Experience Design by Patrick Newbery & Kevin Farnham

Author:Patrick Newbery & Kevin Farnham
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2013-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Brand Frameworks and Tools

A brand is a living entity—and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.

—Michael Eisner1

We believe that bringing a business’s Brand to life through the products, services, and experiences customers have with the business is an important component of experience design and actually differentiates it from other user-centered design methodologies. One of the biggest challenges that both business and design face, however, is that a Brand is seldom defined with a real eye toward the actual experiences customers will have related to value. Brands have traditionally been developed with the goal of expression and have focused on developing a distinctive identity and communicating meaning through visuals and words. Another challenge is that Brand tends to be managed within a marketing function of a business and the emphasis is on visual consistency applied to tactical messaging based on specific business goals (building awareness, driving lead generation and demand, fueling sales, etc.).

There are two very common circumstances that we have seen when business and design come together at a strategic level around Brand. The first is when a start-up has an executive who tasks his or her design agency to help develop a world-class Brand before there is any substantive product, service, or customer base. We understand that executives want a high-quality Brand identity system, but it begins to position the Brand as just that—the visuals—and it does not address the experience component that makes the Brand real.

A second common circumstance is when a new person is brought in to run the marketing function of an existing business, and that person has a strategic objective to breathe new life or meaning into the Brand. Although it’s natural for one to want to have an impact through one’s position, it’s important to understand what the current position of the Brand is and what really can and should be done to reflect changes in value for the customer. The risk is that the only real change that gets made is a new visual identity for the Brand, while the value (products, services, and customer experience) hasn’t really changed.

We believe that too often Brand is equated with Branding. The problem is that the efforts involved in defining a visual and verbal refresh of a Brand don’t necessarily address the Brand’s role in defining real value or experience. For the purpose of experience design, we would like to propose several frameworks to help unlock the Brand for use across all areas of the interface between business and customer.

We aren’t going to go into the basics of Brand, because the topic is already well covered in other books. But if you are looking for a solid foundation, we suggest reading Strategic Brand Management by Kevin Lane Keller2 and Building Strong Brands by David Aaker.3

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