Raymond Loewy (1893-1986), considered a father of Industrial Design, developed a very interesting theory on what drives consumer preferences and indeed influences consumer behavior. His concept is known by the acronym MAYA and stands for “Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable.” Loewy observed in his design work that the public has a curiosity for the new, characterized by neophilia, but at the same time a desire for the familiar and fear of the novel, characterized by neophobia. A successful design to Loewy, met in a sweet spot directly in between these two opposing forces and was both novel and familiar. If your design is too novel, according to Lowey, you risked confusing or alienating the consumer. If you are too familiar, you risk boring or not inspiring the consumer. Lowey felt if you want to sell novelty, you needed to surprise your audience, and if you wanted to sell surprise, you need to provide familiarity.
This MAYA concept of Lowey is anticipated by the design principle of “skeuomorph.” British physician and archeologist Henry Colley March (1838-1916) coined this word and neologism “skeuomorph” in 1889. March observed many prehistoric artifacts and implements such as architecture, pottery, etc. incorporated familiar design elements form earlier materials. For example, a clay pot may have a handle resembling something made of wood, or a brick architecture may be shaped in organic manner to resemble earlier wood precedents. March combined the Greek words “skeuos” meaning “vessel or implement” and “morphe” meaning “form or shape,” to coin the word “skeuomorph.” Contemporary examples of “skeuomorph” include Jeep Woodie Automobiles, digital two-dimensional iconography of three-dimensional floppy disks, trash cans and organizational files, and even postmodern steel and glass architecture shaped like Chippendale wooden carved furniture.
An example of a remarkably successful design that demonstrates the MAYA philosophy is the Apple I-Phone introduced in 2007. The I-Phone started with a phone emphasis and with a button, switches, hand-held scale and photo capabilities. Over time the I-Phone evolved to be denuded of these tactile features and made in a larger scale as a phone and type of hand-held computer with increasingly sophisticated photography. One of the interesting features that drove the phenomenal success of the I-Phone (2007) and I-Pad (2010) was the touch screen technology. Interestingly, this technology came about as a result of the highly innovative Apple Newton (1993), a commercial flop. The Newton cost $100 million to develop and was projected to sell 1 million units in its first year in 1993 but in 5 years before being pulled from the market sold less than 300,000 units or a rate of 60,000 units a year. Newton was designed as a Personal Digital Assistant or PDA with a stylus featuring a highly innovative language recognition. However, the stylus proved clumsy, and the language recognition prone to inaccuracies. To put this in perspective, Apple shipped approximately 230 million I-Phones in 2023 alone.
Raymond Lowey was born in France and moved to America at age 25 after serving in the First World War as a captain and earning the Croix de Guerre medal for valor. As a 13-year-old in France, Lowey invented his first product, a rubber band powered model airplane, which won the James Gordon Bennet Cup Award in 1908. Lowey turned this product, named the Ayrel, into a business the following year. This experience foreshadowed a successful career combining design, sales, marketing, and entrepreneurship. In America, Lowey immediately established himself as a freelance fashion illustrator and window designer in New York. Soon he obtained contracts as a sketch artist and conceptual designer for consumer products and identified himself as an industrial designer, a field he with other pioneers established. Lowey’s business card read, “Between two products equal in price, function and quality, the better looking will outsell the others,” and this underscored his philosophy that good design meant stimulating more sales. As Lowey expressed it, “The goal of design is to sell. The loveliest curve I know is the sales curve.”
Lowey established one of the most successful industrial design firms, Raymond Loewy Associates, with offices around the world. With a gift for sales promotion, Loewy was featured on the cover of “Time” magazine on October 31, 1949, as the first industrial designer. Many claim Lowey in some respects designed the 20th century and his firm’s iconic designs are prominent to this day. Examples include the U.S. Postal Service Eagle logo in 1970 and Shell Oil logo in 1971. Loewy donated his services to design the Air Force One livery in 1962 for the Kennedy administration. For the presidential seal, Loewy chose the Caslon typeface inspired by the first printed Bill of Rights, with an elegant color palette of blue slate, cyan and silver. Lowey loved transportation and as a NASA “Habitability Consultant” from 1967 to 1973, designed the space capsule, sky lab and even space suits. Sky lab included a porthole window at Loewy’s insistence, over the objection of some engineers, to humanize the environs and so astronauts could enjoy views of earth. He was responsible for the streamlined, bullet shaped S-1 Philadelphia Railroad steam locomotive in 1937, the classic sleek silhouette of the Studebaker Starlight in 1953, and the fiber-glass frame compound curve Studebaker Avanti sports coupe with disc-brakes in 1962.
Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. (1875-1966), a pioneering industrialist, embraced design and newness as a key business strategy as the visionary leader of General Motors (GM). Sloan is credited with the idea of introducing new model changes to automobiles on an annual basis. This revolutionary idea stimulated trade ins, created a used car market, built anticipation of new car models, and led to a new perception of auto purchasing for lifestyle.
Sloan was an electrical engineer who attended Brooklyn Polytechnical (today’s New York University) and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Sloan’s father, who owned a tea and coffee importing business, became an investor and owner in Hyatt Roller Bearing Company and installed his son as a draftsman, manager and ultimately co-owner. The Sloan’s, who purchased the company for $5,000 (today’s $200,000) sold Hyatt after 20 years to William C. Durant at GM in 1916 for $13.5 million (today’s $396 million). Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. joined GM as a stockholder and board member and became president and CEO when Durant was forced out in 1923, and ultimately chairman of the board from 1937 to 1956.
Sloan’s strategy of introducing new annual car models, with new styling, colors and features systematically on a compressed time cycle stood in stark contrast to Henry Ford and Ford Motor Company’s concept of doing business. Ford felt it was important to sell quality that lasted and mass production and pricing reduction far more important factors than style considerations. Sloan adopted this design strategy of annual model changes, brand differentiation and segmentation because GM could not compete head on with Ford on pricing. GM approached their car business with an “architecture of brands” priced from entry level to luxury level reflecting a “ladder of success” as follows: Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac. The idea was to keep buyers loyal to the GM “family of brands” and grow with the company through their brands as customer’s tastes and circumstances evolved with age and affluence. Sloan believed there was “a car for every purse and purpose.”
Sloan created an “Art and Colour Section” at GM in 1927 and installed Harley Jarvis Earl (1893- 1969) as head of design. Earl became a vice president in 1937 and the only design person with an executive position. The section was renamed “Styling Section” the same year reflecting its importance. Harley Jarvis learned his craft working for his father, Jacob William (J.W.) Earl, in his Los Angeles custom coach and horse buggy shop catering to Hollywood celebrities since 1889. J.W. sold his business, “Earl Automotive Works” in 1910 to Don Lee, the largest Cadillac dealer in Los Angeles, and Harley stayed on as the chief designer. Lawrence P. Fisher, president of Cadillac, one of the founders of Fisher Body Works, was impressed with Harley and recommended him to Sloan who hired him.
Jarvis brought unusual talents to GM as a craftsman and stylist skilled in conceptual renderings, fast sketch work and building organic clay models. These artisanal and hand-crafted approaches to automative design contrasted with traditional methods with engineering drawings and slow- moving models made of wood, plaster and steel. This artisan approach to car design injected artistic flair, moved fast, and provided a rapid response to market trends. Previously automobile models ran for years, and now designs could be changed briskly. This design methodology led to the exciting “concept car,” promoting novelty.
Automotive styling, with its newness emphasis, was elevated on par with engineering stimulating sales. Design changes could be made quickly and relatively inexpensively and provide a perception of progress. Most changes were to color and trim and consisted of headlights, finishes, colors, grilles, etc. The actual mechanics of the car with the motor and chassis as a part of the Sloan plan for profitability remained the same standardized parts and shared to the extent possible among divisions. The cosmetic look and appearance of the cars, aesthetics, body shapes and lines, propelled sales. Under Earl’s leadership, many innovative design concepts were introduced including the wraparound windshield, tailfins, and two-tone factory paint, and the Corvette series in 1953 when GM entered road racing.
The newness emphasis by Sloan’s leadership at GM, which became the largest automotive company in the United States and the world, had many ramifications for consumer behavior. By mass producing the ultimate consumer good, automobiles with “planned obsolesce,” buyers were encouraged to embrace new models and jettison old models trading up. The popularization of the term “Planned Obsolescence” is associated with the industrial designer Clifford Brook Stevens (1911-1995), from a speech he delivered in 1954 at an advertising conference. Stevens was an industrial designer responsible for many iconic designs including the Jeep Wagoner introduced in 1962.
The “Cult of Newness” is a characteristic feature of our 21st century. People prefer new cars, new homes, new technology and new fashions. All of this has resulted in increased production, sales, and material wealth. It also has led profligate waste and ecological harm in many instances. People naturally want the latest and greatest widget in our consumer culture and the advertising industry and social media, and television and streaming help promote these needs and aspirations, both real or imagined. An interesting part of our Cult of Newness is the “throw away” feature of so many of our acquisitions. Once upon a time, things “were made to last” but in our Age of Newness and our present state of acceleration with fast change, the old is more often than not swapped out for the new at a brisk pace.
The human inclination “to keep up with the Joneses” or our neighbors in terms of possessions, leads to peer pressure, the law of conformity and the acquisition of material objects with either savings or in many instances debt. The familiar expression, “To keep up with the Joneses,” traces to an American comic, “Keeping Up with the Joneses,” created by the illustrator Arthur R. “Pop” Momad (1887-1987). In the comic, the McGinis family of social climbers vainly struggle to “keep up” with their neighbors, the Joneses, who they never even encounter.
It is interesting that our obsession with newness is even reflected in our most important cultural words and symbols. Indeed, the word “gospel” derives from the Greek word “euangelion” which means “good news.” And the word “news” derives from the Latin word “nova” meaning “new things.” We tend to think of our hyper media driven contemporary society with satellite communication as driving our news obsession. However, this concept of news and the insatiable appetite by humans for newness has a very long and intimate history. It is not without good reason that one of mankind’s greatest discoveries was the “New World,” an expression first described by the Florentine navigator and explorer Amerigo Vespucci in 1501 but expressed in a letter of 1503 to his patron and friend Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de’Medici as “Mundos Novus.”
With the idea that newness and familiarity are the opposite sides of the same coin, it is interesting to close this discussion with a quote from the “Old Testament” and Ecclesiastes 1:9: “What has been what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.”
Copyright 2026. All Rights Reserved. Thomas S. Shure, Shure & Company.