Posts Tagged ‘design’

human centred branding as platform for innovation

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

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!

this presentation is licenced under a creative commons attribution-non commercial-share alike licence.

design as strategic resource

Monday, December 29th, 2008

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…)