Hello Moto, Goodbye Moto.
Part of a series on Is Good Design Good For Business?
The Motorola Razr is a design icon. I remember when everyone had them, it was at the height of popularity right when many my age were getting their first mobile phone. Everybody wanted one. It was the phone to have. They even used it on the Apprentice to do those awkward back-of-a-cab conference calls on loudspeaker.
Motorola had historically been an innovative company, Martin Cooper invented the first ever handheld mobile phone at Motorola, “the brick” while there. And the Razr was another innovation, it was a great product. The aluminium body, the smooth curves, it’s thickness or lack therof made it a classic. It was a good looking phone and with it’s marketing it resonated with consumers, so it was incredibly successful. In 2006 Motorola had sold over 50 million handsets.
But where are they now? Motorola have all but disappeared from the mobile phone market, since the Blackberry and then the iPhone they have simply failed to build up any real success. They’ve basically been divided up for patents and it’s quite sad.
So what went wrong, after the success of the Razr? Did Motorola ever really get it? Did they understand why people liked the design of the Razr? Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery don’t think they did. In their book ‘Design matters’ they say:
“Motorola tried to apply the veneer of the product to other products instead of saying, ‘What would be the next step in creating an experience that would resonate with people?’ The company did not continue to grow, build on and invest in what made the Razr succesful. Instead, it chose to imitate, not innovate. Motorola repeatedly used the same language on different models and form factors. They added colours and used the same conventions, without life or soul. The company became almost stale overnight. Motorola doesn’t have a design culture. It has an engineering culture that tries to be a design culture.”
Motorola thought the Razr was the perfect formula for good design. They tried to milk it and repeat it to get results. But it wasn’t the perfect recipe for good design. It should have been the product of a good design process, but it clearly wasn’t. Motorolo only really had a single product. They made a cool thing, but they didn’t make a way to repeat it. They didn’t develop things like their operating system and interface, they missed so much out because they thought the Razr-ness of the Razr was a one-seze-fits-all solution.
I think great design is a moving target, the Razr hit that target bang in the centre. But Motorola kept blindly shooting at the same spot and as the target has moved further and further away they have paled into insignificance.
Motorola needed a holistic process that knows design isn’t limited to a form with buttons on. A design process that encompasses the whole customer experience. The culture clearly wasn’t there at Motorola. They didn’t understand their customers well enough. You need a good product but you need to consider why people might like it. You need to design everything people experience about your company, anything that leads them to form opinions about you.
“Marketing considerations are important. Designers want to satisfy people’s needs. Marketing wants to ensure that people actually buy and use the product. These are two different sets of requirements: design must satisfy both. It doesn’t matter how great the design is if people don’t buy it. And it doesn’t matter how many people buy something if they are going to dislike it when they start using it. Designers will be more effective as they learn more about sales and marketing, and the financial parts of the business” — Donald Norman
Those companies that filled the market Motrola had a brief hold over knew their customers better. BlackBerry certainly knew its clientele and was hugely succesful for it, with a number of great products. But even they didn’t quite manage to keep up and seemed to for a while thing that the many buttoned keyboards they’re known for were why they were loved.
And Apple are of course a fabulous example of that all-encompasing design process. Design is at the core of their company and everything, from the packaging to the retail stores to the customer support service has been intensely designed. Design is more than just a product. Great products embody ideas that people can emotionally engage with, ideas that go deeper than a 7mm thick of phone.
