When Worlds Collide

When Worlds Collide: Better Product Branding Through Integrated Industrial and Interaction Design

When Worlds Collide: Better Product Branding Through Integrated Industrial and Interaction Design

Chris Murray, Bresslergroup

Originally published: 2016 (PDMA Visions Magazine Issue 1, 2016 • Vol 40 • No 1)
Read time: 8 minutes

In the last decade, product branding has undergone a transformation. It’s no longer the logo tripling the price of a shirt or the shiny package hiding an inferior product.

Today, it has the potential to create a more meaningful relationship between product companies and their customers.

I believe there is a new branding imperative driving what new product managers deliver to clients and their products. This shift has changed deliverables and work processes across industrial and interaction design.

The New Product Branding Imperative

The following quote by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore from a 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review accurately described what was to come in the new experience economy: “As services, like goods before them, increasingly become commoditized, experiences have emerged as the next step in what we call the progression of economic value. From now on, leading-edge companies—whether they sell to consumers or businesses—will find that the next competitive battlefield lies in staging experiences.”

Today’s consumers want products that dazzle their senses, touch their hearts and stimulate their minds. They want products that, together with communications and marketing campaigns, deliver a distinct and relevant brand experience. Product design has evolved from designing the toaster to designing the toasting experience.

Mauro Porcini, SVP and chief design officer at Pepsi- Co, does a good job of encapsulating some of the factors that drove this transformation:

  • Access to knowledge via the Internet has created smarter, connected, savvy, more discerning—and some would even say spoiled—customers.
  • Social media has meant that brands need to communicate with customers both on an internal/personal level and on external/mass broadcast level.
  • Connected products, or the Internet of Things, has led companies to forge more intimate relationships with customers and their private lives, prompting greater brand transparency.
  • Consumers are now able to access global markets so there’s competition beyond direct (and traditionally on-shelf) competitors.
  • Digitally enabled entrepreneurship and manufacturing have leveled both the competitive landscape (think FitBit versus Nike in fitness wearables) and the product manufacturing landscape. This shift makes brand a more essential differentiator.
  • We have four generations colliding in our marketplace, and they are quite different. Traditional market segmentation models don’t necessarily work as cleanly for today’s brands as they did for previous generations. Today, customers take functional features, benefits and product quality as a given. This phenomenon relates to what consumer journalist Rob Walker calls “the pretty good problem;” when every product in a category is pretty good, what comes next?

Brand as Experience

Figure 1 is a process graphic that illustrates what the consumer journey should look like in order to build lasting brand loyalty. Bear in mind that business-to-business journeys look somewhat different. Today, designers need to effectively address all of these touchpoints in the product journey in order to create a lasting and loyal brand relationship with customers.

Figure 1

Figure 1

Designers need to address all of these touchpoints in the product journey in order to create a lasting and loyal brand relationship with customers.

Designing the Digital-Physical Experience

Not only has branding become more comprehensive, but products have become more sophisticated. New products are often embedded with smart technology and multiple types of digital interfaces. In my product development work, I have seen how physical design and digital design have merged to create a coherent customer experience. And this blend of physical and digital design takes place across a broad technology spectrum, from low fidelity, embedded devices with simple LCDs and switches through to high fidelity, app-enabled learning devices.

Let’s step back a little to dissect product branding before its shift to experience. For a long time, developing a distinct visual design identity has been the core of developing a distinct brand identity for product companies.

As seen in Figure 2, both industrial design and interaction design have traditionally started by tackling functional challenges through mockups and wireframes before going on to address the three-dimensional or two-dimensional aspects of branding. The two disciplines’ processes often align quite nicely, and with shared proximity, there is opportunity for great harmony in what industrial and interaction design can deliver in terms of visual brand articulation.

The center of the visual brand articulation process is helping organizations articulate their brand and vision. This is often more challenging than you’d expect. Designers thrive on values they can translate into distinct and tangible design attributes. Generic terms like “quality,” ”value” and “innovative” do little to distinguish a brand in today’s crowded markets.

Often, we find ourselves facilitating for our client stakeholders, helping steer them toward more distinctive brand values that we can leverage effectively in new designs. While we help our clients articulate those brand values, they have to originate in the company’s heart. The company needs to authentically believe in and confidentially deliver on these brand values. It’s ideal at the end of this process to validate that those brand values and derived design attributes resonate with the desired target market of consumers.

Figure 2

Figure 2

The traditional scope of product branding offers great harmony in what industrial and interaction design can deliver in terms of visual brand articulation.

Today’s consumers want products that dazzle their senses, touch their hearts and stimulate their minds. They want products that, together with communications and marketing campaigns, deliver a distinct and relevant brand experience. Product design has evolved from designing the toaster to designing the toasting experience.

THE New Dimension in Product Branding

What we’ve witnessed is a new dimension in product branding. See Figure 3 for an idea of how experiential brand articulation is

transcending the purely visual elements of products. Sometimes those brand elements are physical in nature such as distinct materials and finishes that we associate with a brand (think Apple products). And sometimes they are purely digital in nature (think Google docs). Increasingly, though, they are a blend of the physical and digital to create unique product interactions that might encompass light, sound, gestures, haptics and other experiential elements.

Product brand language now has the opportunity to extend beyond traditional design elements. By stimulating more integration across the disciplines of industrial design and interaction design, we can create sensory touchpoints that differentiate and reinforce your brand.

Figure 3

Figure 3

Experiential brand articulation is transcending the purely visual elements of products.

But how do you make sure the experience is as compelling as possible and how do you make sure that experience resonates with brand value? Some takeaways for the new world of experiential product branding:

  1. Understand your brand. How will your brand’s values, mission, vision and character inform the experience?Understand your brand and what it could mean to your target customers. Again, I want to emphasize that this should originate from the heart of the company.
  2. Think beyond visual. Experiential branding requires us to think beyond the visual in a purely industrial or interaction design sense. We have the opportunity to create meaningful and distinct brand interactions across multiple product touchpoints.
  3. Create together. Industrial design and interaction design create their most effective experiential brand solutions when working in an integrated team from the beginning. I’d like to able to tell you that there’s a rigid formula or process for this co-creation but I haven’t found it yet. What I have found is that interaction designers are highly skilled in analyzing, mapping and structuring new sensorial product interactions while industrial designers are skilled at using new technologies to physically implement them.
  4. Be human. We live in a world of sensors and smart products, but not every product needs to be loaded with the latest technology. Users can be delighted with simple, elegant experiences.
  5. Treat brand guidelines as a living document. Having too rigid of design guidelines can create a stale brand. Define fixed branding elements that are sacrosanct and evolving branding elements that can keep the design fresh.

Above all, craft a great brand story that is authentic to your company’s values and differentiates your customer experience. That story needs to align with what you’ve identified as customer opportunities and what you deliver as your product touchpoints.


About the Author

Chris Murray is the director of industrial design at Bresslergroup, a research-driven product innovation lab in Philadelphia. He oversees Bresslergroup’s industrial design work, leading teams of designers and engineers on client projects across various industries, including consumer electronics, industrial equipment, household appliances and medical products. Murray writes and presents about front-end user research, product innovation strategy, design and innovation direction, and engineering and manufacturing implementation.

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