SD3262 IDENTITY SEMINAR NAME: Abby Yang Shu Fan
ID: 19084538D
TUTOR: Vincie Lee
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What is Brand Identity and why do We Need It? I have great interest in branding so I was really excited to have Identities Seminar in this semester. In the winter vacation, I read a book called DROOM VAN HELDERHEID:Huisstijlen, ontwerpbureaus en modernisme in Nederland 1960-1975. The book examines about the visual identities devlopment of Netherland companies and Netherland Modernism design from 1960-1975 and gives insights of how designers view brand identities at that time. "Visual identity is a kind of message instead of marketing tools like advertisement. Visual identity is useless if it is used for creating certain images. Visual identity won't generate companies; it is companies that generate visual identities. Identities should reflect the truth. Even if the company isn't prolific, the identity should reflect the situation," said Wim Crouwel. I think the statement from Wim Crouwel is true in the aspect of designers. However, in my opinion, visual identities works as a marketing tools in reality, too. Crouwel's statement is an idealism for designers when doing branding but I think in the aspect of clients, they want designers to design visual identities to make their products more appealing and prolific. Nevertheless, Crouwel's statement was thoughtprovoking since on the design end designers usually focus on the advantage of the brand instead of the disadvantage. If a brand can admit their shortcomes in their branding, the honesty of the brand may turn out to be a positive promotion, which is an interesting angle for designers when considering the design. Brand identity is the entrance for consumers to get known to a brand. First impression is very important to catch the eyes of the consumers and therefore impressive design is no doubt important. However, the long-term maintainance is the key factor that makes the brand root in consumers' memory. In this seminar, I'm looking forward to learning more about marketing and consumer's philosophy. I hope I can build up a more solid design philosophy at the end of the semester.
IDENTIT Y SEMINAR | WEEK 1
WEEK 1
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Behind the Barcodes: Price the Experience In last October, I went to the exhibition "Behind the Barcode" with my classmates(Justin & Jennifer). The concepts of consumer's perception on branding and consumer's risk introduced in the lecture reminded me of the content of the exhibition. "Behind the Barcode" was an exhibition started from the angle of marketing statistic to disclose the thinking pattern behind marketers and consumers and how brands manipulate marketing strategies to affect consumers. The exhibition included 3 parts: voting section, shopping area, and case study area. In voting section, there were several comtemporary marketing copywritings displayed on transparent banners respectively. Visitors could paste a sticker on the banner to vote for the copywriting they resonated to. In the shopping area there was a mini shopping booth displaying several marketing copywritings. Visitors first "purchase" the copywriting they were appeal to and then checked out to get their shopping philosophy report. IDENTIT Y SEMINAR | WEEK 2
WEEK 2
6 shopping philosophies The exhibition categorized the motivating factors in shopping into 6 shopping philosophies and these philosophies can refer to the consumers' perception taught in the lesson, which are: 1.
Reciprocity (search on cost reduction)
2.
Vibe(lifestyle, symbol device)
3.
Rarity(uniqueness)
4. Loyalty(promise, bond with a product) 5.
Security(social risk reduction)
6.
Authority(signal and quality, risk reduction)
Loyalty, authority, and precious are my shopping philosophy. The result quite matched my shopping behavior. When I was shopping, firstly I would concern about the values and promise behind the brand, especially after so many issues related to the political stance or values of brands recently. I would then concern about the risk of the products especially functional and physical risk. If a brand is reputated for its function and high safty but the
[Top] My shopping philosophy report and the copywritings I chose
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values or stance of the brand contradict to mine, I would rather give up this brand and search for other options. This habit indeed reflects on my shopping philosophy report that loyalty accounts more than authority.
You are what you buy To see whether the brands I like also fit my personalities or images, I decidied to do a little selfanalysis. The brand I chose was Uniqlo, my favorite clothing brand and I'm quite loyal to it. My personalities I'm a rational, refined, quite and shy person. I prefered simple and clean design. Personally I spend most of my money on buying books instead of clothing compared to the average shopping preference of young women.
money on clothing and want to have a good quality clothes, Uniqlo is definetly a good choice.
UNIQLO
Besides from the product function and price aspects, I think the reason why I am so fond of Uniqlo, or specificaly addicted to it, is because I am fond of the simplicity and tranquility in Japanese design. The refined and elegant design of Uniqlo's clothing is like a mirror of my personality. Even if I were rich enough to afford many luxurious clothing such as Channel, I think I would still spend my money on Uniqlo because I feel resonate to it instead of luxury brand, which doesn't really fit my personality.
I think my images suit well with Uniqlo overall. The clothing style of Uniqlo is simple, clean, elegant, yet playful at the same time, which provides me a lot of choice to come up with various combination to demonstrate my temperament. In addition, the price performance ratio of Uniqlo is high and satisfying. For people like me who doesn't want to spend too much IDENTIT Y SEMINAR | WEEK 2
WEEK 2
Sum Up The exhibition introduced me a new perspective to think about the role of designers in markets. Designers sometime are dettached with the reality, only focusing on the aesthetic side of a product or promotion. However, the actual market is far more complicated especially when it comes to philosophy and behavioral factors. We designers are also consumers. Next time while we are shopping whether online or at brick-and mortar store, before checking out, we can pause to think about what drive me to purchase this product and how the product displays or brands promotion affect us. By doing so, I believe we can get a new spark on our design philosophy.
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Why Emotional Marketing is Powerful in New Econnomy? Recently, more and more companies has been moving their marketing strategies from functional benefits to emotional benefits, which is an interesting phenomenon to discuss about. In my opinion, the function-wise of a product (for instance, smartphone, clothing, houseware) from every brand reaches the level that meet users' need, which is, in the other words, to great extend we are purchasing the same thing. Functional benefits are the most straightforward factor that influences consumers' wellingness, but it is hard for users to tell the subtle difference between different brands when the function benefits of different brands are neckto-neck. Therefore, what makes consumers decide to buy brand A instead of brand B is the emotional benefits in new economy.
The Power of Storytelling Research on advertising shows that emotional response to an ad influences consumers’ intention to buy much greater than the ad itself. Comsumers get connected by the brands they feel emotional to. Therefore storytelling are the match point for a brand in marketing to win their potential consumers. In Art Direction subject, we learn how brands shape their tone of voice and look and feel to influence the emotion of consumers. For instance, Google's tone of voice is energetic with a sense of houmor, protraying a young and cheerful lifestyle for audience. Although Google's products were controverial in collecting users' data, however a lot of consumers still purchase Google's products because they were moved by the vision given by Google. The storytelling would be more convincing and emotional connected if the narritive starts from user's point of view. Airbnb is a good example using mouth-of-word in their marketing. For instance, Airbnb Citizen is a community a community of hosts, guests and other believers in the power of home sharing to help tackle economic, environmental and social challenges around the world. Their advertisments are composed of the stories from differnt guests and hosts about the reason why they started using Airbnb. For a company which makes the experience of "connection" between people as their IDENTIT Y SEMINAR | WEEK 3
[Top] From the meaning of Airbnb's logo, we can find a lot of emotional message inside of it.
WEEK 3 products, storytelling is extra important because experience is all about emtional feeling. Interestingly, the visual equitiy of Airbnb itself is an emotional storytelling to the consumers- love is the connection between people and Airbnb help you to build up the connection.
Sum Up We are living in a materialism society made up of countless and miscellaneous products and cool stuffs. As a member of z generation grew up in the beginging of the 21th century, I felt like the rapid advancement in technology satisfied our needs and desires day by day but our hearts are getting empty. The fulfillment of material are getting saturated to an extend and now people started to focus on the spiritual and emotional fulfillment. This could be the reason why "experience" is a trend in marketing now. I'm not good at writing and kind of resited to it. However, it is inevitable to equip the related skills. As a visual designer, the abilities to design aesthetically is a must but we are not only visualizing the story in our mind. We need to explain and tell the story behind the design to clients and then deliver the whole picture to consumers thorugh copywriting and visual advertising. Each step requires different way of storytelling and communication skills. Therefore, I hope I can keep improving in the coming semesters.
"Does it (Google) know what I want ... " "...before I know what I want it?"
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Brand Message Communication In the first class of the Identities workshop, we were introduced with the process of communication in advertising. From the flow chart, we can see that the role of the designer is to encode the product, which means giving message and values to the product.
The encoding stage is at the early process of the advertising, which means that the message encoded in the process would influence the following stages and decide whether the consumers will do the action- buy in the brand. In the 'what to say' section, the message sould be distinguished so the brand can
Process of Communication in Advertising
e l o R s ’ r Designe Product
E.g.: Toothpaste
Encoding
Channels
Giving message and values to the product. (E.g.: Toothpaste + Smile)
Media and promotio
What to say
Message 1. Keeping the idea focused. -> Subtraction & Addition 2. Differentiating the brand from the competion. -> Create, Activate, Mutiply IDENTIT Y SEMINAR | WEEK 4
on.
WEEK 4
be differentiated from the competition, and this is where 'identity' is created. The key of marketing is not about how well your product/service is. Instead, marketing is about how you 'talk' about your product/service and make your
consumer be persudaded through rhetoric approach and the support of visual. Therefore, a designer should equip basic ability in writing so to enrich the visual content. If the message of the brand is good and identifiable enough, then the visual may even not be the 'face' of the brand, just like MUJI.
Decoding
Decision
How people inteprete and react to the message.
Whether people like it or not.
How
to say
Idea 3. Making the advertisment look good to influence concumer’s decision.
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NETFLIX: Everything is a Recommendation The real-time communication of Apple's customer service provides a customized and caring experience for customers. As an apple user, I had used its customer service before and the real-time communication with the consultant gave me feeling that Apple really cares about its consumers and its professional assistance worths the the high price. Similar feeling came to me when I was watching on NETFLIX. NETFLIX is known for its recommendation system. On the official NETFLIX research websites, there are plenty of articles about how NETFLIX keep working on personalisation service and innovation. In the articles, NETFLIX explained about how the artwork selector in recommendation system select the thumbnail images to reach the highest clickthrough rate. Indeed, when I was browsing the video list, I found that the thumbnail of each video changes every time. The content shows in the cover will trigger my interest to hover on the thumbnail to know more about what the movie or drama is about. This kind of B2C mode gives every user their own tailored NETFLIX experience. From the report Recent Trends in Personalization at Netflix, there is abundant of information about why, what, and how NETFLIX do personlisation, which is really informative and inspiring. In the report, NETFLIX pointed out that 'a spark of joy' was the reason for doing personalisation. Indeed, when I discovered the topic I was interested with I would feel delight as if came across a piece treasure. This spark of joy would make users want to explore more
[Left-Right] Content extracted from the Recent Trends in Personalization at Netflix
IDENTIT Y SEMINAR | WEEK 5
in order to reach more joy, and this is how NETFLIX 'get its way to our heart through our stomach'. In my opinion, apart from the spark of joy, the personalized NETFLIX menu also provides emotional benefits to the users in terms of scarcity because every menu is unique. Building up one's own NETFLIX menu in today is somehow a demostration of one's taste, just like building up one's fashion style. In terms of what NETFLIX personalizes, the content range from algorithm, UI/UX, to how they reach out. The most appealing information to me in the report is knowing how UI/UX design works in the recommendation system as I am interested in UI/UX design and want to devote to the field and I'm excited to know one more possibility for me in the future. It is interesting that NETFLIX said 'Every thing is a recommendation'. This sentence demonstrates NETFLIX's passion on the development of ultra peronalised experience, and it may also be the reason why NETFLIX is the top-of-mind brand in streaming platform industry today. In this more user-centerd era, customisation and personalisation is the trend in brand service. To let users be addicted to a brand, personalisation is definetly the match point in competition.
WEEK 5
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REFLECTIONS ON PROJECT PROGRESS AND EXPERIENCES
Brief account of project progress and result
Our project research on IKEA's brand communication. Through the research, we want to find out whether IKEA is a well communicated brand. The methodology we applied is AIDA model and primary survey research. In the project, I was responsible for the survey and survey analysis. At the first stage of survey research, we asked about customers shopping experience in IKEA. From the data we collected from the first survey, we made a second survey to find out how IKEA communicated with consumers to influence the shopping experience. In the analysis, the results shows that IKEA's Logo is most awareable to the general. Also, we found out that IKEA is percieved more than a furniture retailor but also a place of entertainment becuase of its other in-store services, which makes consumers be interested in paying visit. Then we explain how IKEA effect make use of psychology to let customers desire for IKEA. Last, based on the communication problem point out by participants, we suggested improvement for IKEA. The research result found out that IKEA's brand communication is effective in raising brand awareness and delivering brand values. However, although IKEA's storytelling narrative is part of the brand personality, it is considered to be confusing in providing detail information.
Memorable project experience
As a IKEA lover, I was quite excited to know more about this lovely Swedish brand. IKEA's communication approach is quite appealing to me and therefore I would like to know more about how the coomunication work on consumers. While watching IKEA's vedio advertisement for research, it was inspiring to learn how IKEA subtly blends its brand values inside the advertisement to trigger consumers' desire. This was my first time for conducting survey research which was a fresh experience for me. Through the process, I found reading data interesting because sometimes the responses weren't what
IDENTIT Y SEMINAR | PROJECT RECORD
PROJECT RECORD I expected to be. For instance, I persumed that emotional benefits would be the main incitement for consumers to purchase IKEA. However, the result showed that people still put product function as first concern when taking action. When analysing the data, I realized I tend to interprete it from my own perspective, which should be avoid and improved in the next project. In terms of group work experience, to be honest, I was a bit frustrated. There were only few members were active in discussion. Also, since I'm used to finisih the assignment few days earlier before the deadline, I couldn't get used to a groupmate who didn't participate in the discussion and start working on her part until the day before the presentation, which made me rather annoyed. Therefore, the whole working experience for me is quite tough and not satisfying.
What I've learnt from the project
In terms of knowledge... From the project, I've learnt more about IKEA in terms of brand communication, advertising strategy, and its positioning in consumers' mind. Personally, I like the knowledge of how IKEA names its product after natrue and animals in Swedish the most. In my opinion, it is very inspiring that IKEA fully makes use of its culture elements to not only promote itself but also its origin. I also found the theory of IKEA effect inspiring and interesting because IKEA well demonstrates that psychology can foster brand communication and strengthen the relationship with consumers. In terms of skills... From the project, I've learnt how to design questions for a survey to conduct primary research and further analyze the data. This is my first experience, and to be honest, it was quite challenging but I enjoyed the process and the result I gained. In terms of abilities... From the project, I've aquired the abilities to analyze the brand building of a brand and its marketing and communication strategies.
Knowledge & skill development approach
To learn more about the role of designers in the branding industry, I read some case study books about how a creative angency develop a complete brand from client background research, user
16 /17 research, core value identification,idea brainstorming, visual developement and performance examination. Apart from books reading, I also search for related articles on the forum to gain more upadated information.
Knowledge & skill development throughout the course
Through the 9 weeks learning in brand identities, case studies, communication approach, and analysis, I believed my knowledge on branding has broaden and grown deeper then before. Personally, the lecture of Pantagonia's case study is my favorite. From Pantagonia's case study, it was inspiring to see how a brand being honest and transparent to its consumers by calling its consumers to stop purchasing some of its previous products because the materials used were contradicted to their brand values. As communication designers, often we are misunderstood that doing branding is doing a logo or visual design. However, visual is only part of the branding like the skin of a brand. Even some brands do not have a significant visual just like Muji. The skeleton of a brand is its products/services, values, cultures and messages. Having knowledge about the other aspect of brand's component apart from visual design is definetly a bonus for designers. In this semester, most of the subjects include branding activities. The non-visual branding knowledge taught from this course gives me a new perspective and mindset to think about brand design. While doing the branding assignments from other subjects, these knowledge supports me to build up a steady foundation for my visual and advertising strategies, which brings me more confident in the whole design process.
Improvement (what haven't changed in me throughout the course)
Throughout the course, I think my ability in conducting a research doesn't changed much. Writing is always one of my weakness and a pain in my neck. Therefore, I subcounciously felt resisted to the research project. In terms of branding knowledge, I think I am still unfamiliar with the digital ecology for brand communication. As a design students, I often ignore the stages after visual design, which is marketing and maintaining user sources. In this digital era, it is impossible to have no relation with internet. To
IDENTIT Y SEMINAR | PROJECT RECORD
PROJECT RECORD stand out from the competition, digital marketing is a key point especially in the aspects of user-centered service. Therefore, it would definetly be a downside for me if I have no related knowledge and abilities to consider digital communication in my design. To make up these shortcome, it is important for me to review on the lecture and search for more related books to enrich my knowledge. Recently I am reading a book about gamification marketing, which is inspiring and new to me. I believe the knowledge of gamification marketing can give me insight on the application of digital communication.
Next steps...
Branding design is a field that I've always been fascinated with. To further develope my abilities in order to be capable in the industry in the future, in addition to the development in visual and aesthetic skills, I need to learn more about marketing and communication strategies, especially the emotional message and marketing. In this semester, most of the subjects were related to brand identities. In the Identity workshop, one of the guest speakers talked about how his architecture major helps him in doing total design for branding. The content is inspiring and let me understand that branding is an interdisciplinary design. In the subject Art Direction, one of the guest speakers introduced how to generate insights and another talked about the power ethical marketing, which is rather helpful for designers to develop communication strategies. The knowledge taught in this semester is really fruitful and inspiring. Before digging in into more related information, I believe going through the lessons again can give me more insights and strengthen my design thinking foundation.
WEEK 1 WEEK 2 WEEK 3 WEEK 4 WEEK 5 PROJECT RECORD
