DESIGN LANGUAGE
In the past, we used ‘brands’ to solve the problem of ‘commodification’ - to differentiate objects of the same kind (commodities). For example, you would pick up Surf Excel washing powder because you trust Surf Excel more than an unnamed washing powder. However, today we are surrounded by brands and the modern consumer is vigilant enough to not fall for just communication. Today we often talk about how cellphones have hit ‘grand commodification’ in that we cannot really distinguish two phones from one another very easily. However, as demonstrated in section 3, this is much the same with heavily mass manufactured watches. All watches within Titan’s price bracket suffer from the same problem - If you were to remove the brand name and logo from the watches, it would be hard to tell who they are made by.
Differentiation is necessary for a company’s product to stand out from its competition. However, the different products that a company produces also require a certain degree of homogeneity in order to create resonance in the user’s mind. Usually this is achieved through communication. However, crafting competitive differentiation and internal coherence at the product level itself can have a massive impact on the system. One can make the argument that modern brands like Apple and Tesla have been able to really stand out because differentiation and harmony are seeded within the narrative at early stages in the product development process - Their products set them apart. In such cases, communication efforts like advertising augment the company’s competitive shield but may not even be necessary - Ask yourself, have you ever seen a Tesla ad? Referring back to all the branding touchpoints,
crafting differentiation at the product level is going to be what lies ahead to creating ‘Lovemarks’. (Read Lovemarks by Kevin Roberts) Given the challenge at hand, it was worth considering the idea to see whether any other sector in product design had faced this problem and was able to effectively resolve it. It was this thought that inspired a deep investigation into design language. One often hears of the term ‘design language’ associated with cars, thus cars became the starting point to demystify the subject and see if it could help solve the problem at hand.
Graduation Project | Titan Vision Next: Explorations in Recrafting the Watch Proposition | 121
