K.I.S.S. -- KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID

For years I kept the above sign hanging on my office wall. It's a concept I feel strongly about. All too often we get caught up in developing elaborate solutions to simple problems. For instance in the development of Liquid Tide's container, we wanted to incorporate a measuring cap. Up to this time liquid laundry detergents did not have one built into their containers. There were all kinds of advantages both for the consumer and the manufacturer in a built-in measuring cap. However, there was one disadvantage in the current prototypes. The residue in the caps had a tendency to leak down the side of the bottle. P&G with all their resources designed an elaborate multi-component bottle with a drain-back feature. Needless to say this bottle presented serious manufacturing problems but at the same time greater consumer acceptance resulting in great success. Our competitors took a different approach in looking at the construction of the bottle and created a single, molded bottle and a unique but simple cap (also a single unit). Since the introduction of the self-draining cap, we have new designs with some as single and some as two-piece bottles.

In the above example, competition took a step outside the box of conventional thinking to solve the problem. A technique that I use to crawl outside the box, is to ask myself, "How would Walt Disney portray Mickey Mouse solving this problem?" Or, how would Curley from Larry, Curley and Moe fame, solve the problem. For example, consider a Three Stooges' feature of interplanetary space travel where the crew needed to make some calculations to avert a catastrophe but the crew's pens would not work in a gravity-free environment. The crew would be frantically trying to design a new gravity-free pen. Curley on the other hand would give out with his funny laughter, reach behind his ear and use his pencil.

We might believe that something that stupid would never happen. But consider that in the early 1960's, NASA spent over a million dollars developing a gravity-free pen. While the Russians, faced with the same problem, chose to use pencils.

While all too often in the search for a solution, we look to the elaborate, there is another area where I believe we incorporate the elaborate solution to the detriment of the project. That is in the early assessment of a project's potential. We will give a blind test product to a group of respondents and from their responses calculate the market share, cannibalization, source of share, etc. All without the benefit of advertising, brand name and image, package communication and appeal, clear pricing points, customer cooperation assessment, competitive reaction, etc. While elaborate calculations, black box analysis, can be comforting, they can also be an easy way to over-promise and most damaging, result in an under-promise of the potential.

The K.I.S.S. concept worked for me, but then again I never did consider myself to be very smart.