Defining the Brand Equity

Workshop on the different brand promises

As basis to develop a consistent experience for the customer with the brand the three promises have to be defined: Performance, emotional and aesthetic promise. These can be seen as a manual or a basic direction for all developments of interaction points with the customer. The definition should include visual and verbal explanations, as mentioned by Leslie, because various people in a company or project creating these experiences for the customer can understand the message in either a visual or verbal way.

Usually the brand promises are defined after the purpose and the target group, but before the ideation process. The choice of strategic ideas in the ideation should be informed by these and thereby create a consistent, strategic experience for the customer.

In our project, we worked on the definition of the brand equity at a later stage of the process. Although we did the research on the target group and trends and presented it to each, we didn’t define the performance, emotional and aesthetic promise. The reason why we got distracted from this, was that we talked about ideation in the next class and how to start this process with a target group definition to line out personas. We were quite excited about the ideation process and had many ideas already in mind.

Only after the whole ideation process when we started executing the idea, we talked again about the requirement to set some guidelines for the design. Then I realised that we were still missing the clear brand definition part.

Our project process with definition of the brand promises at a later stage (Hinger, 2019)

Today in class, Leslie led a workshop with two tasks to the topic of creating strategic experiences and there we took the chance to finally define the three aspects of our brand identity. Although it was a retro-fit to our already developed idea, it was very helpful. Especially the combination of words and pictures helped to ensure, all members of our team interpreted the project identity in the same way.

Task 1 was to choose brands that have a similar brand identity to the brand we envisioned and to discuss, which aspects we liked about them. We liked the product brands Adidas and Fjällräven for their clear, distinctive and iconic design language, the ocean cleaning company 4Ocean for their vision of environmental protection and their inclusion of elements of movement in their logo, the (RED) campaign for their collaboration with established consumer brands for a good cause and Blue Bottle, a coffee and café brand that has a surprising and disruptive visual presentation by choosing the colours white and blue, two very untypical colours in their market.

Task 2 was to illustrate the key words we had identified to represent our brand based on the first task and following discussions. For this we should pick two contrary interpretations of the same term and illustrate what we do and do not want to represent. The terms we chose were smart, unobtrusive, sustainable, disruptive, emotional, memorable. From the discussion around these terms, we concluded that we want our brand to create positive emotions and memories around the impact people can have, not working with negative or horrifying images. From sustainability and the connection to the ocean we derived that our colour scheme should be designed around blue and green. And the terms smart and unobtrusive went hand in hand with the idea to create practical real-life solutions, not unfunctional gadgets. This informed our performance, emotional and aesthetic promise.

In order to finalise the words we wanted to use for the formulation of our brand promises, we followed Task 3 suggested by Leslie in our next team meeting: We wrote down all the identified key words and created mind-maps with additional words connected to these. Then, we tried to combine the new set of words to best describe our values.

As a result from this, we cam up with the following brand identity definition:

• Performance promise . practical, sustainable real-life solution for the substitution of single-use plastic bags

• Aesthetic promise . joyful but subtle . clean lines . blue/ white/ green . emotional and positive

• Emotional and Experience promise . be part of a positive life-changing lifestyle to save the oceans and sea creatures . try something new . resourceful celebration of life and nature

The exercises from Leslie have supported the definition process a lot, as finding visual examples and alternative words around our visions made it easier to understand the different ideas of every team member and finally to agree on one way to go.

Since this definition, whenever we discuss design ideas in the execution part now, we can relate to these promises and check our solution against them. Especially as we have split up tasks around the execution part, presenting our ideas to each other in the next session, I will try to keep the brand equity and the feasibility to it in mind. Also, for my next design project, I will remember to finish the brand promises before diving into the ideation stage.