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Design
On day one and two of the Future Marketing Summit design was a very important topic. Day one included a panel discussion on the future of design, and on day two Stefan Boublil, founder, The Apartment shared some insights into one of his company's latest projects.
The future of design
Design panel members:
Moderator. Calle Sjonell - Group Creative Director, Fallon
• Eduardo Braniff - CEO, Imagination USA
• Brian Collins - Senior Partner & Executive Creative Director, Brand Integration Group
• Daljit Singh – Founder, Digit
• Victor Newman – Founder, Freestyle Collective
• Nicholas Utton – CMO, E Trade
• Stefan Boublil - Chief Creative Architect, The Apartment
Design has always played a crucial part in defining a brand and in the sales environment, but as an integrated element of a marketing campaign design is rarely fully plugged-in. The design panel assessed the opportunities, the issues and the methods for agencies and client marketing teams to further engage with design and ensure its role as an integral part of all marketing communications strategies.
A group of students from the VCU Adcenter opened the session with a few thoughts. Consumers aren’t designers, but either knowingly or unknowingly value it. Consumers value design because it’s something they experience every day, which was shown very clearly by Apple which turned the emotional response of consumers into a profit. There is no such thing as an “undesigned” object, only a well or poorly designed one.
From Ralph Lauren, to digital spray cans, to a chocolate making machine at the Hershey store, the discussion panel tried to sift through exactly what and where design in communication is going.
Two themes that kept coming up were emotion and experience. A question that was asked was “With the flood of information, does there need to be a better consistency in design”, the answer was yes. Those are two elements that are the future of good design, not just design, but good design. Good design will span the emotion of the experience from the logo, right down to the website. One example that was used that shows how this isn’t really being used was Target. Target has a very simple, very recognizable logo. It’s simple, and efficient. But when you walk into a Target store, sometimes that same experience that you had with the logo branding doesn’t relate. Great design needs to be consistent over all elements of the brand, and as interactive grows, those elements become greater in number, from websites, to banner ads, to mobile, etc.
Another point was made about the connection of the 30-second promise, to the performance of the design. Many traditional ad agencies only focus on the promise of the 30 second commercial, but neglect the performance that the design is part of.
With the separation of the design and advertising in many agencies the panel was asked about how to bring together the design and the ad/marketing side together. A few suggestions were: bringing the design company or department into the creative process earlier, more collaboration between everyone, and also glue.
A final point was also made that until marketers and advertisers understand each other and each others' goals better there will continue to be a disconnect.
The story of Swich
On day two the design discussion started with Stefan Boublil, founder of The Apartment sharing a short video parody of life in a creative agency. He and John Gargiolo from Swich spent the time sharing how they created the restaurant Swich.
Stephan began by stating “really, the only person that matters is the customer”. They then discussed how when The Apartment came on board they started out by checking the competitors in the same industry, finding out what they liked, what they didn’t like.
After doing their research they came up with the brief, “create a restaurant in a well designed place, with good music, and the best pressed sandwiches."
From here they took on the task of finding a name for the new restaurant. They worked on this from three different angles: tried naming by using the creative brief, by the feelings (full) they got, from what the sandwich does (crumbs), and then lastly they did a play on words. This last method ended up being how they came up with Swich.
They wanted to make sure that everything was on brand target, so everything they did, from the look, to the logo, to the tables, they kept going back to the brand idea, to make sure if was on target.
For more info and the full story, check out http://www.swichpressed.com/
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Issue #2.1 - NY Summit Special
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