Just before my very well deserved 2 week christmas break I held a presentation for Trespa international‘s executive board and their top 50 managers on the significance of design as a strategic resource to build brands. I’ve been involved with Trespa for the past 10 years and the way they’ve used design to boost their brand is exemplary. I was part of the team responsible for their ‘perspectives‘ program and loved every second of it. Perspectives is about exploring the architectural possibilities of what is essentially a very rational product, by pushing out the boundaries of what’s technically possible. Call it a concept car strategy. Our task was to explore the needs and desires of architects, and to translate these into Trespa concepts. We sketched, visualized, prototyped and built these explorations in a very well orchestrated team effort, boosting Trespa’s brand image and preference in a major way. See slide 55 and 56 for some examples of the crazy stuff we did.

The thing I conjured up for the presentation turned out quite nicely, judging from the responses I got at slideshare, where the presentation was featured on the frontpage. There’s also a nice little discussion going on at Rik Wuts’s new blog Klatergoud. So I believe I hit something of a string here. For your information, the two main slides can be downloaded at Zilver’s Flickr stream.

Here’s the presentation, with the confidential bits removed (the original presentation had market research data showing the effect of the perspectives program on brand awareness, preference and the likes…)