Innovating Innovation. David Morey
Hathaway founder Warren Buffett. Brooks offers a convincing and detailed argument to debunk the legend that the Edsel’s marketing and innovation were based on scientific research. There was research, but nobody paid much attention to it. Then, when it came to manufacturing the car, what little of the research that went into design was mostly discarded so the car could be built on an existing chassis using existing machine tools and assembly lines. At a very basic level, therefore, the Edsel was a failure of both marketing and innovation. While marketing and innovation are together critical, trying to market a product shorn of any consumer-inspired innovation is a forlorn hope.
The blindness of Ford leadership did not prove temporary. Even after Edsel’s failure, J. C. Doyle, an Edsel marketing manager, steadfastly refused to learn anything about the power of consumer perceptions. Years after the demise of the Edsel, Utah congressman Mo Udall remarked the day after he lost a particularly close election: “The people have spoken, the bastards!” Like Udall, Doyle concluded the people had spoken (the bastards!) and, to his dying day, he blamed the dopey American public for the Edsel’s failed launch. As he told Brooks: “People weren’t in the mood for the Edsel. Which is a mystery to me. What they’d been buying for several years encouraged the industry to build exactly this kind of car. We gave it to them, and they wouldn’t take it. Well, they shouldn’t have acted like that… And now the public wants these little beetles. I don’t get it!”
If we look at Ford’s large market study of 1952 and the work of its “Forward Product Planning Committee” in 1954, it becomes apparent that, in designing the Edsel, Ford was focusing not so much on what consumers wanted, but on the gap between the company’s offerings and those of its competitors. Ford executives should have been obsessed with potential customers. Instead, they were obsessed with their competitors. In single-mindedly concentrating on producing a mid-priced vehicle, they built a car for their competitors, not their customers. As former Procter & Gamble Chairman A. G. Lafley observed, there is a fundamental difference between competitor-focused companies and customer-focused companies. For example, in phone manufacturing, a competitor-focused company says they are in the business of “making smartphones.” By contrast, a customer-focused company believes they are in the business of “connecting people and enabling communications any place, anytime….”
In fact, Brooks points out the market research was simply ignored, discarded, and replaced by whim, intuition, personal agenda, bureaucratic politics, plain-old guesswork, and, later, some old-fashioned snake-oil-selling methodologies.
The lesson: Successful innovation and business growth begin and end with consumer perceptions.
Lesson Two: Be Different or Be Damned
As my former client, The Coca-Cola Company chairman Roberto Goizueta, once advised, “Be different or be damned.” Notwithstanding its jarring looks, the Edsel actually represented a whole heap of same-old, same-old—particularly under the hood and from the inside-out. The January 1958 issue of Consumer Reports gave the Edsel its most damaging review. The editors hit it hard for sameness. Worse, they educated some 800,000 subscribers—and potential Edsel buyers—on what made the car tick. It “has no important advantages over other brands,” they wrote. “The car is almost entirely conventional in construction.… The amount of shake present in this Corsair [the next-to-highest Edsel trim level] body on rough roads—which wasn’t long in making itself heard as squeaks and rattles—went well beyond any acceptable limit… The Corsair’s handling qualities—sluggish, over-slow steering, sway and lean on turns, and a general detached-from-the-road feel—are, to put it mildly, without distinction.” Ugh.
And just when you think it cannot get worse, the Edsel came onto the market with another mortal wound, entirely self-inflicted. The vehicle was offered in eighteen different trim levels—Ranger, Pacer, Corsair, Citation, twenty-four door-hardtop, sedan, wagon, convertibles, six or nine passengers, and so on—smothering consumers in a confusing array of choice, far beyond what any sane buyer could want. Largely consisting of distinctions without differences, the lack of focus left consumers paralyzed, which is not what you want when the object is to get a showroom visitor to reach for his checkbook. When variety becomes a blur, indifference cancels out differentiation.
The thing is, Ford executives were less interested in designing and refining a distinctive product, image, and character and more intent on making the Edsel everything at once. Think of this as lazy innovation and lazy marketing, a dreary combination if there ever was one, shining a light on everything and everyone rather than focusing the spot on what is core to the success of your mission. The “everything approach” is easier, but doomed. In the words of Prussian monarch and strategic genius Frederick the Great: “He who defends everything defends nothing.” If Der Alte Fritz could have seen an Edsel, he might have noted, doubtless in disgust, that it indeed defends nothing and offends just about everyone.
The lesson: A lack of focused differentiation will throttle any effort at innovative breakthrough.
Lesson Three: Innovate Forward
As bad an idea as it represented, the Edsel’s pushbutton transmission was at least capable of forward and reverse. Nevertheless, the car was resolutely aimed backwards. Whereas innovation is driven by forward momentum, the Edsel and its marketing were all about rolling to the rear. The car represented tried and tired conventional engineering wrapped in subjectively unattractive design billed as futuristic. Fueled by engineering sameness, it was promoted with depressingly conventional marketing strategies. As if to echo General of the Army Omar Bradley’s famous 1951 rebuke concerning Douglas MacArthur’s desire to extend the Korean War into China—“It is the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” Time magazine in 1958 called the Edsel, “The wrong car for the wrong market at the wrong time.”
Time was not just blowing rhetorical smoke. For instance, when the Edsel was on the drawing board, consumers seemed intensely focused on buying “big” and “bigger.” By 1958, when the car finally limped off the assembly line, these same consumers were starting to look for smaller economy cars. The public’s interest in gigantic, big-fin, chrome-encrusted, gas-guzzling cars was going stale. New, smaller, future-focused cars included the VW Beetle, the Nash Rambler, and the Studebaker Lark.
Congenitally conservative and shackled to the glacial pace of bureaucratic decision-making concerning matters of design and technology, Ford was innovating backward, not forward. It was not just that Ford suffered from an epidemic of wry neck, in which every head was turned backward and incapable of looking forward, the company’s processes—planning, design, production—moved at the pace of a mastodon. Massive time lags between every step meant research findings were about as fresh as moldy bread by the time it came to apply them. During the two interminable years between conception and delivery, consumer trends toward smaller economy cars roared in like a rip tide, pulling the Edsel deeper out into the briny depths of oblivion.
The Edsel emerges for us as an argument for the kind of research approach I have used for such clients as The Coca-Cola Company, McDonald’s, Microsoft, American Express, Verizon, KPMG, Nike, and many others. Importantly, this was not research, but pre-search—hypothesis and scenario testing rolled out into the future, pulling consumers as far forward as possible in their perception and thinking, driving market research to anticipate rather than react to consumer trends. Asking consumers, in effect, what will you want instead of what did you want helps us understand perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors and, most importantly, what might move consumers going forward.
The lesson: Aim your research and thinking forward, not backward, and put to work the same level of agility in dealing with change that today’s consumers bring to their everyday lives.
Lesson Four: Transform Your Business
I argue in this book for a wide-angle view of innovation, far wider than your company’s products, services, and technologies. Successful innovation today must take in a company’s business model as well as the platform on which that model is implemented. Today, it is the platform that will drive breakthroughs and success.
Consider an example detailed in Ron Adner’s excellent book, The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation. In the 1990s, Michelin innovated the self-inflating run-flat tire. Sounds