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Something is useful if it serves a purpose or a person, or if it satisfies a need or creates the conditions for a need to be satisfied. An individual can be useful. So can an object. So can a service. All kinds of things can be useful, and all kinds of other things can be useless; something that is useful for one person may seem useless to someone else. So who is the judge of what is useful? And what criteria make it possible to judge?
To understand usefulness, it is interesting to observe how we define it over the course of a lifetime.
As children, usefulness opens up the field of possibilities. We constantly ask ourselves, “Why?” and “What’s that for?” These two questions shape our worldview, our understanding of what surrounds us, and the future we wish to create. The main criteria for assessing usefulness are logic, common sense and ideals.
As adults, usefulness becomes a means to an end. “How?” and “Why do that?” are the questions that guide us. We study for a career. We work to get paid. We make a life for ourselves in order to leave a legacy. The criteria for assessing how useful something is include how much time it will save, how well it performs, whether or not it can make money, and what kind of legacy it will leave.
The shift from childhood into adulthood turns our field of possibilities into a life path which is all mapped out.
It is a chance to ask ourselves the questions that we stopped asking. It has made us realise that we can no longer carry on as before.
So the “downtime” opens the door to three opportunities. One is to create an ideal world with the aid of logic and common sense. Another is to establish new criteria for usefulness, criteria which define usefulness as whatever enables us to improve society, to contribute to the well-being of humanity or to preserve the planet. Finally, we have the opportunity to act collectively, since we have realised that we cannot succeed on our own.
Some brands have already led the way, proving to us that it is possible. Too Good To Go is putting an end to food waste. Yuka is encouraging manufacturers to offer healthier recipes. Farmers’ drive-through stores are helping consumers to eat locally. Engie is rewarding those who consume less energy. Daddy is getting rid of its plastic packaging. Patagonia is repairing damaged products.
Others want to follow this new road as well, making use of their resources and their visibility to serve the world of the future. But how can brands achieve this?
Design is an extension of usefulness. What links them is the task and intention they both share: to make everyday life easier and thereby facilitate change. Design is a tool for transformation, and it makes usefulness visible and tangible. In a way, it is the voice of a brand’s commitment, which means it can help to raise consumer awareness and thereby create change, a positive action that may lead to progress.
So for the brands, what we’re talking about is designing business models that make it easy to change our behaviour, by getting citizens involved in the effort. So we need to design positioning that motivates people to make a positive impact. We also have to design identities that have a beneficial influence. And we need to design products and services that embody this new approach.
That means designing useful things, with honesty, flexibility and commitment.
We are all facing the same situation. The current epidemic is forcing us to take a time out. More than three billion human beings are on lockdown, giving those not on the front line fighting the virus the opportunity to reflect on what they really need, and want. This represents a major spring-cleaning for end-users, consumers and local communities. What do we want to change in our lives and society?
Both individually and collectively, this current state of introspection is quite evident, but it is nothing new. We must not forget that in recent years, we have witnessed a growing current reflecting a deep need for change with the Yellow Vests crisis, general strikes, the #MeToo movement, eco-anxiety, and more.
The quest for meaning, purpose and being useful to society have all emerged in recent months. Enacted in April 2019, the French PACTE law is an example of humanity waking up to the need to get involved.
CBA has embraced this revolution for almost three years now. Through our Critical Imprint® initiative, we seek progress through design. This ideological, methodological approach has allowed us to establish a brand’s value with consumers and society, as well as to measure their concrete impact. We are also aware that major change does not happen by itself. Therefore, we have built a partner network tackling collective intelligence (Bluenove), brand value evaluation (Occurrence) and forecasting.
During this time of great reflection, how can we understand the deep changes that will result from the pandemic disaster?
Even though scientists had warned us about these risks, we must admit that our societies were not ready. Instead of plunging into a fatalistic attitude regarding a relatively unpredictable future, we must see the positive side of this situation: anything can happen. We are no longer confined by a gloomy narrative that defines a de facto future. We can take back our power by using our imaginations to envisage a new path.
At the end of this pandemic, it may be tempting to go back to the way things were before, but this is neither a viable, nor enviable, solution. However, building a new tomorrow by razing the current world to the ground is neither realistic nor relevant. It is up to us as citizens, nations, and companies to sift through, keeping what is good, improving what is useful and abandoning what was leading us off the edge of a cliff. Beyond everyday solutions, including mass remote working and medical phone consultations, changes in philosophy are also looming.
As a design agency, we must serve as a bridge between reality and companies: brands.
To understand the upcoming sweeping changes, it is necessary to know how to listen for and decipher weak signals. As a design agency, we must serve as a bridge between reality and businesses through brands. To do this, we need to go further than our Critical Imprint initiative. Discussing and listening to consumers through collective intelligence and analysing opinions are tremendous tools, and ones we will continue to use. However, in order to find, track and decipher weak signals, we must go out to meet so-called fringe end-users.
By definition, something on the fringe exceeds normal boundaries. A fringe user pushes things to their outermost limit. We increase the possibility of seizing real opportunities for innovation by taking a problem out of context and framing its development beyond its target users.
In 1872, Alexander Graham Bell believed he could use emerging electronics to help deaf people to hear, by creating a machine that sends sound via telegraph with a transmitter and a receiver. That’s how he invented the telephone. For the same reason, 100 years later, Vint Cerf programmed the first messaging protocols for the newly-born internet. Emails were the only way he could communicate with his deaf wife when he was at work. The vast majority of users of phone or email users are not deaf, but two major innovations emerged from addressing the unique communication problems of the deaf.
Fringe users refer to two opposite extremes of the spectrum for the use of a product or service. Their needs and desires are amplified. They find workarounds to existing problems or frustrations, unlike average consumers. They launch trends and thus become early adopters of a new consumer movement. For example, veganism was considered niche only a few years ago, but is becoming increasingly mainstream.
We can speculate as much as we like, but we are still in the midst of the storm at the moment, and everything is too unclear to know what will happen in the future. The only certainty is the belief that tomorrow’s consumers and end-users will have been pushed to the extremes in terms of their desires, requiring a profound change in the rules of the game. It is up to us to find those who have something to teach us, to listen to and observe them in order to understand how today’s world is evolving into tomorrow’s horizons. In this context, the lens of Critical Imprint® does not bring certainty in knowing what tomorrow will bring, but it can certainly contribute to an improvement in a brand’s value, resulting in increased engagement, commitment, simplicity and efficiency.
The reason why? Faster and cheaper delivery, online exclusive deals, easier returns and 24/7 availability. Even if many people still prefer the hands-on approach of shopping in a store, high street outlets are starting to suffer as more and more people chose the comfort of online shopping rather than bothering to leave the house.
The leading actor of the offline shelves is undoubtedly the pack, one of the first touchpoint with whom we get in contact with the brand. When we switch channel and we find ourselves surfing on digital shelves, what is its role? How does it change?
The colors of packs, their fonts and call to action, pounce upon us from offline shelves redirecting our attention and our choices. On the other hand, when we’re on the online shelf, the pack often loses completely its function and it becomes a search engine support, a slideshow that over and over portrays the product with little effect on the user. If offline I can touch, see and read the pack, online I just can “recognize” it (from far away).
To deeply understand how the role of packaging changes online and how does it influence customer experience and purchasing choice, we went out in the field and talked with consumers. We did this in order to understand their purchasing behaviors and then we identified opportunity areas for brands and retailers as well as actions aimed at strengthening the relationship with their consumers online.
Offline, the packaging has always been crucial in the first stages of customer journey, where it orientates the products search, and in final stages, when we use the product and we store it in the larder. Differently from grocery offline shopping on the e-commerce platforms we can’t rely any more on packaging to attract and inform the customer on our products. On the other side, the central stages of customer journey – the using and the conservation of the product – are the first and unique phases in which online customer comes in contact with the packaging.
Goal number one of all the brands today is to be visible, easily recognizable on the platform and to be chosen among all the other products. Working on a strategy based on the creation of a series of emotional visual assets, varying from pictures to videos, to better visualize and understand the product. This will help the consumer’s navigation on the platform towards your product. This is what FLAVIAR proposes, alcoholic drinks brand, that presents users with visual depictions of the flavors associated with particular alcoholic drinks.
Collaborate to improve the experience on the retailer platform, in order to make your brand more visible than the others. When purchasing, online platforms are the ones taking the lead over products and packaging. There are several brands that, with specific agreements, get higher visibility on supermarkets’ online platforms. For instance, on Auchan’s e-commerce there are brands like Mulino Bianco, Granarolo, Citterio and Mutti that stand out on the homepage. Or on Carrefour website home there is a “magazine” section where brands like Rio Mare explain how to prepare the best tuna salads.
Delivery, unboxing, usage and storage are phases that are not considered enough when designing a pack. Working on the role that packaging can fulfill in these late stages of the customer’s journey can be a key differentiator to strengthen the relationship with your consumers. GLOSSIER‘s packaging is like a ziplock bag with pink bubble wrap inside, and it became a must in every woman’s handbag. It become such a hit that on the website that they even started selling the empty pack by itself.
Brands, too, are heading towards a VUCA world. Take the alcohol sector, for instance. It’s volatile because trends are changing faster and faster: a new cocktail supplants another cocktail at breakneck speed. Mojito one year, spritz the next, Moscow Mule today. Uncertain because as French vineyards are being bought up by the Chinese (for instance), French uniqueness and expertise is being jeopardised. Complex because the advent of the Loi Evin tobacco and alcohol law, anti-alcohol campaigns and European lobbies mean it is hard for us to make our voices heard. And lastly, ambiguous because it’s a struggle to know what to believe: when it comes to young people, there is both talk of binge drinking and drinking responsibly. We are supposedly drinking less, but better. Or perhaps we will all end up drinking non-alcoholic drinks? Or maybe even alcoholic drinks with health benefits?
Since the mid-1990s, we’ve slowly been transitioning from a unilateral, stable period into one that is unilateral and complex.
For brands, it has become just as hard to stand out as it is to keep a consistent course in terms of brand positioning and identity.
And yet, one generation has come up with the answer. The renowned ‘Generation Z’, born in the mid-1990s, precisely when the VUCA world was emerging.
Who is in a better position than Generation Z to help us to grasp what strategies we need to be implementing to make ourselves heard, without losing our integrity?
To achieve this, they start from the assumption that wealth does not equate with conformity:
A sheer abundance of influences, references, skills and experiences.
Yet they do not conform: there is just one guideline they follow: themselves.
It is their identity that takes various forms, not their personality.
After all, in the complex web of daily life, making yourself heard is all about adapting whilst still being true to who you are. The process is all about moulding yourself, but also finding where you should be.
Here are some brands who have already made this switch in the field of design, in three different ways:
• Responsive & adaptive design – by adapting to each medium the brand uses to express its identity. Coca Cola.
• Plural iconicity – by adapting one of the brand’s major features. Lacoste Live!
• Flexible design – creating a language that can be shaped. E Bologna (city branding).
All in all, these are brands that adapt their identity whilst remaining true to their brand positioning. After all, as Tinker Hatfield, the American designer, reminds us: u0022Good design is always functional. Great design tells a story.u0022 That story is yours.
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