Consumers no longer buy products. They buy brands. The power of a brand lies in what consumers have “learned, felt, seen, and heard about the brand as a result of their experiences through interaction with brand’s touchpoints “(Keller, 2013, p. 69)). The designing of these experiences is called Brand Experience Design.
Brands have become one of the organizations’ most valuable assets. This entails that storytelling has become more important. It helps ensuring a brand has a single and consistent proposition. However, when a brand does not live up to its story, the story is nothing more than empty words to persuade a consumer. Therefore, it will not only be essential to tell a consistent story but also to prove it.
To achieve this, brands have to think from a central idea and translating it into the brand’s different touchpoints. Think about central ideas like Nike’s Just do it or Coolblue’s Alles voor een glimlach. While these are successful examples that organizations look up to, they don’t organize themselves to do the same. So the question is how to help these organizations think more from such central idea?
This project is executed in collaboration with creative agency Selmore. Selmore believes they have the answer to this question: Guiding Ideas. Guiding Ideas are meant to spark inspiration and give guidance to the brand builders during brand experience design. It is a guiding principle and forms the basis of the design process of brand touchpoints (Calabretta et al., 2019). Selmore uses creativity to help brands grow with Guiding Ideas.
Guiding Ideas can potentially function as brand ideas for organizations that help translate the brand’s story into the different touchpoints. Selmore believes in this potential, but the reality is still different. Selmore experiences that Guiding Ideas are not used correctly and therefore do not reach their full potential. In line with this observation, the purpose of this thesis was to research:
How to exploit the unexploited potential of a Guiding Idea?
In other words, the aim was to investigate how to create a warm bath for Guiding Ideas that, at the same time, can contribute to better usage of Guiding Ideas.