Remove what people hate
What you hate the most
All my life I’ve been a servant of a succession of cats. Recent deaths in the family mean we’ve welcomed two kittens to our household, and thus the cycle begins again. My wife, Kate, who’s an interior designer, will unhappily list the downsides of cat ownership: clawed sofas, bedheads, and curtains along with breakages of glassware and vases.
For my first 25 years of indoor cat ownership, I put up with old-school cat toilets. You know the ones: open, shallow, and filled with a disgusting mess of gravel-like pellets mixed with ugh. Therefore, I was a cynical convert to the Modkat. It’s a top entry litter box with multi-use waterproof liners. The company has gone back to first principles and asked, “What do people hate the most?”
It doesn’t leak, it doesn’t smell, it doesn’t scatter litter or poo pellets around the house. You can clean it in under a minute. It even looks like a decorative object: some of our visitors ask, “What is that?”. Needless to say, I’m a fan.
Question: What do your customers hate the most that you can remove for them?
Architecture of health care
Speaking of design, have you ever wondered why hospitals, most airports, and even many schools, look like factories? Hospitals especially have acoustics, surfaces, and sightlines and vistas that banish nature, and are bland at best, soul-destroying at worst.
But there are dramatically better ways to design health care spaces. A client introduced me to the term ‘salutogenic’ this week. The word means ‘origin of health’ and the approach was used in the Royal Childrens’ Hospital in Melbourne where they installed meerkats (really!) and tropical fish, along with colourful wayfinding devices and decorations. On a smaller scale, my client is planning to introduce outdoor counselling spaces where people can talk privately in an environment lush with plants and birdlife.
Salutogenesis was devised by an Israeli medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky who asked a simple question: “What’s the origin of health?” after he observed that women who survived the Holocaust had a ‘sense of coherence’. His advocates today design healthcare facilities that are, above all, designed for coherence, or stress-reduction by ensuring three things:
manageability—the capacity to maintain homeostasis and physical function;
comprehensibility—an ability to negotiate one’s surroundings; and
meaningfulness— creating conditions that make us want to resist illness in the first place.
Question: Are the physical environments in which you deliver services salutogenic?
Selling while you’re using
Have you noticed this too? When you spend that 20 seconds using a Dyson hand dryer, what do you see?
Conspiracy theorists surmise those little images are spelling something out, but it’s way simpler. Dyson is simply taking advantage of your captured attention (without the ability to do anything else) to advertise the rest of their product range.
This is a little like restaurant menus (you order one dish, but the rest is there for you to see) and also like most retail outlets (I’m only there to buy one pair of shoes, honestly), but in Dyson’s case they don’t need you to buy the product, just use it.
(Bonus points if you knew that in the 1980s James Dyson tried to license his cyclonic vacuum technology to Hoover, who rejected it, as their vacuum bag market was worth $500m a year. Dyson now outsells Hoover 4:1 in the UK).
Question: What could you do to bring your range of services into the attention span of your customers, at the same time that they’re using your product?
Please click the heart to let me you’ve enjoyed reading this week. And, drop me a line in the comments to let me know your answer to my questions.
Have a great weekend, and I’ll be with you again next Friday.
Andrew