This blog hasn’t gotten much of my attention lately but that doesn’t mean I have been idle. To the contrary, I’ve been extremely productive this first half of 2009. I’ve just found other ways to express myself than through this blog. One of these is twitter, where you can follow me. I’ve met some great like-minded people to learn from and be inspired by on twitter, so give it a try!
I have also been doing a lot of presentations. In an educational context but also as consultant to new and existing clients. These presentations are always a moment for me to collect my thoughts into something that makes sense. The process of creating a good presentation helps me clean up my cluttered mind so I can move on form there.
Here’s a public adaptation of a presentation I did for Priva, a wonderful Dutch company where we at Zilver have been spending a lot of pleasant time lately, coaching them on branding and design management. The presentation is about what we’ve come to call Human Centred Branding: building brands that are fruitful platforms for innovation and design requires a human centred approach. Only human centred brands will be used by innovators and valued by users.
Here’s Zilver’s take on human Centred Branding, plus a quick overview on how we build human centred brands. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, spread the word! and comments or improvements are always greatly valued!
For my Module Coordinator job at Eurib’s design management program I invited Festo’s manager of corporate design, Markus Fischer as a guest lecturer. Markus does a nice job of managing the corporate identity of a this large (12.800 FTE) German multinational, but that’s not why I invited him. He also manages Festo’s Bionic Learning Network. And that is just the coolest thing in the world.
Festo develops, manufactures and markets solutions for production automation. Say what? They make high-tech, complex, B2B, highly functional, serious stuff. Actuators, fluidic muscles, electro-motors, pneumatic parts, the works.
The Bionic Learning Network is “part of the company’s commitment to vocational and further training. Cooperating with colleges and research companies, Festo promotes ideas and initiatives that go beyond the core business of automation and didactics, and may well give rise to promising areas of application in the future.”
Check out these two movies to see what they mean by that:
Now, I am just completely impressed by this program, from a design point of view (those jellyfish! that manta-ray with the logo on its wing! the sheer beauty of this kind of technology in motion) as well as from a brand driven innovation strategy point of view. This last view deserves some explanation:
the Bionic Learning Network positions and comunicates the Festo brand way more effectively than traditional brand communication would do.
the Bionic Learning Network demonstrates Festo’s capabilities in a very convincing way.
the Bionic Learning Network aligns engineers, designers, marketers and sales people: it gives them a shared understanding of what the Festo brand is about.
the Bionic Learning Network attracts talent to the comany: it is a recruiting magnet.
the Bionic Learning Network timulates young people to develop an interest in technology: it has a socio-economic function.
the Bionic Learning Network explores possible future directions for innovation and assesses their feasibility and potential.
the Bionic Learning Network helps explore new markets
the Bionic Learning Network helps to create and maintain value networks through cooperation with technology specialists and academics.
the Bionic Learning Network is a platform to introduce new products to the market in a very compelling way
the Bionic Learning Network helps to fill the innovation funnel with new ideas, as spin-offs from the work done within the program itself.
Jan Buijs and I have come to call this aproach to innovation ‘the concept-car strategy’, because in the car industry, this approach is common. We call the projects evolving from this strategy ‘projectas‘ because they are to ‘real’ projects what personas are to real persons. What fascinates me about the concept car approach is not only the impressive result, but also the process, the mental exercise. I belive this process is applicable to any industry. It is a very practical brand driven innovation strategy. You can turn your brand into a driver for innovation through asking yourself the questions: ‘how would we fulfil our brand’s promise if we were free to create what we we want, without restrictions? What products would really bring our vision to life? And how could we then learn from those products? How can we create spin-offs from these future concepts that will be meaningful and profitable tomorrow?’
These are questions I believe any entrepreneur should ask him/herself from time to time. It works for BMW, it works for Festo, and it might also work for you. Try it like I have for my clients. It’s extremely refreshing.
And if you’ve encountered this concept-car strategy at non-automotive companies yourself I would be very curious to hear about them.
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…)
At the Design Management Institute’s Academic Conference in Paris this april I will be presenting a paper on Brand Driven Innovation, co-authored by Christa van Gessel. It includes our latest insights gained from research and projects at Zilver. It builds on my 2005 dissertation, but goes much further in the specifics of BDI, including its scope, a refined methodology and a case study. Download it here and let me know what you think!
I’m very proud of my strategic product design students from TU Delft who presented the results of three months of work to a very senior jury from Philips Global Marketing last friday. The assignment Tijs Timmerman of Philips and I gave the students was extremely challenging and proved to be a great case in point for Brand Driven Innovation. For reasons of confidentiality I can’t go to deep into the assignment but the reaction from Geert van Kuyck, head of Global Marketing Management, Chief Marketing Officer and chair of the jury says it all. I quote: ‘ I’m very pleasantly surprised by the way these product design students have treated a very strategic branding challenge. The result is both inspiring and highly actionable. I’m allocating budget to the implementation of the winning group’s innovation tool, and the prototyping of the design concept that evolved from their tool. 5 other groups I’m sending to our incubators in the Lifestyle, Healthcare and Lighting divisions to make sure their ideas are carried further within our organisation.’
That’s what brand driven innovation is al about: to approach strategic branding issues with a design attitude, using the brand as springboard for meaningful innovation. Kudos to all my students!
Fatal error: Call to a member function children() on a non-object in /home/users/braniftp/branddriveninnovation.com/wp-content/plugins/amazon-showcase-wordpress-widget/AmazonShowcase.php on line 40
At the 
