Welcome to the Vision by Proivity interview. I'm Joe Cornick, editor-in-chief of Vision by Proivity, a global content resource examining big themes that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide. Today, we're exploring the future of customer experience. And we're thrilled to be joined by Mauro Porcini, president and chief design officer at Samsung, where he oversees a global team of 1,500 designers. Mauro hosts the In Your Shoes with Mauro Porcini podcast and has been a presenter and judge on the TV show New York by Design and America by Design airing on CBS and Amazon Prime. His most recent book is The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People, published in 2022. Prior to joining Samsung, Mauro was chief design officer at PepsiCo and 3M. Today, Mauro will be speaking with my Proivity colleague, managing director, Alex Weisshopple. Alex, I'll turn it over to you to begin.
Thanks, Joe. And hi, Mauro. Thank you so much for being here today. It's really a pleasure.
Absolutely. So, one of the things that digital in particular, I think, has done over kind of the last, you know, decade or two has really absolutely proliferated the number of touch points and services people interact with regularly. So, I'm going to start with a softball question. As people interact with brands across an increasing number of touch points, how are you seeing the role of brand identity, user experience, and ultimately product innovation evolving? Or maybe more specifically, what is the role that you're seeing that design plays in that emerging future?
Well, I mean, very interesting question in this specific moment in time. It's more important than ever. The role of design today is more important than ever for a variety of different reasons. First of all, the way we build brands today is so different than just 10, 20 years ago. You mentioned it earlier. We're moving from a world where brands were communicating top down, one direction, with specific messages to people that were passively receiving that information, to a world where instead there is a dialogue. And so these brands are moving from being actors of the conversation most of the times to becoming just a topic of a conversation happening amongst people. Because of this, they're also moving from the ability to buy the right to talk to people to the need of earning the right to be talked about. So from buying — the more money you have, the more presence you can buy in the media — to earning. You don't even need, you know, huge amounts of money, big budgets to be relevant in the conversation amongst people. You need meaningful content. So this is changing the way you interact with people and therefore, first of all, the way you build experiences, and design has a very, very important role in this. It needs to change, it's becoming more and more relevant. For instance, you go to a store and in the past you were just going there for a financial transaction to acquire, to buy a product, a brand, a service. Today you can build those brands in those stores. People, if they're excited about what happened, the experience they're living, they can take out their cell phones, take a picture, take a video, share it with the rest of the world, become your ambassadors. It's user-generated content. In a world where communication moves at the speed of light in social media, you need to be very impactful in delivering the message. And we study in semiotics that the message itself is not enough to define the meaning of your communication or what you're trying to say with your products and your brands. There is another element that is called the code in semiotics. That is the visual element that is super important. So you're scrolling your images and the different brands and products and services in your digital platforms. If you have the right aesthetic, if you have the right identity, the right visual language, you're going to grab the attention of these people, you're going to be impactful, you're going to be meaningful. If you don't, even if you have the right message, the right proposition, the right service, you're going to be neglected by people. And then last but not least, you need to keep innovating. You know, the world is moving at the speed of light. So you need to keep creating something meaningful for these people. And so the only, the strongest competitive advantage you can build for your company — I say the only because it should be the primary competitive advantage — is human centricity. Care, love for people. I call these innovators the real innovators, people in love with people. That's the driver of everything else. Everything else follows that kind of drive and it's not something you create through a project. It's something you need to drive through the entire culture of the organization. Design is a community that embodies that idea of caring for people, love for people. This is what they teach you at school, to care for people. In business school, they teach you to grow a business, a brand, and you can be an amazing business leader if you are able to grow the business and the brand. In design school they teach you to care and then they tell you, by the way, you also need to make money for your company, you know, so you need to understand other variables, the three lenses of design thinking: the business world, the technology and manufacturing world, on top of the first world that is the world of people. Today we need a kind of culture in these companies. It's design culture, but it's a culture of human centricity that needs to be spread to every single function, vertically from the CEO to the entry-level employee, and transversally across every capability of the company.
And you know, it's funny, I recently returned to your book, The Human Side of Innovation, and that notion of people in love with people — or I'd say my read of the theme was almost that impactful innovation really comes from people who care deeply, who design with human needs at the forefront. How do you get or help an organization's culture and values align better with, you know, a brand's external customer promise? And as part of that, maybe specifically, what kind of challenges have you seen where there's a disconnect between the two, where that obsession just isn't fully there?
Yeah, look, I think it depends on the industry. In some industries, this is pretty obvious. This alignment is there to see. As an example, in the fashion industry, you see the employees of fashion, luxury brands embodying exactly what the consumers, the customers are looking for. You see that also in sport, if you work in Nike, in Adidas, even in products that are not related, belonging to the apparel world, like in PepsiCo the Gatorade brand that is a brand really focused on the world of sport and the kind of customer in those kind of worlds. The people working in those companies reflect the values, the behaviors, even the look and feel of those customers and consumers. In many other industries they don't, and they don't need to, but they need something very important, and this is true for both industries: they need to care. They need to care for real. Once again, we call it human centricity. People, you know, with people. What does it mean? Look at the customers in front of you as you would look at your daughter or son, your children, your parents, your friends, people you care about. If you do that, the first thing you try to do is to put yourself in their shoes. We call it empathy, right? I mean, from the Greek, empath, you put yourself inside the pathos, the soul of these people. So it starts with this care and that ability to really understand deeply what drives these individuals. So you need to build that kind of culture inside the organization. Now what are the biggest challenges? Often companies talk about human centricity. Sometimes they use the word consumer centricity as an example and they confuse these two approaches with what a consumer insights function does. So they start to collect a lot of data. Now we live in the world of data. We have really the ability to dissect, you know, the customer base with a capillarity, with a precision, with a focus that we never had before. That's great. That's great. But a lot of people think that consumer centricity, human centricity, is just knowledge, insights, data about, you know, the people we serve. And that's the problem. It's not. It's the beginning. You need that, but then you need to care. You may have a lot of information about your customers but you're like, you know what, I don't care. Our brand is so strong. The profit is very profitable. We are the leader in the market. And this is the biggest mistake you do. Often when you are successful, you are paralyzed by that success and you stop caring, observing and caring. And that observation and care push you to innovate even when you are successful, especially when you are successful because you have eventually more resources to do it and you have less pressure. So you need to care. Now even that is not enough. You may understand what you need to do. You may care about this but then as a leader in the organization you may eventually not have the courage to act on it because innovating, changing, especially when things are working well, is risky. So you need also that, you know, this is what human centricity is about. And then finally, well, let's say you have it all, you have the courage, you act, and then you screw up. You need two things. First, try not to screw up, so you need knowledge, skills, you need leaders with specific kind of skills that make the difference. And then the third thing is if you do screw up — and you will screw up sooner or later, I mean this is statistically certain, we will make mistakes in the future. I learned that in design school in the study of ergonomics where when you design the cockpit of a plane, of a train, you know, they take into account that there will be a human mistake for sure. There is no doubt it's going to happen sooner or later, so you have a series of backup systems to manage all of this. So companies should understand that if you invest in change, transformation, innovation, you're going to screw it up in multiple instances and therefore you need a culture that protects the ability to make mistakes, that doesn't crucify the people making these mistakes, they learn out of those mistakes. So all of these create the right culture that is really human-centric and is really in sync with the values of the customers and the consumers that we serve every day.
