Design To Grow

Design To Grow uses Coca-Cola as an example of how keeping a company stable and flexible at the same time over decades is not only possible, but a must to grow and scale your business across the globe.

When we talk about business design, most often we think of nothing more than a company’s corporate identity – their logo, colors, fonts they use and maybe what the product looks like. David makes two interesting remarks, which both hint at the fact that business design is much more than just that:

The visible design extends beyond your products and branding to everything customers can see and connect with, such as customer service, your office building, your website, etc. There’s also an invisible design, which includes everything your customers can’t see, but that’s part of how you deliver your product: your internal processes, company culture, partnerships in the industry, etc.

David says the only way to make great overall design is to always combine the two.

For example, Coca-Cola re-designed the water bottles for their brand Minaqua in Japan. First, they started with doing something invisible to the customer: researching what Japanese people desire in a water bottle. After finding out that they care about recycling and live in small houses, they could then design the visible part (the bottle itself) in a way that aligned with that.

What they came up with was a small, lightweight plastic bottle, that could easily be twisted, stacked, stored and recycled. Thanks to a combination of both visible and invisible design, they created a great product, which significantly increased sales.

Everything in the startup-world is fast-paced. You have to grow fast, adapt all the time and stay lean. David says all of that true, if a new startup isn’t flexible, it’ll die quickly, BUT he makes one condition: as soon as a startup finds its ideal target market and has a great product-to-market fit, it must switch from flexible to stable and focus on providing the same, high quality standard, in order to scale. For example, Coca-Cola was founded in 1886, which means it’s 130 years old. What’s astonishing is that for the past 93 of those, the bottle design, font, color and franchise model have remained the same. The first two franchisees came on board in 1899, purchasing their rights to bottle Coca-Cola for a single dollar, the contour bottle design was the result of a 1915 bottle design contest and the curly font was standardized in 1923. Because the product was popular, giving it an iconic, simple and recognizable design is what made it spread like wildfire across the world. Yes, flexibility is good, but once you have a winner, know when it’s…