Adrian Burstein — 15 August 2004
A Lab Mouse Hits the Catwalk
A few weeks ago Microsoft announced the introduction of its new mouse designed by famous designer Philippe Starck. The newness of such partnership, the design itself, and Starck’s sexy brand drew considerable attention from the media. However, there’s something more important behind this news that goes beyond Starck or Microsoft and that went unnoticed; an experiment about the next grounds for competitive advantage in the personal technology industry: vanity and fashion.
Philippe Stark is undeniably an icon of the design world. He’s famous for designing pretty products aimed to fuel conspicuous consumption (like the perfectly useless yet sculptural $75 lime squeezer). Many would disagree with me about the usefulness or relevance of Starck’s designs, although few would argue that Starck imposes appearance over functionality. From a design stand point, Starck’s mouse isn’t really any better than many others out there; however, Starck adds a strong celebrity-like brand that provides "uniqueness" to those who buy his products. All these factors together place Starck’s work in the fashion realm rather than in the industrial design realm.
But making technology fashionable isn’t new. In fact, the industry has seen a few examples in how powerful this approach can be. What really matters in the long run is how to achieve sustainable and consistent fashionable qualities while delivering useful and relevant products. For instance, Nokia’s phone with interchangeable face-plates beat Motorola only by addressing human needs through design rather than focusing on the engineering of hundreds of functions in one single phone. In this case, there wasn’t a celebrity or a brand directly associated with the design and sustainability wasn’t achieved in later products. Another example is Apple’s iPod which displaced the first entrant in the MP3 category, Creative’s MP3s. The difference between these two examples is that Apple is able to replicate success consistently. This is because it has invested years in making design the DNA of its business as means to achieve sustainable appeal and relevance to consumers.
In the wake of this success, companies in the tech industry will test shortcuts to replicate Apple’s brand sexiness, rather than spending years developing it. In this sense, Starck’s mouse is a lab mouse, an experiment in jumping ahead of a business’ sexy brand by adopting the ultimate of sexiness, a fashion designer’s brand like Starck’s. This has tremendous implications at the social and industry levels if you consider the consequences of a shift in value proposition from “a coherent, well designed input device” to a “piece of art that happens to move the cursor of your computer”. At the industry level, it might report immediate sales but it will unlikely be a sustainable and consistent approach to remain relevant and to create a culture that strives for understanding human needs (other than feeling “in”) as means to envision new business opportunities. (I will discuss the social effects of this phenomenon in my next blog).
Companies in the technology sector will be closely watching the results of attracting customers not only through design but also through delivering fashion excitement from a famous designer, like Starck. For now, Microsoft’s lab mouse is walking on the catwalk and everyone is dazzled. If it works well, we might witness the beginning of technological vanity experienced at a large scale. A competitive setting in which the differentiation war in the tech sector will be fought in the fashion arena. Who knows, may be we will soon see MP3 players by Armani or laptops “per femme” by Carolina Herrera.
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