It sounds simple and straightforward and—to be honest—just a bit dry. But don’t turn the page so fast, because this is a story about a journey, or rather many possible journeys, and about the people who wander those paths. Design research is not about numbers, focus groups or concept testing. It is about surveying the landscape and getting to know these travelers. Like a great adventure, it’s about discovery, and a subject we hold dear to our hearts: designing with clear intent.
Fig. 1
GETTING THE LAY OF THE LAND—WHAT DO WE MEAN BY “BRAND”?
It’s said every great adventure begins with the first step. In truth, it usually begins with a lot of Googling and buying of travel books to learn a bit of the language and get the lay of the land. So first, let’s be clear what we mean by brand and brand experience.
From the ’50s until the ’90s, the idea of brand grew to become a dominant concept in marketing. From its origins as a mark designed to identify a manufacturer, the concept of brand ballooned until it was used to drive virtually every aspect of business practice. It promised functional (and sometimes emotional) benefits to customers. It inspired and served as the core benchmark for evaluating product concepts. It even offered prospective stockholders a reason for being—many companies in the late ’90s were bought and sold on the basis of their brand alone, revenue or even actual product be damned.
During this era, most agreed that a company’s brand stood as a promise to consumers. It used to be that the goal was to find the single, most important differentiating characteristic and try to own that attribute among your consumer base. When Ford established the brand positioning “quality is job one,” the company was declaring its commitment to deliver cars that were utterly reliable. Once the company adopted that promise, multiple touch points were designed to evoke the promise, be it the showroom, advertising or the car itself. What’s important to understand is the brand promise did not evolve from the intrinsic foundation of the company’s DNA, but rather was developed to stake out a unique position that the company then acted on to fulfill.
This approach to brand worked well because it guided companies in articulating a clear objective in producing for key markets. Today, however, we live in a different world—one that is dominated by new forms of distributed media, demands for corporate transparency at every level and increasing density in the competitive landscape. It has become clear that an approach centered on the articulation of brand can no longer be the control mechanism to deliver desired consumer response and market results. Moreover, the approach can straightjacket innovation. This complex field calls for a new model of looking at brand positioning. So where does that leave the notion of brand today?
ORIENTING BRAND WITHIN EXPERIENCE
We must deep-six the notion that companies “deliver on brand promises.” Companies deliver experiences. If they are successful, they deliver consistently meaningful experiences that people desire. Rather than a be-all-end-all, brand needs to take its place in the overall meaningful experience that consumers expect when they interact with a company, which can include a multitude of touch points. In this context, brand—just like the design of each touch point—is an outgrowth of the “experience-design” process itself. It contributes to and reinforces the broader concept of integrated experience. Brand becomes the experience and expression of an authentic concern of the company, as opposed to simply a marketing strategy.
Harley-Davidson provides a great example. The motorcycle manufacturer doesn’t position its brand to deliver “quality,” or any other functional characteristic. Instead, the company delivers the experience of freedom. It evokes this experience through brand positioning, cycles, clothing, retail displays ... everything it touches. The approach is an evocation of an experience that’s meaningful to company management, as well as the customer.
This approach also opens up the opportunity for a broader product landscape. For Microsoft, the word most associated with the megacorporation from its roots has been software. But as the company evolved, new positioning opportunities opened up. Microsoft’s tagline—“Your Potential. Our Passion.”—positions the company as a provider of solutions, a much larger field in which to communicate and develop product, and a field more relevant to the experience customers seek.
As designers, we need to understand this idea of meaningful experience and the essential role brand plays if we’re to develop strategies and executions that guide and enhance. We need to move beyond brand design and establish our place as designers of experiences where brand is an essential experience component. So, how do we do this?
TAKING THE FIRST STEP
It’s easier to understand the role of brand in experience design if we think of the experience of a product, service or brand as a journey over a well-considered interval of time (see
figure 1).
When we interact with a company and its products and services, we anticipate a path that the encounter will take. Whether we walk into a Mercedes dealership or an Apple store, we anticipate a certain experience and the way it will make us feel. Just as if we were hiking through Yosemite National Park, we have a map and various signposts to guide us and give us an indication what to expect along the way. In this case, brand serves as the map and signposts on this experiential journey. The Mercedes brand has oriented us: It points the way, builds our anticipation and must be an authentic expression of the experience of luxury and sophistication. Following a sign that says “Crystal Blue Lake: 2 Miles” only to find a muddy pond five miles down the road does not a happy traveler make. Neither should a brand promise something that doesn’t match the experience a customer expects.
The traveler has choices as to various paths to take, guided by the map and signposts. Similarly, a customer may experience a company via an ad, a product, a user forum or even a bill in the mail. Along the experiential journey, the things encountered take on significance and, sometimes, meaning. If we think of meaning as something people use to construct and make sense of their lives, we can see how all the objects, experiences and environments we encounter throughout the day intertwine to make up our own ongoing narratives. When a company can evoke meaning through its positioning as well as its offerings, customers bond with its brand, product and services at a level beyond simple satisfaction. Regardless of the path taken, at the end of the journey the customer will expect to feel different for the experience. This journey, broadly speaking, is what experience designers create, mapping out what is to happen to the customer over time.
Just as maps and signposts must be clear, easy to read and reflect the anticipated experience of travelers—whoever they might be—so must brands point the way and recognize their role as part of the total experience of the journey. Given this analogy, how do you approach the design of a brand experience—the guide to the journey your customers seek—to ensure it richly and authentically communicates the promise of the journey ahead? Design research helps point the way.
MAPPING THE BEST ROUTE: THE PROCESS OF DESIGN RESEARCH
Design research is a consultative process. It merges the talents of designers, developers, anthropologists, market researchers and business strategists to guide innovation, be it product, service, retail, brand or other experience touch points. The process requires an inherently collaborative and skilled approach to innovation strategy, process consulting, application of the right tools for the right job, creative synthesis of the findings and a clear articulation of design direction.
Design research uses consumer insights to help create contextual understanding, to focus development and brand strategies, and to generate new concepts and new experiences. It provides the most reliable basis for developing optimal brand experience in the context of experience design. Design research tools— unlike traditional approaches focusing on concept evaluation after design—are centered on unearthing needs early in the experience development process. With a deeper understanding into consumer needs and the meaningful experiences customers seek, brands can be developed and positioned to meet these expectations and become an integrated part of the experience journey (fig. 2).
Some of the questions design research seeks to answer in the context of brand are:
● Who are we?
● Who do we want to be?
● Who are we perceived to be?
● What does the market want?
● What can we be?
● Who will we be?
● What is our strategy to get there?
● How should we execute that strategy?
SEEING THE FOREST & THE TREES
Design research builds a holistic perspective on a company’s business context, the external market environment and its customer definition so as to immerse brand development, product development and marketing teams in the opportunities they are slated to address.
The business context encompasses the lay of the land inside the company: corporate and business unit strategies, alliances and partnerships, technology and product roadmaps, etc.
The market environment covers trends that play out beyond the corporate walls, including trends in social/cultural, political, regulatory, competitive, design and other external factors.
The customer definition involves the gamut of information about existing and potential customers, their lifestyles, attitudes and usage patterns, demographics and psychographics (fig. 3).
Examples of design research methods include segmentation and lifestyle studies, subject explorations, ethnography, and attitude and usage studies. The results of this research help designers and experience strategists frame the situation they are trying to address and guide the development of design principles and creative briefs.
ENVISIONING MULTIPLE PATHS: GENERATIVE RESEARCH
Beyond just building the context for development, design research also provides tools to spark the creative process, which is essential for developing compelling brand positioning. These tools, which we call generative research, uncover unmet needs, unveil new opportunities and stimulate creative thinking. Examples of generative research methodologies include consumer workshops, in-depth interviews, in-context interviews, participatory research and observational ethnographic studies, as well as quantitative methods like conjoint analysis, which can uncover key hidden drivers that influence what people value in a brand. Fig. 4 shows one methodology for generative research.
When well executed, these tools illuminate opportunities, identify gaps in product offerings and create a clear view of the potential, promising a powerful, relevant and authentic experience through brand. Unfortunately, these methods are underutilized in most companies, and yet they are the richest source of the ingredients for brand innovation.
NEW FRONTIERS IN RESEARCH
Because customers, businesses, opportunities and challenges are always changing, research tools are changing to address new realities. The biggest frontiers for addressing brand in the context of experience design are currently in:
● Tools for uncovering meaning, the deeper associations customers develop with a product, service or brand. Meaning goes beyond the functional, emotional, status or identity benefits that customers experience with a product, to tap into what people value most in life. Approaches based on semiotics are becoming more popular.
● Advances in ethnographic methods that build empathy with people and uncover subtle, unspoken needs. There are many factors that motivate progress in ethnographic methods, one key driver being mass globalization and the need to understand populations in places like China and India, where change is rapid and a whole new socioeconomic structure is emerging. This enhanced need for empathy, so central to design in general, provides key input for the development of brand positioning in particular.
● Technology advances that support new approaches such as digital ethnography. These allow us to interact with people remotely via digital diaries, image capture, e-mail correspondence and other means.
● Tools for visual synthesis that bring together disparate findings from all types of research to create a unified set of insights. These tools synthesize data to create visual expressions that readily communicate results and ensure a consistent view of the findings, building alignment among not only the product development and brand teams, but also the broader base of stakeholders in an organization. Fig. 5 shows how results from this research are applied to brands.
BEYOND THE BLUE HORIZON
One of the key benefits of design research is it focuses on what underlies markets and customer decisions. These tools are extremely useful in addressing longer horizons for brand and product development, because they cultivate a deeper understanding of the customers for whom a design is intended. It’s not simply customers’ values and beliefs, but how these factors interact to create meaningful experiences.
Design research can be extremely in-depth, multiphased and complex. It can also be as simple as careful observation. Whichever path your client’s brand innovation requires, remember that a great journey always begins with the first step.
DESIGN RESEARCH RESOURCES
● Cheskin Added Value, www.cheskin.com
● The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage by B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, published by Harvard Business School Press
● Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences by Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff and Darrel Rhea, published by New Riders Press
● Design Research: Methods and Perspectives by Brenda Laurel and Peter Lunenfeld, published by The MIT Press
● Experience Design by Nathan Shedroff , published by Waite Group Press
● The Long Interview by Grant McCracken, published by Sage Publications, Inc.
● The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz, particularly chapters 1–4; published by Basic Books
● Design Research for Product Innovation—DMI seminar by Darrel Rhea, Nov. 13–14, 2008; www.dmi.org/dmi/html/education/seminars/udr.htm
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