👚 Shrink it or Pink it

Starting to empathize with designing products and why it is the need of the hour to grow a business.

👚 What is the 'shrink it or pink it' strategy?

There is a popular mantra among markets to advertise a product to women by using the 'Shrink it or Pink it' strategy. It is a strategy used in marketing and producing goods for women in which an existing product (especially one for men) is simply made smaller and pink. So if marketers wanted to sell something to women, they either shrink the product or change the colour of the product to pink. For instance, if they wanted to sell a shirt to women, they would either change the colour of the shirt to pink or shrink the size of the shirt and sell it to women.

Sounds very feminist right? Don't women have their own tastes and preferences? That’s when the CEO of PepsiCo Mrs Indra Nooyi, an Indian-American business executive helped PepsiCo with her great design thinking process. She was very keen on building products based on empathy and not on stereotypes and needless to say design thinking is now an essential element in product design.

To explain this even better, let me pitch how PepsiCo started selling The Lady Doritos which was exclusively designed for women.

Crazy right? Which company would storm in extra efforts to design a product to separate the audience based on sex and that too on an FMCG product like Doritos?

🍟 The Lady Doritos

So, the idea of Lady Doritos emerged in the first step of Design thinking i.e., Empathize. So when they started to empathize with how women love to snack, they got astonished when they actually started to conduct these exercises and they were able to know the intricacies of the women's behaviour with snacks that were completely overlooked. They observed that when men finished the snacks they would pour all the leftovers into their mouths but women were very less likely to do that. Why? Because they were often worried about how much the product would stain if it fell on their dress. They wouldn’t even rub it on their chair or dress which a lot of guys were more likely to do. (I do it often 😁)

Similarly, they noted that women in public places were more conscious of eating than men. So they introduced stacked-up Chips that come in a tray (like Pringles). They also made the chips lesser crunchier because a lot of women did not want people to hear them crunching away.

🧠 Design Thinking

This is just one scenario where a great company like Pepsi co avoided the shrink it or pink it concept and inculcated the design thinking process to give birth to a more empathized product. Design thinking is now being adopted everywhere and one more such example is how CavinKare introduced the iconic small 50 paise Chik shampoo packets in 1999 (now it is 1 Rupee) which changed the shampoo packaging industry because they felt small sachets were more likely to be bought by travellers and by people who wanted to take showers quickly. That's how design thinking can help escalate product quality and perception.

If you wanted to know more about how design thinking can effectively change a product’s design, you can check out the UX design course offered by Google employees at Coursera. Also, you can read the book ‘Change by design’ by Tim Brown.