James L Adams—People and Products

A Plague Of Advertising—More Is Not Necessarily Better

 I may be a bit unusual, in that I don’t think my purchasing habits have ever been much influenced by advertising.  In fact, I have always been suspicious of products that have unusual advertising exposure, because I figure that the makers of the product are desperately trying to get people to pay more for the product than it is worth. Neither have I thought that if I use the coffee maker that Roger Federer promotes I will be a better tennis player, or that if I buy a heavy duty pickup that I will be tougher.  Even more interesting, I now find myself avoiding products because I am tired of being constantly exposed to their ads.  Am I alone?

 There seems to be an explosion in advertising going on.  This is partly due to developments in media (the internet, TV,) which make it possible to “reach” huge numbers of people cheaply, partly because of increased competition to find and influence potential customers, and partly because of growth and increased sophistication of marketing and advertising as business activities.

 But what goes up usually comes down.  Is advertising really worth the money it costs? Do companies realize that people “tune out” ads if there are too many of them?  How many consumers, like me, are tired of  being constantly hustled?  And what is it doing to the aesthetics dimensions of living?  As  you may be aware, I quite often refer to the New York Times Sunday edition in my posts.  This is partly because my wife and I for  years have spent much of Sunday Morning in bed reading it while we drink coffee and munch on various unhealthy pastries.  We have been particularly fond of the Sunday magazine section.  We noticed some months ago, that the Sunday edition began including large slick-page “travel” or “style sections”, which consisted mostly of advertisements for expensive tours, or strangely unflattering and expensive clothes, typically modeled by young anorexic women and men. We instantly recycle these tomes, but I still cannot help but mourn the number of trees executed each week so that I will be able to receive these huge volumes that I never even open. 

 This dependency on full, or even double page ads, seems to be a survival strategy for newspapers and magazines. Some (New Yorker, The Economist) have held the line, but many (Architectural Digest, Wired) have succumbed to the temptation of big bucks.  But to my horror, today we received the much heralded redesign of the Sunday New York Times magazine (February 22, 2015), and guess what, from the three full page Cadillac ads in the front to the one on the back cover, it contains 220 pages, including some interesting articles, but also an incredible number of full color and often full page ads for everything from Carnegie Hall to jewelry, to kidney beans, to Miami hotels. As a comparison, I just picked up a copy of the magazine from a few weeks ago, and it contained 48 pages. Do you suppose that much of the difference consists of ads? Well, yeah!

 Hopefully, this Sunday’s edition was an attempt at a spectacular launch, and since I  have been a regular reader of the magazine, I admit the new version is a bit of a shock.  Will I get used to it?  Some, unless I simply quit reading it because I don’t want to spend the time trying to find the content buried in all the ads.  But it also suffers from graphic designers running wild.  How about two full pages for the title of an article (The Great Divide), turned sideways, yet. 

 This is an obvious attempt to modernize the magazine, and there are some good points in what they are doing, but I am saddened if modernizing means that content should be overwhelmed with ads.  Hopefully they can decrease the number and increase the quality of the ads and the products they represent .  And I love exciting graphics, but not at the expense of readability.

 

 

 

 

Products Bigger than a Bread Box*

Back in the late 1950’s. I was involved in the beginning of the Product Design program in the Stanford School of Engineering.  The chief instigators were Professor Bob McKim (degrees in mechanical engineering and industrial design), Matt Kahn, a professor of design in the Stanford Art department,  and Professor John Arnold (recently hired from M.I.T. to “modernize” the design courses in mechanical engineering.  I was then a Lecturer and my credentials were  degrees in engineering, a year’s study in art school which included several courses in industrial design, a love of design, and experience in industry. As I remember, Bob McKim was the person most influential in naming the program “product” design, instead of “industrial” design.  I thought this a bit strange, since I had been exposed to a lot of conversation with Henry Dreyfuss, an industrial designer (one of the founders of the field with large and influential offices in Pasadena Ca. and New York) who used the same words as Bob.  But “Product Design” it became, and many years were spent teaching the university faculty,industry, and the world what these words meant when applied to products requiring an interdisciplinary approach.

 Now, “product design”  and “design” seem to be favorites in engineering and business, and more and more universities are moving in that direction.  Students are very interested in invention and innovation, and courses and projects having to do with such things are cropping up in many parts of these universities. But they often focus on clever, relatively simple products with potential high profit and large potential market. Many start ups are also often based on such things.  Certainly such products as Tesla cars, DaVinci surgical robots, and Lockheed spy satellites are not simple,  but such things as new apps,  software for the internet, and digitally enhanced existing tools and appliances seem to outnumber them.

 The lead article in the February 15^th New York Times business section is entitled The Invention Mob, and concerns Quirky, a start up that seeks inventions and provides the necessary design, manufacturing, and marketing to get them to market. The article is here.  Quirky keeps 90% of the sales, with the rest divided between the inventor (s) and other contributors.  Typically the inventor(s) get 4 %.  The company seems to be doing well so far, having raised $185 million to date, including $30 million from General Electric, as well as investments from venture capital firms.  As to its future, who can say?

 But much of this seems to be focused toward clever products that can be thought up and designed by one or a few people, and do not require a large amount of complexity or sophisticated technical sophistication.  There is a reason for this, since many would-be entrepreneurs are looking for quick success and ownership, and developments in software and hardware (computer-based design and manufacturing, available software modules, more sophisticated marketing information) have drastically simplified the process of coming up with clever new gadgets with consumer appeal.  Clever new products mentioned in the Quirky article include a device for separating egg yolks, a plastic device that inserts into a lemon or lime and becomes a push-button spritzer, a corkscrew that cuts the foil off of a wine bottle and doubles as a pour spout, and a drinking fountain for dogs. 

 Cute, but perhaps not likely to have large impact on the quality of human life.  Quirky is aware of this, and according to the article, is trying to think more at a system level by focusing on the smart home—an anticipated large market.  But the example of a smart-home product in the article is an attachment to the motor of a garage door motor allowing it to be controlled by a smart phone.  As the article explains, the inventor was growing weary of the hassle of using his garage door opener (poor man).  He did not want to take the clicker with him when doing such things as running and taking his kids to the playground, so since he always had his smart phone with him (while running and playing with his kids?), Why not be able to open the door with his smart phone.  This is a system?

 I am  personally very fond of working on products that do involve complexity and many people.  I loved working on spacecraft design, testing, and manufacturing at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  Hundreds of people were necessary, no one “owned” the products, and no one became rich from them. Nor could single individuals or small groups be thought to “design”  them. I worked in design at General Motors a bit, and enjoyed the essential, if sometimes grudging, cooperation between the “engineers” and the “designers”.  I was involved in  testing at The Air Force Flight Test Center when in the Air Force, and again liked mingling and arguing with a wide range of specialists. When  I came to Stanford I was involved in teaching systems engineering and have consulted a lot in connection with product design and development necessarily involving large numbers of people, many disciplines, and continual interactions between functions.  I am a subscriber to the viewpoint that to best enjoy Silicon Valley these days, one should have a job in a large organizations (Stanford University in my case), and watch it, rather than experience it through working 24/7 on a start-up developing  a highly specialized product .   I must admit sometimes I do feel like a member of a minority.

 To me, the products that are needed now in the U.S.  have to do with transportation, energy, resource management, affordable and uplifting housing, medical care,  and other such things that most of us realize need improving, but seem to be neglected with respect to building the “information revolution”. As an example, The U.S. lags terribly in trains. The BART system in the San Francisco is a good system, but needs extending, and upgrading so that one does not need to wear  ear plugs.  A north-south high-speed train is an obvious need in California, but is being held up by political wrangling.  I no longer take U.S. highway 5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles, because it is two lanes each direction, and often both lanes are occupied by trucks heroically attempting to pass each other, even though they are both going as fast as they can.  And flying?  If you are lucky, four hours for  one hour in the air. 

 Were I graduating from college these days, knowing what I now know, I would not try to start a company based on an app or a widget.  Nor would I try to become incredibly wealthy (if I did, I might consider lottery tickets).   Nor in fact, would I move to Silicon Valley.  I would go to work for a reasonably large company in a nice and more affordable area that produces complicated and much needed products that will increase the quality of life for the human race. And the products would be bigger than a bread box.

 *For those of you who have never encountered a bread box, they were once a standard fixture in kitchens in which two or three loaves of bread would be kept to minimize the moisture loss (maybe 20 inches square and eight inches high. Bigger (or smaller) than a bread box used to be a commonly used rough magnitude measure.   I like the expression and continue to use it around students, even though I pay the cost of explaining what a bread box is.

 

 

 

 

  

Quality for Free

In my book, Good Products, Bad Products, I briefly discuss cost (to maker) and price (to customer).  These often relate to overall product quality, but not necessarily in a logical or linear manner.  But it is definitely the case that we are all sensitive to price when acquiring products.  But how about products, even reasonably high quality ones, that can be obtained for free? To many of us, especially those of us who do not have the benefit (?) of great wealth, these have a particular cachet.

 I used to like to read Wired magazine, but it has over time become such a promo-piece for expensive products (full page add for Gucci on the back of the Feb 1,2015 issue) and the digital industry that I no longer subscribe to it.  But like many Conde Naste publications, it still comes to my house, probably either because they think I will subscribe again, or because they can keep me in their circulation count (attractive to advertisers).

 This issue has an interesting editorial by Scott Dadich, the editor in chief, which starts out with a mea- culpa on his addiction to “shiny new gadgets”, followed by raves about Microsoft’s Project HoloLens .  But then he brings up the fact that the rapid turnover in new gadgets results in great numbers of still usable devices ending up in landfills.  He then mentions an article in the issue by Randall Sullivan about a person named Matt Malone, an expert in corporate security and a professional dumpster diver, in that he finds products (often new) that have been discarded and resells them at a lower cost.  In fact, he states that if he was to do this full time, he could make at least $250,000 in the Austin. Texas area alone.  The editorial is here, and the article is here.

 I resonate with Matt Malone, even though I have never met him.  First of all, he is adding to the world’s recycling effort, and secondly, I am an amateur dumpster diver and finder of fine objects in trash piles.  I don’t sell them for profit, but rather I either give them away, or keep them because I love them— they appeal to me and they are FREE.

  The photo at the left shows a “free swap” book box I built for my wife for Christmas.  She loves books, and since the area in which we live is full of academics, who in turn have and read lots of books, it gets a heavy trade.  But it is a miracle to my wife and I, because it is an ever-changing source of free books right next to our house (sorry Amazon). 

When I first arrived at Stanford it was "upgrading" and discarding many "old" items.  As an example, they were re-doing teaching spaces and filling dumpster boxes with captains chairs that had been used in the old rooms.  I snagged a half dozen of them for my house, because they were comfortable and showed the patina of history.  Ironically enough, some years later, Stanford was putting brass plaques on the few that were left. and awarding them to major gift donors. And people were so eager to acquire new and "modern" equipment that they did not value the beauty and historical value of some of the old.

 The two photos below show  an old medical instrument that was used for examining tissue sections, and a few rescued objects that are in my office.  The adding machine is of great value because none of our present students have the faintest idea of what it is.  The two instruments are there because I like them.  And I’ll bet you don’t have as good a whiffle ball container as the one in the photo below them.

 

And I do not restrict myself to dumpsters.  My wife is a compulsive gardener, and  has a constant need for pots. The photo below  shows her pot supply.   We never have to buy them, because Stanford has a free trash pickup for all campus homeowners twice a year, and I have a pickup, with which I can easily keep her in pots, as well as miscellaneous yard furniture, shelves, garden tools, and other goodies.

 I must admit that she is somewhat embarrassed that we will be seen by the neighbors as we go through their trash, but I am proud to be helping the ecosphere and our budget, as we acquire objects of high quality that are no longer appreciated by their former owners. 

 

Horn of Too Much Plenty?

Today I went shopping.  One of my land line phones had had a sick battery for some time and finally gave up, so I decided to go to a large local electronic supply outlet and get one rather than buy one over the web and wait for it to be shipped.   I had gone there often, and was pretty  sure they would stock the battery, and while I was there I realized I could pick up  a couple or USB hubs, since both my wife and I were out of slots, and another external drive.

 BUT, the resulting trip took much, much longer than I had planned , because (1) as many stores tend to do, they had re-arranged their stock, and (2) I was simply overwhelmed by choices, and had the common store experience of not being able to find anyone who knew much, if anything, about the options I had.

 As to batteries, there were yards of them displayed in a section labeled something like “Battery World”, and many, many customers standing in front of it agreeing that there should not be so many of them.  While old-line battery equipment makers seem to do fine with the traditional letter sizes (AAA, D, etc) and numbers (6 volt, 9 volt), makers of digital equipment have gone wild in configurations, sizes, voltages, and connectors.  Standardization time? 

 After looking through the whole mess, and squinting at the fine print, I could not find a match, so I ran down an actual employee, and taking my dead one he disappeared, (telling me the usual “give me a second”).  After 5 minutes he came back with a big smile, and told me that since it was a telephone battery, it was undoubtedly in the telephone section.

 So I set forth for the telephone section, and initially discovered that the batteries were not in the aisle entitled “Batteries”. I found them after looking through the section, but couldn’t find any numbers  that matched the old battery.  The first employee I hunted down could not solve my problem.  The second one did. 

 Then off to find the hubs and the drive.  After I found the locations in the store (they had moved), I encountered an overwhelming number of each, at a variety of prices, each boasting of their superiority on the box.  I once again found the rare employees, and asked them  questions such as “what is the difference between them”?  and “why shouldn’t I just buy the cheapest one"?  Once again, no satisfactory response, and in defense of the employees, probably because there was no way that the relatively few of them could understand the details of the overwhelming number of products in the store.

 Incidentally, on the same trip, I found the same result in the drugstore in which I was looking for more products.  It was a big store, but not a “big box” store.  The staff seemed to consist of a woman at the cash register and a pharmacist in the back, with long lines at each location. I was looking for eye-drops, and the choice was over whelming,  Looking at the ingredients, there seemed to be much more similarity between them than the packages suggested, but once again, no help available. Remember “floor walkers”?  No more.

 I enjoy owning high quality products, and some are better than others, but it is  becoming increasingly difficult to discriminate between products in these days of  overwhelming marketing, packaging that does not let you get your hands on things,  and decreasing numbers of informed store employees and trustable web sites that could help. I sometimes think that many times there is less easily available usable information in the "information age", than there was before.