Name: Brainstorm Design 2019: Design For Strategic Differentiation
Uploaded: 2019-03-20
Duration: 12 min 1 s
Description: Through a process that is holistically considered and irreducibly complex, Todd Bracher Studio elicits key differentiation strategies for clients through the lens of design.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I wanted to start off by asking a question. I guess you can say, what does everyone truly want from their business? What is the one thing we all want from our products and services that we put out there? Can anyone say the one thing that we all really, really want? Anyone? [ BLANK_AUDIO ] To me it's love, right? To me. And I really believe we want our product and services to be loved. I mean, just passionately loved and appreciated. If you do this, if you're able to arrive there, you capture brand loyalty, they become your brand ambassadors and everything takes place from there. It's so critical to reach this love, but how do you get there? In my opinion it's through what we call best in class design. I today's environment, we have to arrive with best in class models and services. There's no room to, you can't cheat around it. You can't market around it, you get exposed immediately and I think rightfully so So for our clients, we try to drive them to best in class. And what we mean by that, specifically, is the part that exceeds expectations, it also inspires your audience, at the same time, is culturally relevant. And these are the three critical components that for us make up What we call a best in class product or service. We are based in New York, we have a business we call Design for Strategic Differentiation. And we utilize industrial design, and design strategy as our lens to provide differentiation for our clients. So today I thought I'd bring along a few So it insights into what this process is that we use, and how we look at design, does this make sense. We start with understanding our audience, that's critical and I think it's a given for most of us, but it's not that easy to do. What we like to do is help our clients navigate the complexities there. There's so many choices, so many different paths to take It's our responsibility to help our clients make good decisions and cultivate out really where the true value decisions are. And that's our objective. We think at the same time we need to move this into an execution. So how do we do that? For us we look What we call an ecosystem, or the context from which we are developing our thinking. So we need to develop the lens that's the filter for our decisions. So we consider all the stake holders, any of the constraints, all of the possible opportunities, at the same time limitations. All of the possible elements that govern the decisions that go into what we're taking. They effectively become the lens and the measure for which we make our decisions on. We also think it's critical to reach true differention and to access this audience that we're speaking of. Is to, we bring in what we call experts. And our experts, sometimes it's us, sometimes it's folks we need to bring in. Sometimes, for example, it might be a professional athlete, it might be a scientist, it might be a doctor, it might be a material scientist. It could be folks that really understand, it could be an expert end user. Folks that truly understand what we're trying to achieve, that raises the barrier of entry. At the same time, it acts as a multiplier. Not an additive, but a multiplier to how we are approaching our audience and their end result. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] We need to communicate what we make. And it's obviously equally critical to communicate in a way that's super clear and focused. Obviously in today's market it's extremely saturated with communication. Therefore, for us it needs to be multifaceted, 360, integrated, and clear, and precise and relevant to your end user. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] I thought I'd bring along a case study. And one, as an example, was there's a brand called 3m. Very large, American, hopefully you know an industrial and technology manufacturer among many things. And we had this wonderful opportunity to help bring them together into what Base were targeting which is the architects and designer space, we call the A & D space. But specific thru lighting. So to enter the architects and designer space through lighting. So for us it starts again with searching the opportunity. How can we do this through product design? What can we do that's gonna access this market and create true diffrentiation for 3M And bring them something new and gain them this access. So we do our research, we start to connect the dots, and we realize if our objective is reaching this gold star, right? Reaching what is the best in class solution, we need to understand the context. So again, back to the ecosystem. And what we do is we start to map out what are the governors that drive this decision process. Everything that's involved. And as you start to zoom out you see the strategy and the communication and the design. The [ UNKNOWN ] starts to get granular and you realize it's quite complex of the components. We look at this as we look at something in nature, it's driven by its context. The ecosystem control's the result. And for us it's very, very important to establish a clear underlying ecosystem. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] From there, we're searching for differentiation, so in the lighting space, specifically, we look at how can we differentiate 3M. How can we do something that's truly unique to them? And it was interesting, I had a conversation with one of the scientists there, and he said something kind of very casual, and kind of in passing, and he said to me, he said, light Is 100 % predictable and I thought that's beautiful to me. That's really beautiful and to him is very obvious. But to me that was beautiful as a non- scientist. I said well what is 100 how many things in the world are 100 % predictable well for us in this case, it was light and what it told me was 3M knows how to control light. They can shape light. They can manage life, and this is not normal in this space. In the traditional A & D, archiects and designers phase, the company's mainly assemble product. You take a light engine, you take some sort of shape, you diffuse light, you style light. But 3M can control light. And in some cases we can invent it, so we thought, so let's leverage this 100 % capability, right, so how do we do that? And with speed to market, we leverage one of their existing materials, which is the film, which in some cases is 100 % reflective. It's considered This most reflective material in the world. So again, it's another strategic advantage to utilize this material. At the same time, we're using it to guide light. Since it's so reflective, it's very, very good for guiding light. So where does it get used? Typically, in mobile devices. And we thought, well, that's interesting. If we could light architecture As you like a mobile device what would that be? So what we wanted to do was to send a message to the industry that 3M was doing something different. They weren't just styling and sort of putting together a product transactional business. They wanted to invent something new, inspire this market. This is what we wanted to do together, inspire the audience. And to take this business somewhere new and to really create a new opportunity for 3M that was truly unique. So we started with this idea of taking a single point of an LED. can we light architecture as efficiently as a mobile device. Can we send light across the surface of architecture? So the iteration started again with the experts. With the scientist. We start to iterating on how can we shape and drive life across architecture? And through this process, we arrived a significant effort to arrive to this invention, something completely unseen before, not driven by fashion or style, it was driven by mathematics and by physics which are the fundamentals of our world. So for me, we're really getting somewhere meaningful And something that's beyond what we can draw with our hand. It's something that's conceived from a true understanding of the physics. Which for me is an ultimate differentiator. So we arrive to this fixture which can be scalable. It was powered by you can see, a single light engine in the middle. And the light is cascading across the surface. And how it works It's using that film, there were these optics that were engineered to act as a kind of guide to direct light, so what's happening is the light is just waterfalling itself along the system completely passively, so there's light in one point, and then there's no power anywhere else in the system. So we're able to light large expanses of surface with very little energy. So in this case there's six LEDs lighting this entire wall. And if you would put your hand in the middle, you would effectively turn off the light downstream, because you'd be interrupting the light throw. So it's really interesting to us that we've invented something new. We have new IP around it called the virtual Virtual LED. And it's a new way to consider how to light architecture. And we needed to take this message, and again it's beyond the product, we needed to communicate this. So we do this by actually, and bringing in there's one case, we would bring in some of the world's top influencers and media. And we'd share with them what we're doing together with 3m. Where 3m is going and we literally do a handoff with our clients to the media. So that they have now a direct relationship and then this media is inspired to communicate what is actually happening with 3m. We also need to communicate internally to three M's, so they're not necessarily design folks. A lot of them are and some of them are chemical engineers and physicists and scientists. So, we need to get everyone aligned, so internally, of course, we have documentation to help with the design- thinking and what's going on here or with this business where everyone is aligned. And of course at the same time we have to speak to our end user. And our end user, we have many ways, many channels, one particular channel was through trade events. And showing 3M in a new way. We're speaking to architects and designers, not to industrial trades. Therefore, how do we do this? So we arrived with a presentation which was around the beauty of the science, and how does it get applied And how can it help an architect and designer express what they do, so it's a new way for 3M to communicate. So for us it was a journey to help take 3M into this new territory and at the same their capabilities were by far stronger than anyone else in the industry in this particular space to really create together a true differentiation. And the results for us were, couldn't havve been better and we couldn't have been happier to have received such a quote from FastCompany. And what it did for us is it validated how we were communicating was working, it was clear. The design was clear, our messaging was clear, our audience understood it We were getting it back from everyone. That they understood what we were doing and that's our validation. Our tools were functioning properly. The industry validated as well by communicating that our work was working well through awards et cetera. So again just so sort of close out the It's important for us to define the opportunity and guide our clients. This is how we really look at things. It's very, very important. What we do is include what we call experts, to help bring a multiplier effect to the output and to look through a holistic lens, a lens that considers all at the same time Focusing that message so it's crystal clear to our end- user, to the audience. And that for us brings you to this love and appreciation for the product. And again, what we call, " Design for Strategic Differentiation ". Thank you. [ CLAPS ]

Brainstorm Design 2019: Design For Strategic Differentiation

Design

Through a process that is holistically considered and irreducibly complex, Todd Bracher Studio elicits key differentiation strategies for clients through the lens of design.