MAYA

I've been trying to think what makes us try new consumer products. Peter Thiel would tell us that if a new product is 10x better than the existing one, demand would automatically shift towards it. But that doesn't apply to the viral products from Off White, Kylie Jenner or Yeezy.

The answer to this business strategy question comes from the field of industrial design from Raymond Loewy: M.A.Y.A = Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. Derek Thompson explains,

According to Loewy, consumers are torn between curiousotiy of new things and anything too new.  As a result, they gravitate to products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible. He said to sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising.

Humans seek familiarity, because it makes them feel safe. For that reason, the power of familiarity seems to be strongest when a person isn’t expecting it. On the other hand, people are charged by the thrill of a challenge, powered by a pioneer lust. This battle between familiarity and discovery affects us “on every level”. A surprise seems to work best when it contains some element of familiarity.

Virgil Abolh of Off White described his personal design language in a lecture titled “Insert Complicated Title Here” . #3 on his list was his "3% approach". He will only edit an existing design by 3% because he wants his customers to immediately identify the product and notice the changes.

MAYA can be used at a product portfolio level as well. Bernard Arnault of LVMH has used this method successfully time and again. In a 2001 interview to the Harvard Business Review, he said that only 15% of his business comes from new products; the rest comes from traditional, proven products.

A great industrial designer, it turns out, needs to be an anthropologist first and an artist second: Loewy studied how people lived and how machines worked, and then he offered new, beautiful designs that piggybacked on engineers’ tastes and consumers’ habits.

Evolution of the iPod using MAYA iterations

Notes:

1. https://hbr.org/2001/10/the-perfect-paradox-of-star-brands-an-interview-with-bernard-arnault-of-lvmh
2. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/what-makes-things-cool/508772/
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biFlrzTJets