Chinese computer maker Lenovo scooped two golds, Panasonic was the year’s biggest winner by far with six awards, while Samsung’s two silvers and a gold helped the Korean electronics giant stay global number one as the company with the most gongs over the past five years. Regional success on this scale was unexpected, flagging up a new confidence and dynamism in Asian design.
Fuelled by growing consumer interest in, and readiness to buy, well-designed products, design is rising up the boardroom agenda worldwide. “Clients are seeking new innovative ways to create brand experience for consumers,” says John Ford, CEO of Australian-based branding agency The One Centre, which assisted Asia Pacific Breweries in delivering a sensory branding experience for its premium beer Tiger that took into account how it feels to hold a Tiger-branded bottle-opener. “People are understanding that creating a unique or distinctive brand language isn’t just through graphics but through form language, materials and general usability.” Companies such as restaurants, hotels and airlines are well advanced in making sure brand values are communicated through all consumer touchpoints — “the product is actually the experience,” Ford remarks — but increasingly this philosophy is being adopted by marketers across the board.
Samsung’s success at last year’s IDEA is a testament to its status as a pioneering company that put design at the heart of its brand strategy, having overhauled its design centre and strategy 13 years ago in 1994. Now, more and more advertisers from the region are making design a key part of their brand sell. Panasonic products for instance were formerly linked by little more than the brand’s ‘Ideas for life’ tagline until 2002, when then president Kunio Nakamura unveiled a new design unit to introduce a more consistent image across the brand’s 15 different product divisions. Five years later the brand’s former jumble of products that had little in common has been replaced with a recognisable look extending though the colour palette, the materials used and user-friendliness of the product, culminating not just in a shelf full of design awards but a healthy hike in earnings too.
Design arguably first grabbed the attention of most CEOs when, upon becoming Procter & Gamble chief at the turn of the decade, AG Lafley declared his intention to make the packaged goods company the most innovative design-led business in the world, a goal inspired by Lafley’s experiences running P&G’s operations in design-savvy Japan. P&G’s design focus has returned to Asia of late — the company has been installing design managers in key Asian hubs such as Guangzhou and Singapore over the past few years to gain a better understanding of how best to tweak product and packaging design for local markets, adding to similar functions already set up in Western markets.
Along with the attention paid to product and packaging, the sales environment is also becoming increasingly important for brands, with some advertisers launching branded stores to gain complete control over how their products are sold. “If the store environment and experience does not match the promise of the slick TV campaign, flashy website or sexy mailer, then the brand’s compelling truth is no more than a lie,” says Neil Hudspeth, Asia-Pacific CEO of Enterprise IG. The agency helped realise a new store concept for Motorola in which brand values are communicated at every point of a customer’s journey, through the store, from entry to exit.
This idea is not just limited to consumer goods. Landor for instance has helped fashion a distinct retail presence inside HSBC outlets for the bank’s new sub-brand HSBC Direct, that was at the same time both instantly recognisable but in keeping with the main brand’s existing interior look and feel, as well as striking new business-to-business sales showrooms and demonstration centres for Fuji Xerox, dubbed the Epicenter, now open for business in Sydney, Singapore, Tokyo and Shanghai and shaking up the joint venture’s formerly staid image.
Increasingly, companies are using design to tell the world they mean business. Motorola was arguably saved from the brand scrapheap by its Razr phone, says Craig Briggs, regional managing director for branding and design company, Desgrippes Gobé. “If you make design fundamental to your mission, [to] your brand strategy then you not only create innovation in products and experiences but you send a message to your customers, your competition and your own internal audiences that you are switched on,” he explains.
Briggs points to some notable examples of Asian companies investing in design to win. Nintendo’s revolutionary motion-sensitive Wii gaming console, a deliberate move to avoid head-on competition by creating a new way for people to interact with video games, is an exercise in experience design, an area of increasing interest to companies seeking to communicate brand values beyond traditional media.
Sharp’s beautifully designed Aquos flat panel TV meanwhile, each one bearing the name of its designer, Toshiyuki Kita — a most unJapanese act but part of a growing global trend to exhibit human craftsmanship in product design — has given Sharp the lead on former design giant Sony and maintain a premium product price.
Despite this greater activity, on the whole Asian companies are still less likely than their European and North American counterparts to invest in design as a competitive advantage. The argument for making design central to brand strategy is growing stronger, but low labour costs, protectionism and steadily growing economies all discourage greater attention to design in Asia. “The mindset of Asian brand-owners will change,” Briggs says. “It has to.”
One part of Asia where brand-owners are starting to pay a lot more attention to design is China, where company bosses taking their company public or eyeing expansion into international markets are reviewing the message their brand image sends to the world. The prospect of international attention through next year’s Olympics is also making some domestic advertisers conscious that their products may be seen as derivative. “Some of these companies are talking to us about how they make themselves more honest and unique,” says Toby Johnston, design director with Landor Associates.
Imposing consistent design disciplines is still a fundamental challenge however. Multinationals are starting to review what bonds together their Chinese portfolio after an initial flurry to get a toehold in the market. Belgian beer giant InBev, for instance, has embarked on a major tidying-up exercise of its various brand identities in China after tying up with local brewers in numerous provinces, each one bringing with it its own design vagaries, with only a brand name tying the whole range together.
Such reviews are presenting multinationals with a dilemma about how to balance an international with a local look. Some local brands ready to extend outside of their home market are also facing the same problem. “Everyone wants to modernise,” observes Nitro China’s group managing director, Stephen Drummond. “The desire to be more foreign or local depends on the category.”
Nitro helped overhaul the image of travel portal eLong after its acquisition by Expedia, incorporating the dragon image suggested by the name (in Puthongua long means dragon) into the ‘e’ of the name itself, creating a distinctive image that wouldn’t get lost among the thousands of dragon brands that already exist in China. “The dragon in the shape of an e logo has been designed to represent the power of the dragon in a modern, fresh, distinctively Chinese style,” Drummond explains.
What works in China design-wise is a moot point, with some designers arguing over how much there is a cultural preference for business over the clean look favoured by the West. Many international brand-owners are loosening their normally rigorous brand guidelines in order to find what clicks with a Chinese audience, but whether this points to a new flexibility in design, with brand managers having much more freedom than before to tailor a look to their market, or whether global strictures will gradually be reintroduced as the brand finds its feet, remains a matter for debate.
Either way, working within design guidelines will remain paramount. If local managers do end up with more freedom, Landor’s Johnston argues, clearly laid-out guidelines will become more important than ever.
Design's mega-trends
International design company Desgrippes Gobé has identified three major trends in design, encompassing industrial design, retail, packaging and, to a lesser degree, corporate identity.
1 Craftmanship In a world of mass production anything that can hint at the involvement of the human hand will benefit, even for everyday purchases. The designer behind the product is also becoming more important, with consumer interest raised whether the designer is well known or not, while products that enable people to become creators themselves, such as Nike’s custom-made shoe, are also taking off.
2 Sustainability Not just packaging but the product too is being impacted by growing interest in sustainable lifestyles. Toyota’s petrol-electric hybrid Prius is not the prettiest of cars on the outside but has become a runaway hit based on the beauty of its environmentally-friendly design. How many different components are needed to make a product, where they come from and how they are put together will all become increasingly important.
3 Design as a beacon One major reason why design is being embraced by brand owners, beyond the need to compete and answer consumer needs, is to send a message — to let people inside the company know that their company is switched on, listening and prepared to act.
