By Accident or Design

In a Business Week report on innovation, the move from the 1990s to the 2000s was described as a move from the “knowledge economy” to the “creative economy”. It seems clear as we move into the second half of the first decade of the new century, that the technology and communications advances of the previous decade, whilst still rolling forward, are now leavened with style and design. Look at mobile phones. It is as important now for them to look good as to have all the latest capabilities. Look at the success of the iPod over other MP3 players. It is a success built on brand not on technological superiority. If nothing else, the pages of this magazine and these articles have stressed the importance of the brand in all sectors of the marketplace.

Brands of course are carried in the minds of the buyer or potential buyers and are made up of multiple encounters that the buyer or potential buyer has with the brand. The issue for all of us is how to control those encounters, so that the residual perceptions are positive. The more encounters, the stronger the brand, but marketing departments and agencies in B2C and B2B alike, delude themselves if they believe they have absolute control over these encounters. Full ash trays and empty coffee cups in the car showroom, a shoddy brochure, a salesman with bad breath, a presentation of “death by PowerPoint”: all these trivial incidents can, by the force of attrition, erode your brand.

The one thing we can control, however, is design. Design of all things surrounding your products and services will add to the brand encounters. It creates a platform that underpins your brand values. Many organisations recognise this and many have taken the importance of design as a mantra for how their company behaves. Richard E Laye at Proctor and Gamble has insisted that there is a design representative at each board level of the company. He has elevated the role of design within the company to an important and central function of the company’s success. Mr Lee, Chairman of Samsung, recognised in the 1990s that technological excellence would not be good enough for the company. Samsung have made design a focus of their product innovation, setting up design centres of excellence in London, Tokyo, San Francisco and New York. Both these organisations have seen that design offers an important point of differentiation in an increasingly commoditised marketplace. Good design is one of the foundations on which your brand is built. It touches people emotionally, and aesthetically. It reaches out and connects with people at the conscious and unconscious, rational and emotional levels. It touches consumers, buyers, decision makers and influencers alike, and it is as important in a B2B world as it is in a consumer world. Because we are not just talking about the design of product, but the design of all the things that surround and associate with the products or services you are marketing. In a B2B context, it doesn’t just mean having a beautiful logo or identity, it means you have to be vigilant that all your communications, showrooms, web site, and sales presentations embody your brand values and incorporate them in to quality design. It only takes one shoddy or ill conceived piece of poor design to destroy all the positive brand attributes you have been striving to communicate.

Design is not just about surface, or perception. It influences the way people behave, move and think. The way you display your products and services can be a strong influence on the potential customer’s predisposition to buy. A test done by a department store, displayed all 24 flavours of a top quality jam with a special offer. They then tested it again, but only displaying 6 of the flavours. More people were attracted to the bigger display, but interestingly more people bought from the smaller. At Harvard University’s School of Architecture and Design, they are pioneering work on how you can use design disciplines to solve apparently non-design problems. Their current work is on how to treat stroke victims in Massachusetts, to ensure they get the right treatment in the shortest possible time. To do this, they are not only looking at the design of space and equipment, they are also taking an holistic approach to the whole issue and applying design principles to logistics, patterns of behaviour and even to the approach of the medical insurance companies.

These examples demonstrate how our mind shapes, and is shaped by the world around us. Whatever our company is selling from manpower to managed hosting, and however complex the buying process is, we should understand the importance of seemingly trivial and emotional events in what we would like to believe is a rational process. We should therefore always pay maximum attention to the way design reacts with these events and the way people react to our designs.

Torstai, 02.11.2006