonated to “designing on purpose,” even if they didn’t know what it meant. At least they got the phrase, and we built on that. That led to the strategy, which was written shortly after that. We have been implementing it since then.
The strategy circles around three areas: brand identity, user experience and sustainability. We have hired people and have expanded our teams, capabilities, and our process in those three areas to push design forward.

[HF] What does user experience mean for Coca-Cola? We have our own interpretation of it here on the West Coast and in the digital community, but I imagine it’s something quite different for you guys.

[DB] For us it has to do with the usability of packaging and equipment and as well as communications through clear information hierarchy, etc. We’ve brought new focus to ergonomics and the use of our packaging, which is how people touch and experience our brands and products.

[Brandon Schauer] In those activities, how do you give the rest of the Coke organization a feeling for the value of what your design group does and brings?

[DB] Around here, and I’d venture to say around the world, the word design has virtually lost its meaning. Strangely enough, I never use the word design or usability or phrases that we are used to as designers. I really try to communicate in terms of the people we are talking to inside the organization. A simple way of talking about the way the thing work versus the way things look. I use basic ways of communicating usability and try to shy away from anything that would cause dissonance or confusion.

[HF] Has design become any less of a dirty word?

[DB] Design was never a dirty word, just meaningless in the sense that it’s difficult to understand in the worlds of marketing, finance and science. As soon as we start talking about value, things that have or build value for brands, people get it. You don’t have to use the word design to talk about making something more legible or making something more usable. Up until then no one had associated these types of phrases or expressions to the word design. We don’t use the word very much around here, but we talk about the value and what it can do.

Our intention is to build a design thinking organization. To distill that type of knowledge into people, we shy away from anything that would cause confusion or impede that progress.

[HF] Design thinking—there’s a loaded phrase. Could you elaborate how Coke views it and where you are trying to push it?

[DB] The thing that I found out quickly was that this company and many other global companies have the opportunity to leverage massive scale. Not only do they have billion dollar brands, but also the scale they operate in is crazy. When you’re talking about the impact of design, you quickly see that it’s not just about designing the perfect label for something like Fanta, it’s really about helping this organization see differently, think differently and leverage design as an integration or synthesis capability along with making sure the label is right. That’s what we do: we focus on the highest value opportunities to build value for our company and our brands through redesigning vending machines, packaging labels or whatever. But we also use our time to build the capability of design in the company. The more popular phrase used today is “design thinking,” even though Richard Buchanan and others have been writing about that for 10 to 15 years. It’s interesting to see how that idea is moving into the popular culture of design.

[BS] Can you give us an example of helping Coke see the world in a different way for perhaps synthesis or integration?

[DB] Sure. Again, it comes back to the word design. If you come into a situation thinking that design equals aesthetic values or balancing aesthetic elements then it’s difficult to get past a sort of “applied art” scenario. A lot of times inside this company and I’m sure a lot of others, we talk about design in terms of innovation. To get to an innovation or to solve a problem that would speak to innovation requires a cross functional synthesis of things. In other words, our supply chain, brands, communications, markets, etc. all have to come together to get to an innovation. That’s just another way of designing toward a solution. We’re taking these elements and synthesizing them. We can leverage what we do best looking at multiple concepts, quickly prototyping them and reducing them down to the most useful solutions.

[HF] I love the fact that you’re taking about synthesis and bringing together disparate parts of the organization. How much time do you find yourself playing the role of a facilitator as opposed to the maker of things?

[DB] It goes back to the scale of the organization. Depending on the market, or the brand or the group that you’re working with it can really vary. I’m not trying to avoid the question. In some instances, all we really need is to improve the communication value of something so it’s much more tactical and it becomes more about information hierarchy or something like that. That’s more design as a function. Other times, it’s more about design as a discipline—more about “wicked problem” solving. It’s the problems that we can’t figure out, that we have no clue as to how to design a product or it hasn’t been done before. That’s when we tend to get brought in as facilitators and integrators across different functions.

Register for MX 2009 here and use the code BLOG for 10% off.