Brandon Schauer and I 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.
Part 2 of our interview with David will appear February 3. Register for MX 2009 here and use the code BLOG for 10% off.