how do you approach “brand” in your ID Projects?

… not JUST so products match an existing product line, but how do you understand the the meaning behind a brand and then use it shape a product

“Branding” can be vague – what is it? It’s basically it’s the big idea that can show in every facet of a company, including products. When they are good, they resonate with people and are recognizable without logos. They get in people’s minds and can represent aspirations. J Mays said “if you look at a person in his car, you see who they want to be”, so his team try to represent the ideals their customers in the shape of cars, building the brand. They affect the bottom line; why choose Nike over Adidas when they both make nice products - what are the fundamental brand differences?

So that’s really abstract, and product designers do a lot of concrete stuff. We innovate, make things ergonomic, more beautiful to specific people, we surface/sketch/model, we ensure stuff works and is understandable. All this makes up a product which lets people build their opinions on the brand. Packaging designers capture meaning in the perfume bottles and package shapes/treatments. IBM does it with their serious shapes for business. New Beetle did it with fun elements.

So that leaves the questions…

A) How do you understand the “brand” and then how to you represent it in your design?

B) Are you familiar with how a professional branding firm would do it?

C) Brands consultancies use specific tools, some strictly word based (not visual) - would you consider them for ID projects?

D) Is branding and ID not as relevant as this post makes it out to be?

Thanks guys, I am looking forward to your responses

any stories or opinions out there? … not looking for secret sauces, just general thoughts

I’ll try to kick this off with a couple stories from around the EU… friends at two separate consultancies have been doing research in Russia to learn about customer habits around the house. Their findings went straight into a product CMF, another into package design, and the features they included are so specific to the segments that the customers really love the products - they wouldn’t think of using a competitor. It’s ethnography, but the result really endears the product to a customer thus building the brand up

Another actually does start projects with written exercises to determine keywords for the companies, then tries to embody the words in 3d forms

So do the designers out there think understanding the brand is the ID’s job - if yes, how do you do it?

Great topic!!

I think brands are more that just graphics that people recognize and hold a product line together. I great brand has its own personality, it’s own meaning, and tugs at the emotions of the user.

Every brand should have meaning. Who are your users? What does your brand bring to these people? I think a great example of this kind of thinking is a brand I work with everyday, M&M’s. M&M’s is all about colorful fun and the M&M’s characters. The character all have their own personalities and that as well as colorful fun is designed into every product. This brand appeals to all ages and has even allowed us to open 3 muliti story retail store devoted to just this one brand.

As far as how do IDers use branding? I would say the same as other designers. We have to understand the brand positioning and the emotions the brands are trying to provoke and design around that. There are tools like brand compasses or style guides, but I think the best way to figure out if you brand is working or how to design around a brand is to observe people using the products. You would be amazed how brand loyal people really are. They know their brands and they can tell you why they pick on over another.

Thanks for responding Justin!

Branding is so relevant to your realm, packaging, but do you think the brand as important in products? I suspect tools like brand compass is more used by packaging designers.

For fashion like footwear, it seems especially important… I’d love to hear more about how freelancers “get” the brand for their client companies… or how star guys like Richard Kuchinsky sculpt brands from scratch through the first products

In the case of Nike and Adidas, the major elements like the swoosh or three bands on the side are the obvious stuff. If you took the logos off, could you recognize the brand? Mood boards is a traditional way to discuss brands,
but marketing people might make charts like this to describe the differences, and it would seem knowing some brand “DNA” keywords might inspire the designs… and give orientation for pushing them.

…or is it too restrictive, maybe stiffeling creativity? (it might be more fair if this example was for a smaller segement, like female Adidas running shoes vs female Nike runners)


Any thoughts?

Branding is so relevant to your realm, packaging, but do you think the brand as important in products?

Yes packaging is one way to communicate branding, but every product should follow the DNA of it’s brand. Brands are much more than just graphics. There are many different brands that do this very well in products. John Deere, Harley Davidson, Apple, Viking, just to name a few. All of these brand give the user a specific feeling while they use the product. Viking makes me feel like I am a five star chef while I cook my grilled cheese. Harley Davidson makes me feel like I am a bad ass when I ride home from my white collar job. John Deere has many different equities, from their loyal farmers to their green color that when you see green on anything having to do with outdoor maintenance you know that it is one of their products.

or is it too restrictive, maybe stiffeling creativity?

I don’t think so. I find it much easier when I have a very well defined brand and brand statement. This allows me to put personality into the product. It also allows for checks and balances for concepts. If the product does not fit the brand then it should be put aside or modified to do so.

Not trying to hijack the thread, but it brings up a point that I have been making for a long time, and that is that there is not enough branding education being taught in ID school. We are taught that we design the product, GDers design the graphics, and all branding is graphics and that this is not our job. When infect I think that is very much so our job and should be stressed in school.

not at all - and a good friend recently told me the same thing. Something similar prompted me to post in the first place…

I’ve worked for focused brands and then for companies who don’t think about it at all. I’m usually there for the doing: innovating, sculpting, & making rather than brand creation and steering. I think car & footwear designers get into it more

When I stopped working with large companies, the ones with smart marketing and business people steering the brand, smaller companies were asking me to create a look around their products but gave me little to go on. There was no precedent and they didn’t know what they stood for

ID tactics did work - looking at the customers, competition, and shape preferences, but I felt like strategic direction was missing… It’s an expensive investment for a start-up, and it’s going to be their public face for some time. Big companies are so concerned with the brand (restrictively sometimes), how could I have so little to go on?

that’s why I’m asking how you guys approach it, to learn what’s out there…

In a previous job, I worked at a integrated marketing/branding company. ID was one of the tactical offerings of this company and was how I got my in. The company architecture was nearly completely open, I could take part in research, branding, strategy, grapic design, package design, ad campaigns, collateral material design along with my ID duties.

Branding and strategy is all about communications/words. We would develop lexicons from the VOC research, competative research and a situation analysis of whatever company hired us. We would take those lexicons and grow them by adding our expertise. And as you have shown, we would rearrange those lexicons into several different types of charts and diagragms in order to view that information from many perspectives.

How a lexicon was arranged is critical in determining the direction of the tactical implementation (a design, an ad, a brochure, instructions, etc.). I am definately more in tune with the tactical side and the strategic can be a bit ethereal, but it gives you a place that you can judge your concepts. As a hokey example, if the strategy calls for speed and your design has racing stripes, you can argue your design is a “success”. Obviously no brand is going to be as simplistic as “speed”, but it may have speed as a subset of responsiveness which is a part of customer care. For me, that is the great fun of design, having to interpret and visualize the nuance of a brand strategy and align them with your design objectives.

That is why I have never given any special credence to an individual design style. I think a talented designer is able to design to any brand language, not just to a singular look-and-feel.

I would like to share something I’ve run into to address a method Travisimo brought up upthread: using keywords as a way to start up the creative process and tie it to a brand. Basically, the company was designing a product for Russia. Russian users reacted well to a set of keywords. American designers began designing w/ the keywords in mind, but it this specific case the cultural differences between what each keyword exactly meant wasn’t initially addressed very well.

A big example of it would be a descriptor like “natural” or “natural materials”. Average Russian wouldn’t think of raw linen and bamboo or subtle palettes when they endorse “natural”, they think of marble and really showy woodgrain, high contrast color and gloss. There is a market in Russia for “linen and bamboo” people, but it wasn’t the market the company was going for and design eventually had to reflect that.

I think words can be very powerful, but I think a lot more sensitivity and less vague symbols (or accurate language) need to be used when trying to convey the essence of a brand to a different culture.

That’s a good point, even in the same language words can be interpreted different ways…

Sometimes the words don’t seem to make sense either. I’ve been learning about the subject and a LOT of companies have words like “innovative” or other shallow descriptors. That can makes me think it’s sometimes a lot of marketing double talk, though I do think a lot of these tools can work well.

About the Russian research, that actually wasn’t to uncover keywords but to use ethographic research to add endearing details to products. One was a CMF design for a cell phone targeting upscale Russian women (it doesn’t look that special, but apparently it sells well). The other was a very close look at how Russians use mayonaise to design packaging that better fits the use (apparently they use it on EVERYTHING!)… by shadowing people in their homes, they learned a lot about what wasn’t working with the current mayo bottles.

This sounds like solid ID work, and it is, but the end goal was to build up the brand through ID and they succeeded

Ha! Not to get too offtopic, but yes, mayo and Russians. There are 2 groups there, really, people who use mayo on everything, and people who make fun of people who use mayo on everything. There’s an internet anti-mayo meme of sorts that’s been going on for a few years on so called Runet.

:laughing: that’s hilarious! its what my friend says too… they use it for everything and she couldn’t believe what she saw when watching people in their kitchens. Apparently current bottles don’t let Russians get the mayo out fast enough, so they were looking into opening up the bottle mouths even more.

hey, you don’t have a link to the Runet meme do you?

So MeLoves… you said you have seen language problems happen with keywords. Any chance you can explain more?

Iab, that sounds intriguing - you really got to start the projects at an intellectual level!

So what’s VOC and how would you develop & “grow” the lexicons?

So the charts and graphs were specific to the type of design work? can you share examples for the form and CMF that designers use?

I agree, good designers should 'get’s the brand/design language of products and do amazing stuff within it, not using just their same “look” for everything. (Unless your a name designer that is)

Constraints usually push design to be interesting - these are just intellectual constraints and there’s no reason you can’t be creative within the parameters…

the big question I have is how do you determine the brand constraints in the first place?

Mayo stuff, I don’t know how well Google translate would work w/ something so slang dense:
http://lurkmore.ru/Кальве and http://lurkmore.ru/Нямка (“mayanezik” is a subset of “nyamka”)

I do not know much, but a lot has been written about language vs. meaning. Erich Fromm wrote,

Among the many forms of alienation, the most frequent one is alienation in language. If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say “I love you,” the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word “love” is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses. The alienation of language shows the whole complexity of alienation. Language is one of the most precious human achievements; to avoid alienation by not speaking would be foolish – yet > one must be always aware of the danger of the spoken word, that it threatens to substitute itself for the living experience> . The same holds true for all other achievements of man; ideas, art, any kind of man-made objects. They are man’s creations; they are valuable aids for life, yet each one of them is also a trap, a temptation to confuse life with things, experience with artifacts…

We interpret the reality through symbols, we, humans, are the symbol users, makers, misusers…or something along those lines, somebody said. And sometimes those symbols become more powerful than the meaning originally attached to them, and that’s where branding really comes in. How do we create something that is more than its meaning? I do think that Fromm was onto something, when we allow users experience their creative act, a “brand” will come alive in a meaningful way.

I guess it’s a long way of saying, I don’t know anything, but it’s fun to think about.

Sorry about that.

VOC = Voice Of the Customer.

We would start with industry thought leaders and then trickle down to early adopters and then the “average” customer. Basically we would ask over and over what do they value about the brand and what it means to them, etc., etc. The situation analysis of the company would show the core competencies and the competitive analysis would show their strentghs. We would cull words/phrases/thoughts/sentences from these 3 sources to create the lexicons.

We had a group of communication specialists, or word-smiths. They were the clever ones when it came to words and take the preliminary lexicons and make it more precise and give it great clarity. For example, they could take this post I am writing and edit it to be half as many words and communicate my ideas better than I can. After they were done, the designers took those lexicons to and created design objectives that could be measured against the brand criteria which had been OKed by the client. It makes any concept presentation objective instead of a subjective pissing match.

There can be specific mapping tools, but most are pretty generic. Any B-school will teach you several dozen ways at rearranging information. Or any marketing book at Borders. Just use what helps you, it is just like any other tool. The AIDA chart (Google it) is a very old example. Think of an inverted triangle with Awareness at the top, then Interest, then Desire, then Action at the bottom tip. I have modified it to Attract (at the top), Orient, Inform, Confirm (at the tip) to use as a communication hierarchy tool. And communication is not limited to words, it certainly can be used for CMF too.

I kind of glossed over that and you are correct, it is the big question. The key point for my process is creating design objectives from the lexicons. Usually this extremely long process is almost always directed by the design team but researchers, strategy developers and communication specialists are very much encouraged to join the process. We lock ourselves into a room with plenty of beverages, candy, paper, Sharpies and deodorant and go to town. What we get out of it general is style boards and a means of communicating the link between the lexicons and the design objectives to the client. So when they say in a concept review meeting “I don’t like blue.”, we can point to the customer lexicon and say they want the product to be calming and according to the latest color trending research, that particular shade of blue is the most calming out there.

Usually this extremely long process is almost always directed by the design team but researchers, strategy developers and communication specialists are very much encouraged to join the process. We lock ourselves into a room with plenty of beverages, candy, paper, Sharpies and deodorant and go to town. What we get out of it general is style boards and a means of communicating the link between the lexicons and the design objectives to the client. So when they say in a concept review meeting “I don’t like blue.”, we can point to the customer lexicon and say they want the product to be calming and according to the latest color trending research, that particular shade of blue is the most calming out there.

I think this is key in this whole process. I can’t say that I am heavily involved in the creation of our brands (They have been around for quite some time) but I can say that I take our brands and use them towards a different audience. Given the fact that most of my design is based around the different holiday seasons, our brand take on a completely different meaning than they do when used in everyday. This means that we have to take the meaning and personality of our brands and apply them to the occasions of the season. For Halloween this is not a problem, but for a holiday like Valentines Day a rough and tough brand like Snickers can be quite challenging.

This is where I go back to what is mentioned above. By having a clear defined brand it makes it easy to say, “Okay Snickers is this. What would it look like for valentines day or for Easter?” This may mean that we may need to take the band down a notch to a younger audience. Again I can still take the personality of the brand and imagine what it was like when it was a teenager. With out that clear definition you have no direction and are designing blind.

Another thing I would like to point out from the above is that adding image boards to these word statements is crucial. Without them the words could mean many things to many different people. I am a huge fan of mood boards. A well-constructed mood board paired with your lexicons will communicate a brand better than anything else. And when you get those comments like, “Well my 9 year old daughter likes hot pink for Christmas so we should through some of that in" you can point at the board and say this brand is geared towards X and they go for Y.

BTW…This is a great thread and just the kind of dialogue I was hoping for when we started this Special Interest Area.

Good thread and for sure have more to add at a later date.

For me (in my work I create and manage a lot of brands from the ground up to well-established and seeking re-direction or re-positioning) the key thing is imagining the brand as a person. What is the personality of the brand. What are their characteristics? Are they smart, funny, cool, eclectic,? How would their peers describe them?

Having this in place is key.

Second I find very useful is to create a matrix that positions the brand relative to different factors. For example, could be “Contemporary vs. Classic on the X axis”, Technical vs. Lifestyle on the Y-axis)… there can also be more than two axii as he the Nike/Adi example shows.

Third, I do believe very strongly that the foundation of a brand is the definition of it. That is, the mission, vision, position, etc. Everything should be able to be tracked backed to that for decision making and justification. If it’s red color vs. blue, go back to those statements and one should win (ie. the brand is more sporty and aggressive, therefore red).

Bottom line, i believe if you can’t tell the brand without the logo, or at least differentiate yourself without a logo, you’ve lost.

R

R,

the key thing is imagining the brand as a person. What is the personality of the brand. What are their characteristics? Are they smart, funny, cool, eclectic,? How would their peers describe them?

It’s funny, because I said the exact same thing in a meeting today. I agree completely. I always take it to who is my brand representing. I have put a personality mood board together for almost all of our brands at Mars, and when I do a project for that brand that mood board always comes out. By thinking of it this way and not as some wordy marketing speak statement it allows you to get into the brand and almost become your user. I think this takes a little bit of practice and observation of you user definitely helps.

Second I find very useful is to create a matrix that positions the brand relative to different factors. For example, could be “Contemporary vs. Classic on the X axis”, Technical vs. Lifestyle on the Y-axis)… there can also be more than two axii as he the Nike/Adi example shows.

Interesting way to think about it. I will have to try this exercise.

Bottom line, i believe if you can’t tell the brand without the logo, or at least differentiate yourself without a logo, you’ve lost.

Completely agree. This is why brands were created in the first place. :smiley:

Having had to do this recently, I spent time researching best practices.
In my opinion, Ziba offered the best methodology, and they’ve been good enough to publish it through DMI.

The only thing I might do differently is to spend more time defining the visual positioning as it relates to the context of use and competition, but this easily fits within their framework.

Awesome find.

A few more of the tools I have used in the past.


Michael Treacy’s chart - Where is the client positioned, where do they want to be positioned, where’s the competition, etc. Can be used from the customer perspective at the company or product level.


A variation of the BCI chart, I believe this is the handy work of Jeff Bezos. More of a decision-making tool.

A semantics profile. I used Sears as an example. Again, where are you, where do you want to be, etc.