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'Great design makes people love a company'
By siliconindia
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Friday, 12 September 2008, 00:27 IST
Bangalore: How companies such as Apple, BMW, Ikea, and Target use design to establish lasting relationships with consumers? A new book by industrial designer Robert Brunner and corporate consultant Stewart Emery heralds a broader manifesto on the importance of design in creating products and services that not only sell well but also endear brands to consumers.
Titled 'Do you matter?,' the book which also carries a subtitle 'How great design will make people love your company', aims to explain how companies such as Apple, BMW, Ikea, and Target use design to establish lasting and lucrative relationships with consumers.
According to the authors, successful executives should treat design as more than a finishing discipline that simply improves products' aesthetics. Instead, design should influence every aspect of customers' experiences. Design is an infrastructural element that helps define every aspect of a company, including Web site, stores, customer support, packaging, and messaging as well as products. "Design can't be a veneer," they explain.
The book's strongest example is the most commonly cited company, Apple. That company's leadership, according to the book authors, has successfully imbued every department in its organization with a coherent design sensibility that carries through all of its efforts. This matters not only because Apple has become the king of cool but also because its emotional hold over customers means it can charge a healthy price premium over competitors. The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player in the market, but its role as a gateway to a series of experiences and services, including the iTunes music, video, and movie store and a line of posh retail outlets drastically expanded Apple's business.
Harley-Davidson is another example, which is held up in the book as the model of a company that strives to cultivate relationships with customers. The company boasts revenues of more than $1 billion but spends little more than $2 million annually on traditional advertising. That means the company has created a brand not through ads but great designs. Jones Soda a small but hip soft drink brand with annual revenues of about $40 million, taps into the desires of customers by offering custom-printed labels and flavors. Brunner and Emery take readers to the aisles of Whole Foods and Target, to BMW dealerships, and to OXO-equipped kitchen counters to show that other companies understand these principles, too.
According to an article in BusinessWeek, the book says that the global economic downturn promises to test executives' faith in the power of design.
All told, asking the seemingly egotistical question 'do you matter?' proves a compelling place to start a discussion about the role of design in any given business.
