Brand Experience Design by Philips global head of Branding Design Thomas Marzano

Thomas Marzano is the Global Head of Design for Brand, Communication and Digital at Philips. During his 18 years as a professional creative he has worked in different design disciplines. He has been working at Philips Design since 1997 on a variety of award winning projects. At present, Thomas leads the global brand design strategy of Philips and he recently directed the redesign of the Philips Brand Identity, which was launched in 2013. He speaks for us on the Product Design Meetup in Antwerp. About Experience Design instead of User Experience Design, Brand Design in a holistic way and how to create a better and deeper felt brand differentiation.

Life is what happens when you’re looking at your smartphone

Thomas starts off with a catchy on screen quote. "Life is what happens when you’re looking at your smartphone" - Since the launch of the first IPhone in 2005 we haven’t moved on from our cellphone screens. There are so many more options to pass information, but to this day still, Siri doesn’t work properly, iWatches aren’t being used and others have tried and failed to introduce new platforms. He challenges the audience, filled with designers to think about the next step in our digital future.

Bullshit detector 2.0

Brand marketing has changed a lot since the early days. Coca-Cola used to advertise “Drink Coca-Cola earlier” with a toddler drinking a Coke on the poster. Luckily, no one could get away with that today. People have access to an enormous source of information at hand reach, and have learned to develop great ‘bullshit detectors’. Every promise or advertisement is checked, reviewed and double-checked by the customer. It’s the authentic and truthful companies that deliver best brand marketing today.

It’s not about great design skills

“It’s not about great design skills, it’s especially about great leadership skills”, an edgy thing to say to a room filled with designers. Thomas goes on explaining his view. It’s the decisions companies make that form the product. Strategic decisions mark out most of the product from advance. From there on the designer can only make the best of what the management asked him/her to do. This is where companies like Apple make the difference, they have a management policy where the customers experience is the philosophic starting point and profit comes afterwards. The time and budget allows their designers to create the great products they have. Most companies think of making profit as starting point, they create cheap products and the experience follows. In the end, people won’t mind to pay more for a great product, and Apple wins.

Innovation that matters to you

What is a brand? “The consumers feeling about your products, services or your organization” is a great definition, I like to formulate it more simply: A brand is what people feel, think and say it is.

You can’t force people’s feelings towards your brand, you can’t create brand. But you can do everything you can to manipulate these feelings in everything you do as a company. The packing of your product, the shop assistants attitude, the service clients get when something gets broken, etc. are what makes your brand. At Philips we want to achieve a brand image that answers to our company slogan “Innovation that matters to you”. My challenge is to get our 100.000 employees to support this and our 140.000 different products to measure op to this, in over a 100 countries with different needs and culture. All this under the same Philips brand. Philips has a lot of enormously talented people, but they have to be guided in order to create the brand we want. I look at the companies’ employees as an orchestra filled with talented musicians. No matter how talented the musicians are, if they aren’t guided in playing the same song there will just be some boisterous sound.

Brand Experience Design

Brand Experience Design might not sound familiar to you. It’s the point where branding makes the difference in the experience of the user. Think about chairs, has anyone ever wondered why there are so many different chairs? They all fulfil the same amount of functionality and user experience. The difference is being made in the branding. We recognize the decisions, style, values, etc. of a certain brand, and this is what differentiates one chair from another. A Mercedes, Audi and BMW deliver the same amount of user experience, but are chosen based on the customers feelings toward that particular brand, the 'brand experience'.