Bad Design as Good Strategy
It is amazing how so many dumb ideas, propounded by people who should know better, are taken seriously by so many people. Just look at "The Apprentice," a show that serves up dumbed-down humiliation every week. Donald Trump inflicts this on both contestants and viewers alike.

Trump is obviously no idiot. But one wonders about those who gladly pay to consume his vision. It is instructive to notice that despite design elements like the comb-over, the pink marble & brass "architecture," and the tabloid-baiting pretentiousness, the most recent incarnation of "The Donald" has become as "visionary" a brand as any out there. And one cannot help but wonder how designers work with Trump as their client. Everyone says that America has lost its ability to compromise in recent years but don't believe it. Anyone who has ever had to work for a "visionary" is likely to be quite adept at it. (In designspeak©, it should be noted that "visionary" is a euphemism for "megalomaniac.") And visionaries tend to run things—especially in design.

Good Design as Bad Strategy
This year Braun is celebrating its visionary contributions of the last 50 years. They have assembled various design visionaries to gush over how visionary Braun as a design company was during that time. But Braun, a once culturally defining force in design is truthfully not that anymore. Ironically enough, Braun lost it because it has been too myopically preoccupied with celebrating its visual image, and not visionary enough in defining its product portfolio. The result is that it has been reduced to competing in commodity product categories—which is likely why its parents, Gillette and now P&G respectively, are poised to make Braun even more financially inevitable but even less interesting. It is vaguely disappointing that Braun's main offerings in 2005 consist of alarm clocks, hand-mixers, irons and grooming accessories. Even though it makes these products adequately pretty, such product genres can hardly be considered compelling.

No. The original Braun brand—if it still existed—would be making technologically relevant products that people who live today actually aspire to own, and identify themselves through, like mobile devices, MP3 players or gaming and entertainment systems. Braun's problem was that they believed (likely sometime in the early 80's) that they were in the business of styling record players, and not in the business of making new technology seductive to design-oriented consumers. If they had had some strategic foresight 25 years ago, they would be in a much better position today to be able to celebrate their achievements 50 years from now. It is hard to envision a retrospective in 2055 centered on a moustache-trimming electric razor, but then again, Trump is undeniably successful despite the comb-over.

Being Naïve Makes Good Strategy
Strategic blindness is not only confined to visionaries drunk on their past successes. Strategic people can be as blind as field mice too. Many clients of design—usually STRATEGIC MARKETERS®—dismiss design consultants because they see them as not specialized enough in their category of product. In fact, most design consultancies can attest to the phenomenon of designing say, an innovative hair-dryer for one manufacturer, and then being asked to "do what you did for them" by a direct competitor's STRATEGIC MARKETERS®.

STRATEGIC MARKETERS® do not realize that product category naïveté is especially beneficial at the beginning of the design process. A naïve consultant will see things as a consumer rather than as an expert. It is precisely the naïveté of consultants that creates the space to think expansively without the fetters of industry norms. Sure, innovation can still happen when a company has become expert in a certain industry for 50 odd years, but so too can corporate ossification and N.I.H. Naïve consultants further benefit worldly clients because they have worked in other industries and can often "cross-pollinate" lessons from one industry into another. But these benefits are usually lost on rationally trained STRATEGIC MARKETERS® because they have had all sense of intuitive risk drummed out of them at an impressionable age.

The crime of educated STRATEGIC MARKETERS® is actually impatience for the naïve consultant to climb up the learning curve and produce THE BREAKTHROUGH™. Ironically THE BREAKTHROUGH™ is more likely to happen when there is space in a project for this "constructive ignorance." Constructive ignorance also happens to be the world that consumers inhabit. Consumers do not care about industry norms.

The danger in the over-educated worldliness of STRATEGIC MARKETERS® is that they tend to over-think while under-imagining. They become blinded by reams of data, and thus often gloss over the all-important experience of when a consumer and a product meet. To be constructively ignorant takes courage and a lot of hard work. It is frequently thankless and often unrewarded by normal metrics. It has traditionally been more of a calling than a career aspiration.

How Smart Became Dumb
The original Smart car, the ForTwo, developed by Swatch and Daimler-Chrysler (then Daimler Benz AG) and released here in Europe in 1998, is perhaps one of the most innovative pieces of automotive innovation since the Lancia Lambda in 1923. As its brand name implies, the first Smart was novel in that it was a car developed through a process that obviously featured hefty amounts of analytical and creative thought about consumers in context (rather than the more traditional automotive practice of mixing styling-testosterone with corporate politics.)

The Smart ForTwo is the perfect response to the needs of people who drive in contemporary European cities. Its design is based solely on responding to these needs. To their credit, its creators never felt impelled to make the ForTwo more "car-like." They never piled on features because they could. The ForTwo is a drivable product that can park almost anywhere in a tightly cramped city. It is fuel stingy in the land of perennially high fuel prices. It carries two people comfortably with room for modest cargo. But best of all, it is a beautiful object because it is not trying to be a beautiful object. It exists simply to answer a particular set of needs.

But Smart is in trouble. Smart found it difficult to make money from small cars alone and thought to expand to other categories. Where did it go wrong for Smart? There are undoubtedly many answers to this question. (How Smart would fare if released in the U.S. is a heated debate—possibly moot—and belongs in another discussion.) Smart failed in product definition after the ForTwo. The later Smarts did not courageously or ingeniously address particular sets of consumer needs. The Smart roadster—an abomination to the Smart brand because it is the type of vehicle that ForTwo drivers laugh at, not aspire to—is thankfully being discontinued. The Smart ForFour, a car that excites almost no one, is also in trouble. These attempts at brand extension alienated Smart's core audience and were not strong enough to win over a new one. The ForTwo, now an old design, is still the leading earner for Smart because it is the only Smart product that continues to differentiate itself from any and all competitors. It is almost as though Smart woke up one day, looked in the mirror, got frightened and realized that it should act like a typical car company. It not only lost sight of its brand; it seemed to lose its nerve.

One lesson here is that a brand is not simply delivered by cool graphics, styling or advertising. A brand exists, perhaps most critically, at the point of product definition. And if both the consumer's ideals and the spirit of a brand are not clearly felt and articulated when conceiving of new products, then that brand is already in trouble before anyone pulls out a pencil and a sketchbook.

The Importance of Being Ignorant
If it came down to it, most people would likely prefer to be lucky and stupid, rather than smart and unlucky. Luck—or success if you like—only occurs in creative endeavors from a certain amount of dumbness, ignorance, naïveté or blindness. Best practices are critical, but adhering to them alone is not enough. The design and development process is often about getting everyone out of his or her well-reasoned rabbit hutches and back into the consumer's world of constructive ignorance. Where there is constructive ignorance, there is room for creative possibility. Then there is room for luck, happy accidents, success and maybe even a few visionary solutions.

This is no small feat, given the excess intelligence that each of us—the client and the consultant, the designer and the strategist, the democrat and the republican, the heathen and the believer, even the tasteful and the tasteless—already have.

Cordy Swope is a design strategist and co-founder of normal life, a research and product development consulting firm.