Altered images of a marketing underling

Marketing Week (MW): To what extent can investing in good design help boost sales?

Andrew Barraclough (AB): My role is only 18 months old, but design is now seen as a strategic enabler for the business. We are a large pharma company, which historically has not leveraged its brands as much as it could have done compared to Procter & Gamble and Unilever. So it’s about recognising that design is a real differentiator in becoming a fast-moving consumer healthcare company. GSK is on a massive design charge. We are going through an evolution to inbed design thinking in everything we do. My challenge is about building a new function and competence within the business.

Alexandra Phelan (AP): Strong design can only contribute to the overall success of a brand. There is not always an immediate, tangible return on investment, but over time the positive effect of good design to the overall equity of a brand becomes apparent. This has a knock-on effect on consumer perception and, in turn, purchasing behaviour.

Michael Gillane (MG): In the UK, research from the likes of Bases and Packmaster has shown that ‘above’ versus ‘below’ average packaging design can swing [sales] volume by up to 20 per cent. It is probably even more important now because the media environment is so cluttered packaging has to work even harder. It’s also important to understand that great packaging builds brand equity, which in turn boosts longer-term sales. With Strongbow, for example, we completed a big redesign last July, which included fruit imagery for the first time. This has driven up people’s overall impression of quality and modernity by double digits according to research we carried out with Packmaster.

Nicole Goodwin (NG): We’ve not changed the Jägermeister bottle design for 80 years and that means that consumers recognise it easily. It stands out on the shelf because it is an iconic brand and people know what they are looking for. When you’ve got a good design and a strong brand it helps to boost sales because people are not just buying into the iconic visual but everything else that goes with it.

MW: What is your design philosophy?

MG: Not that long ago, packaging design was left to the juniors to cut their teeth on while the ‘big boys’ focused on above-the-line work. Packaging was the poor relation in the communications mix. That view is changing on the whole as consumers interact with it more often than any other touchpoint from the brand. Great marketing organisations treat packaging design as both a strategic and creative discipline and apply at least the same ambition and rigour to design development, evaluation and execution as they do to other elements of the communications mix.

Anthony Ingham (AI): Each W Hotel has an individual design personality drawn from the local context and design collaborations, with W’s ‘DNA’ serving as a consistent thread. W Hotels strives to develop cutting-edge, forward-thinking design, inspired by location and executed through collaborations with both emerging and well-known creative talents.

MW: How important is it to synchronise the design experience across all channels?

AP: It’s really important to be consistent for consumers. It’s one of the cornerstones of building a healthy relationship. Obviously brands have to adapt to the channels they communicate through, but the core brand message and voice must remain the same and all visual identifiers should be consistent. We had some big inconsistencies before we redesigned our brand visual identity [at the end of last year]. Our logo in retail, for example was Paddy Power but online it was paddypower.com. We now have one brand mark that will appear across every touchpoint. We have also introduced sub-brand logos that are consistent within the architecture, so consumers can tell it’s all from the same stable.

Adam Long (AL): Consistency of message is key across all channels and consumer touchpoints to ensure the image of a brand is maintained. Consumers don’t think of online and offline separately and so the design, image and message of a brand must remain consistent.

MW: What effect will QR codes and augmented reality (AR) have on design?

MG: Packaging as a two-dimensional, inert experience is a thing of the past. QR and AR might be replaced by another technology in five years’ time but the basic principle that we need to start building interactivity into packaging will increasingly be the norm. Whatever the technology is, the key to its success is to make sure it adds value to the consumer rather than just going for gimmicks. We have had success over the past 12 to 18 months using QR and AR on the Bulmers ‘Experimenters Wanted’ and the ‘Perfect Summer’ campaigns. We had around 50,000 interactions across those two campaigns, which was much more than our initial expectations. QR and AR will play an increasingly important role for Bulmers this year.

AB: It’s about what kind of experiences you want to build for consumers. There is a danger with using technology that because we can do it, we should. It has to be relevant to the brand, to the product and to the experience you want to create. QR, AR and this convergence of technology will be increasingly used as we go forward and it is high up on our agenda – it’s something we are working with and developing.

NG: We have tested QR codes but the results have been fairly disappointing, which could have been because of the content or because consumers don’t really understand them, and we’ve stayed away since. However, AR is interesting. We are looking at possibly integrating it into campaigns in the future to bring the brand to life. But first we need to do the basics well, since we’ve gone from not talking about the brand above the line to doing quite a lot. We will then look to create intrigue and a reason for consumers to want to interact.

AI: Mobile is Starwood’s fastest-growing booking channel with revenue up 138 per cent year-on-year, so it is an important channel for W Hotels. QR codes and AR provide a low-cost and efficient means of driving people to specific, tailored mobile content. They also make a fantastic tracking tool, allowing us to understand more about who is engaging with our brand. By using QR code data, companies can see the number of people scanning the code, the device they are using to interact with the content and what they are doing on the webpage they have been driven to – information that is invaluable.

AL: People expect immediacy in digital media and as such QR codes have had little effect on the whole as many give a disappointing consumer experience because of poor connection speeds. However, QR, and AR in particular, have the opportunity to add value to the consumer by providing an experience that cannot be achieved by packaging.

MW: What percentage of your marketing budget is assigned to design?

MG: On a big project like a brand transformation, particularly for brands that have a complex architecture with several products in the range, we could be spending between £500,000 and £1m just on design and consumer qualification work. Bringing a new design to market will also incur additional costs in terms of writing off the old design and the transition, which should not be underestimated. For a total brand redesign we would be looking to get return on investment within one to two years.

MW: What examples do you have of recent redesigns?

AP: Paddy Power turns 25 this year and we thought it was time to take a look at our brand visual identity (BVI) because it didn’t really speak about the brand that we have grown into. We have developed a new identity that has mischief and entertainment at its core.

There are a couple of immediate visual indicators such as having the logo at a slant, which is very representative of Paddy Power coming at things from a left-field angle. We also developed a range of mysterious interventions, like the small sketches that pop up at certain moments, and that’s just about entertaining and having a bit of a laugh. They will all begin to come to life when we introduce the new BVI online.

AL: The re-usable spreader [on the new Aftercut Even-Flo product] features unique ‘spreader ball’ technology to apply lawncare products evenly across the lawn. We worked with Webb deVlam, which used its consumer insight techniques to gain a clear understanding of how we could improve the experience and effectiveness of our range and how products in the gardening sector are viewed and used.

MW: What will be your biggest challenge in 2013?

AB: The communication of what design is within the business is ours. If you ask most people, they would probably say design is just packaging and that for me massively undervalues and under-utilises design. Design can be strategy and it plays an important role within innovation. A large part of my role is building a team of global design management, which we have in the US, China, India and the UK, but it’s also about educating and building case studies and spreading the word of design. It’s about imbedding design into the marketing function and changing the dynamic in the way we partner with marketing. [GSK has recently appointed The Brand Union to handle its new global corporate branding and communications brief.]

NG: We want to continue to drive growth for the brand in what is a competitive market. We will also be building on the new marketing campaign and showing people that there is more to the brand than just the [Jäger]bomb [a shot of the spirit drunk with Red Bull]. We are not trying to move away from that necessarily, and we are very grateful for it, but we want consumers to realise there is more to us as well.