Warc, 28 May 2014
LONDON: A proliferation of touchpoints means that brands are
having to reconsider how they engage with consumers and add value to those
interactions, with service design emerging as a new discipline aimed at
achieving that goal.
According to Dan Harris, director at service design agency
Fjord, "service design is about fusing a brand's 'top down' commercial
value-driven perspective – what it stands for, what customers can expect from
it – with 'bottom-up' emotionally-driven insight into more fundamental human
motivation and needs".
Writing in Marketing, he explained that design creativity
could help brands "rethink their entire ecosystem" and develop ways
to be useful to consumers that went beyond the original product or service.
Nike, for example, was enabling consumers to become better
athletes through its Nike+ Fuelband.
As Paul Kemp-Robertson of Contagious Communications noted in
Market Leader: "The brand has created a community of advocates who regard
Nike as a health and wellbeing partner, providing useful services and tools.
The Nike+ FuelBand becomes an integral part of their daily lives."
Similarly, British Gas has moved beyond a role as a mere
utility service with the introduction of its Hive Active Heating system, which
allows smartphone monitoring and control of temperature and heating from
outside the house.
Kemp-Robertson further observed that when Delta Airlines had
come out of bankruptcy the entire company, including the marketing department,
had been converted to the principle of service design.
As a result it had changed its view of itself, from a travel
brand to a destination brand, and had developed services such as an app to
enable concerned passengers to track their bags at every point in the journey.
Service design, argued Harris, can help brands and
organisation build a connection with consumers over the long term, creating
services that grow with consumers' evolving needs by delivering value over
time. That required marketers to broaden their use of data and personalise
services more effectively.
"The risk for brands that don't embrace this approach
is that a start-up will come along and do it better," he said.
Data sourced from Marketing, Market Leader; additional
content by Warc staff
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