The biggest challenge of Brand Driven Innovation is that I want the brand to be used by people who are by nature prone to brand cynicism. The task I’ve set myself is to line up brands in such a manner that designers, developers, researchers and technicians say: “yes, this inspires and challenges me. This provides guidance and support in what I’m doing. This makes my efforts authentic and relevant. Wow, I will start working on fulfilling this promise today, and I won’t rest until I’ve succeeded.�
So –with Andre Weenink- I’ve set out to develop a way of working to change the brand from an abstract set of slogans used by marketing communications and a high brow vision floating like cigar smoke in the top floor board room to an inspirational platform for normal people to actually do stuff that means something for the user of the product/service.
For the brand this means a number of things, in terms of content, form, process and focus:
1 In terms of content it should culminate in a promise as described in the previous post. We embed this promise in a vision on the brand’s context and on the interaction it has with its users.
2 in terms of form, it should be what we call ‘decoded’. Most brands are defined in their final form in some model or other (brand house, brand key, etc), that is very ‘encoded’ (highly abstract), and very linguistic. Only those who were there when the thing was crafted know what it means. What we do to achieve a more usable form is to leave the brand decoded, layered and rich in data. So what we finally present as ‘the brand’ is a promise packaged in rich and inspiring research data such as personas, videos, context maps, quotes, collages, artefacts etc. This content is generated by users and by internal stakeholders, and filtered, analysed and interpreted by us.
3 in terms of process we involve a whole bunch of people –again both internally and externally- in discovering all the layers of rich data mentioned above. We explicitly involve designers, developers, researchers and engineers in crafting the brand. And we confront them with lead users. We hold sessions that start on a very concrete product level but go via product interaction and use to behaviour and context. This process of crafting a brand with the people who will be working with it in the future is great to be part of: it turns brand cynics into believers, who –through its co-creation- are highly committed to fulfill its promise.
4 in terms of focus we’ve discovered that those involved in design and innovation aren’t concerned with concepts like identity or personality. So we focus on what this identity does instead. We believe identity leads to vision (who you are defines how you see the world around you). This vision in turn leads to behaviour (how you see the world around you defines how you act towards it). It is this behaviour that, on a conceptual level, is the domain of design and innovation: how should a company behave (what should it do for its end users) to fulfil its brand’s promise. By connecting this behaviour to vision and identity, we establish a direct link between the brand and the organisation’s design&innovation efforts.
This way of crafting and researching brands has hugely sparked my interest in Design Research as a domain. What I mean is not so much research into design but research through design. ‘There exists a designerly way of thinking and communicating that is both different from scientific and scholarly ways of thinking and communicating, and as powerful as scientific and scholarly methods of enquiry when applied to its own kinds of problems’ is a classic quote (Archer, 1979). In Brand Driven Innovation, we are working with brands in a designerly way.
Typical in this designerly way of thinking is research wich is generative (gaining insight through drawing, collaging, prototyping, and crafting artefacts) and participative (working in teams with end users, with a high level of involvement).
Although these research methods were developed to gain insights into users of products and to develop products that satisfy these needs, the match is perfect: we’re striving to gain insight into users of brands, and we want to develop brands that satisfy their needs.
We’ve been very lucky to have been able to apply some of these research techniques in brand building projects: the insights gained and the richness of the data gathered have been hugely satisfying. For me, but especially for the people who will be working with the brands we’ve had the honour to co-develop.
So I’m reading up on this stuff: a lot is going on at Studio Lab at the faculty of industrial design engineering, Delft University of Technology (particularly Froukje), and I’m learning a lot from my students there. But if you have any other tips, or have heard of other people applying design research to branding, drop me a line. For I am the curious one!
