The brand as promise.

Brand driven innovation entails the creation of a promise that is meaningful for your end-user and then setting out to fulfill that promise through the delivery of tangible products and experiences. This process is so challenging and has such a rich scope of opportunities and concequences, that I keep learning and discovering every single day (and many a night!). In the following posts I will share with you some of the insights we’ve gained during research, academic work and client projects.

Let’s start with the promise:
If you believe your brand can and should be a main innovation driver for innovation and design (next to a number of more ‘traditional’ innovation drivers, like technology, market developments, competitor behaviour etc), your brand should be a promise to your user. It’s not about your values, your identity, your personality, those are all great ingredients. But the brand, as a whole, should be about what you can do for your customer. What is your brand promise?
1. Your promise should be realistic. Don’t promise anything you can’t fulfill.
2. Your promise should be exciting. Don’t promise you value innovation, strive for quality and that you put the consumer first. Everyone does.
3. Your promise should be authentic. Look for that which fits you most. Dare to look deep within your organisation for what sets you apart from the pack. Usually you will find a vision worthy of forming the core for your promise. Differentiation follows from authenticity by the way. Don’t strive to be different as a goal in itself.
4. Your promise should be meaningful. It should be based on deep user insights. And I don’t mean marketing statistics and target group maps. I mean that your brand promise should be based on insights in the real lives of real people.
5. Your promise should be understandable. You are an organisation making money with products or services, not with philosophy courses. Keep it simple.
6. Your promise should be inspiring. It should be a platform triggering action, improvisation, innovation, design and a quest for fulfillment. (see future post ‘the product/brand plaza’)

Now look at these 6 ‘requirements’. They are described from the consumer’s point of view right? Right. But you know what fascinates me? That your designers, innovators, researchers, and product managers are also ‘users’ of the brand, in much the same way as your end user is. We’ve found out that if you want these people to work with your brand, to fulfill your brand’s promise, they also require brands to be realistic, exciting, authentic, meaningful, understandable and inspiring.
So what we’ve arrived at is a vision and a set of tools (see future post ‘vision vs tools’) aimed at gaining insights in end users of your brand, both inside and outside the company, and setting out to reframe your brand to make it into a platform for innovation and design. And that’s where design research techniques come in. (See future post, ‘BDI and design research techniques’). More to follow, happy easter!