Case Study 3

Interaction with the customer can redirect an entire attitude towards a brand when it’s being used to connect to the customer on a more direct and personal basis. The toolmaker, Craftsman was for a long time a reliable and trusted brand but it became a good example of a brand becoming complacent in their connection with the customer. They went from that reliable brand to “that brand that’s not the best but not the worst”. The solution is to make a better user experience that resonates with the ideals of the customer though engaging interactive design on the web. http://www.craftsman.com/ . Now Craftsman is defined as the suburban middleclass handyman who likes to have sweet tools at a reasonable cost. The site is visually appealing and so keeps your interest long enough to receive their message.

By giving people a more compelling and interactive web experience user become engaged and invested on some level into the site and therefore the brand. Looking at the way Tag Heuer has done their site we can see how the user experience is enhanced to the point that there could be 20 to 30 minutes of exposure just enjoying the aesthetics and soothing motions. You can visit the site here:
http://www.tagheuer.com/eyewear/index.lbl?lang=en .

A good example of adaptable interaction of user interaction would be on the website:
http://www.hulu.com/ They allow you to choose your favorite channels and create a profile that adapts to your input so that you can weed out the things that you don't want to see. This type of media will soon take out cable TV that has poor interactivity and user interface.
A bad example of adaptable interaction would be on the site tigerdirect.com  http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/failedsearch.asp?keywords=gs4 . They put so much in your face at once and have no way of making it possible to track down the thing that you want to buy.

Brand Strategy and Identity

If a brand strategy needs to stay aligned with the highest levels of an organization then what are the limitations for creativity as a designer? In school we learn new techniques for implementing design tools but in the end when we land a job at some firm, is there creativity beyond creative director? If you consider that creativity is both new and useful and you aren’t the person working with the customer you can’t really consider anything that you do creative. You are just another pick ax in the salt mine. Perhaps it’s just a matter of semantics but what really needs to be focused on is your knowledge for how people view and perceive aesthetics and drop the pursuit of being a creative person. Beyond that your job is to be able to communicate with the people around you and show them that you can communicate with the end user.

To understand how this applies to branding we just need to consider some basic components of communication through design. Firstly whom are we communicating to and secondly are we speaking the same language. By creating an identity for the brand we are speaking the language of a specific demographic otherwise the message will never be understood. Does it even require creativity to brand for a specific demographic? If all we need to know are jocks like shiny fast metal-looking graphics and bikers like black leather jackets and a load of attitude than getting your message across is simply a matter of plugging in the right elements with the right intonations.