Colors, materials and finishes-aka CMF-have returned to center stage as a conveyor of value, product differentiator and sales clincher.
Focused efforts to use CMF to give a handset legs in the market began with face plates nearly a decade ago. And though CMF’s role at times took a backseat as the thin-is-in craze gripped the industry, it has captured the spotlight again. CMF today is an integral part of a handset’s design, considered from the get-go for aesthetic, functional and marketing reasons.
The essential payoff, in the vendor’s perspective, understandably begins with exceeding consumer expectations.
“We’re looking to produce a sense of ‘wow,'” said Jeanna Kimbre, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications L.P.’s color and material design manager. “We have come quite a long way in the industry from black-and-silver clamshell phones. Today the mobile phone is not just a communications tool, it communicates who you are. It has become an accessory.”
The goal is to “delight the customer,” said Louis Lundell, a leader on CMF in Motorola Inc.’s Consumer Experience Design group.
Lundell said that investing in producing delight also has a practical business corollary: proper use of CMF can affect a handset’s market success and longevity. Think pink Razr.
“The CMF story today is one of dramatically extending a product’s life cycle,” echoed John Jackson, an analyst with M:Metrics.
Specialty plastics and metals are now being used to convey the “cool factor” and raise consumers’ perception of value, Jackson said.
Coolness and extended profitability in one fell swoop-what’s not to love about CMF?
Shows opportunity to wow
With four major shows in the first quarter-this week’s CES and Macworld, February’s 3GSM World Congress and March’s CTIA Wireless 2007-handset vendors have a number of venues early this year in which to trot out their latest dazzlers.
Though pink and a jillion other colors (and, yes, improved feature sets) granted the Razr yet another life in the market, analysts point out that market leader Nokia Corp. first explored this factor and its influence on perceived value.
“This is not about the Razr,” said Avi Greengart, analyst at Current Analysis. “Nokia is the trail blazer here. They pioneered the notion of the mobile phone being more than grey. At the time, that was revolutionary. Nokia has done metal, leather, fabric, even designer tags. This is an area where the mobile-phone industry is leading other consumer electronics categories into the realm of fashion. The age of the one-inch thick, silver clamshell is over.”
According to Nokia’s Tiina Karhu, senior design manager with a focus on colors and materials, CMF is an integral element of design that attracts and compels.
Emotional experience
“Early on we played with color before the ‘high-tech era’ that relied on the silver/metal look,” Karhu said. “Now we’re back with more colorful personalization. It makes the device more ’emotionally valuable.'”
Nokia attempts to wed appropriate CMF to the phone’s functionality and the two elements are “totally linked,” according to Karhu. Music and feature-packed phones might get one treatment, fashion phones another. Nokia seeks to deliver a multisensorial, total experience. Appearances created by CMF grab consumers’ attention, while the tactile experience of picking up a device with, say, a stainless-steel casing, fabric, soft-touch plastic or paint can clinch a sale. This holds true in mature markets and emerging markets alike, where it’s important to deliver quality and style, Karhu said. “People choose their phones based on how it looks and feels,” said Karhu. “It’s a natural part of design.”
Nokia wields a global team dedicated to developing and applying colors and materials design with a “strategic, not tactical” approach. CMF concepts are developed over several years, so they are ready to apply to near-term product development efforts. Karhu pointed to Nokia’s 7380, the so-called “lipstick” phone, that uses fabric and plastics reminiscent of ceramics and its 8800 series, which uses stainless steel to convey “premium luxury.”
Motorola takes a somewhat analogous approach, according to Lundell. The Razr lesson suggested that a dedication to design required that all elements of a handset be considered up front.
Integrated approach
“In the past we thought of materials and finishes as secondary to form and function,” Lundell said. “Today we take a more integrated approach to CMF within the context of product design. Otherwise you can’t balance the complexity of competing constraints. Mobile phones are complex devices and you need to know the range of things you can and can’t do to integrate CMF into the design to preserve electronic and mechanical functionality. Some metals, for instance, are unfriendly to radio frequencies. So we have to be thinking about where we locate functional attributes inside the handset, such as the antenna.”
Casings have become a careful combination of materials chosen to accentuate or facilitate various aspects of the handset. Lundell cited aluminum, magnesium, plastic, glass and other metals as being in common use today. The front of Motorola’s Krzr, for instance, uses a large glass lens, which provides a high-gloss reflective front face. The back is composed of soft-feel material for grip-ability. Lundell also mentioned the touch-sensitive music controls on the outside cover of the Krzr, which require the right materials to achieve and preserve functionality.
That CMF is a hotbed of innovation and therefore a competitive matter was underscored when Lundell balked at further elucidating “competing constraints” beyond the example of antennas and casing material and declined to comment on CMF’s proportion of the bill of materials. Deflecting a reporter’s questions, however, calls on diplomatic skills that Lundell uses frequently: one of his roles is to reconcile appearance with function, bridging the gap between imagination-driven designers and hardnosed engineers. (Talk about “competing constraints.”)
Although nearly every major vendor is working the CMF angle-LG Electronics Co. Ltd.’s next model in the Chocolate platform is the “Shine,” which relies on high surface gloss for its moniker-players with heft and in-house CMF teams may be able to exploit this angle competitively, according to Greengart.
Are there any downsides to chasing dazzle? “CMF is only as good as the differentiated industrial design to which it’s applied,” Jackson said.
