How can Service Design contribute to Service Branding?

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1 How can Service Design contribute to Service Branding? When a service meets the customers expectations and gives them a positive association and impression of the brand, than the company has created a good brand image in the customers mind. To be able to do this in todays market, companies need to connect with their customers through what they do, rather than through what they say. The customers today challenges the companies and the traditional form of branding.they expect every service experience to be great and staying on- brand. If it doesn t do that, the customer may tell others about their experience and change to a competitor. To create outstanding service experiences it is important to work with the service as whole. We think that Service Design can greatly contribute to the field of Service Branding. To explain why we think this, we need to take you through a train of thoughts. The changes in branding As you all know the word brand is used in business, marketing and advertising, as an organisational tool of corporate communication. Branding is meant to provide the consumers with the clarity needed to differentiate the organisation, product and service offer from competitors. Kathryn Best explains it like this:..brands visibly and experientially connect the internal workings of an organisation (its vision, values and purpose) to the external world of audiences, stakeholders, consumers and users. Brands are usually associated with physical products, especially consumer packaged goods, but in the last 10 years it has emerged an importance of creating service brands too. According to Dr. Brian Monger it is now widely recognized that branding is a vital issue for service organisations as well. In his article A Product Brand vs. A Service Brand, James White explains how the Mars chocolate bar, whose brand is a classic Product Brand, doesn t answer back, isn t anxious and always tastes the same. He continues to say that Every experience with a Product Brand is/ should be identical. This is where they differ from Service Brands. Service experiences are about the people and every experience can therefore be very different. It could be that one of the people representing the organization have a bad day, get anxious or just loose their temper. He uses an example of Starbucks and says that: Whatever you feel the Starbucks brand stands for, one thing all Starbucks customers can agree upon is that the chain has elevated the ubiquitous coffee house to much more than a commodity by making it a special, customer oriented experience, it s become a Service Brand. 20d.png,

2 Should services be branded differently than products? In the field of branding there is an ongoing debate whether Service Branding process differs from the more traditional Product Branding. Several articles have been written about the subject and even though Service Branding arises from Product Branding, many people (Hanna Viita, Dr. Brian Monger, James White) argue that it doesn t have much in common with its originating field. Whereas Product Branding focuses on one single item, they argue that Service Branding is more complex because it exists of various attributes. Brian Monger points out in his blog post about Service Branding that from a Marketing Services perspective, there are some problems with the traditional way of looking at branding, when it is applied to services. He uses an example of the definition of brands from the American Marketing Association which says that brands are: A name, term, sign, symbol or any other feature that identifies one seller s product or service as distinct from those of other sellers. This definition misses the key characteristic of services as processes, and it excludes the customer. Most brand development in the past especially concerning physical products has been built from the marketer s point of view: A brand as something the company creates. People who worked in marketing created a distinct brand through planned marketing communication efforts after the product was produced. The customer was almost never involved in the production process of these products. In case of services, they are processes and the basis for the brand development is much less standardized than with products. Because of this the customers participation, involvement and importance in Service Branding is increasing dramatically. Today the customers are more opinionated in regards to what they want and need, they have more offerings to choose from, and they can easily change their minds. They also have the means online to share good and bad experiences and influence each other. Unlike the marketing of products, in the service businesses, all levels of the organization are involved in creating the customer experience. If the employees are not all aware of the company values and means of communication, the service experience will not work. Reuben Steiger says in his article named Great Brands Are About Fusing Product And Service. How Do You Do It? that: Brands are symbols of experiences, and we have learned not to question brand premiums. He mentions that the brand of Apple has been used as a definitive example on how to integrate a brand and its products and services to create an extraordinary experience. The following picture shows the IPhone as a product that delivers services and fulfills the promise of the Apple brand.

3 Illustration from: Great Brands Are About Fusing Product And Service. How Do You Do It? He continues to say that:..all brands are challenged to consistently deliver coherent and satisfying product and service experiences to customers. And while the Apple era should be cause for optimism for designers and brands alike, there are still major organizational roadblocks to success, including the alignment of internal teams, budgets, and common definitions. Apple has created an architecture of control over their product ecosystem, that many brands can not compete with. Challenges with adopting a focus and integrating brand with product and service, to create a holistic experience, is still something many companies struggle with. Who should manage Service Branding? There are many discussions to whom can manage the process of Service Branding best. James White argues that many of the people who today are responsible for managing Service Brands, have their training from traditional schools of creating Product Brands, and therefore their attempts to apply this knowledge and use these processes on Service Brands will create problems. Reuben Steiger says in his article named Great Brands Are About Fusing Product And Service. How Do You Do It? that: The problem is that building great experiences is everyone s responsibility and nobody s job. We think that a service designer fits into this field of work. In the last decades the term design has moved from form and aesthetics to a means of improving services, products, operations and processes. An example of how useful it can be to integrate Service Design into the organisational strategy, can be that many businesses struggle when they attempt to sell to their customers through hundreds of different channels. A service designer will be able to help a company align the experience of the company brand, communicate the values and

4 make sure that the brand is integrated into the different channels to give a consistent experience for the customers. So what is Service Design really? What is Service Design Made by Sung Hoon Kim and Marianne Sælensminde The Service Design Network defines Service Design as follows: Service Design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers. The purpose of service design methodologies is to design according to the needs of customers or participants, so that the service is user-friendly, competitive and relevant to the customers One way Service Designers are able to help companies is by looking at touchpoints, the ways in which people come into contact with a company through their logo, retail shops, websites, offices and employees. All these touchpoints create an impression in the mind of the customer. They need to be analyzed and designed for and implemented carefully to create coherent and consistently managed steps that will give the customer a great experience every time.

5 Kevin Stirz a senior SEO consultant for FindLaw says that: Every contact we have with a customer influences whether or not they ll come back. We have to be great every time or we ll lose them The brands no longer represent only the identity of the organisation, but also the identity of its customers. According to Olins, in the last couple of years the areas where brands operate have changed towards: the emotional territory of people s hearts and minds. Kathryn Best says that the language of design can help bring this identity to life. This Emotional Branding connects the brand to people s emotional needs and desires. A service designer is specialized in recognizing the needs, emotions and expectations of the customer and putting the customer first. The impact of making the service stand out is that people will start linking the brand to the service. It is important to remember that good services are so integrated into our daily routine that it is often not perceived by the customers anymore, but bad service experiences can stay in the customers mind forever. As an example, we can take a recent project that was done in Oslo University Hospital by the strategic design firm DesignIt. This project made a vast change of the service and the experience for the customers. The task was to reduce the waiting period for patients that had been diagnosed with breast cancer at their doctors, to when they started the intensive examination and treatment at the hospital. The project resulted in a reduction of the waiting period by 90%, which had a huge impact on the anxiety levels of the patients and their overall experience of the service. Marie Hartmann, partner at DesignIt, Oslo says: You can create products and services that better meet the user s needs if you involve them in the development. It is this which is the designer special expertise: We put the user in the center, and have methods to find out their real needs and wants. The role of companies and brands has greatly changed in the society. Service Brands especially face many challenges in meeting with their customers. When they manage to stay on-brand in all customers interactions, this pays of in recognition and trust from their customers. To implement a service properly everybody in the organisation has to live and breathe the brand to make it more authentic towards the customer. It is not easy, but the reward is that it is much cheaper than mass communication and very hard to copy. We think that Service Branding could greatly benefit from Service Design. By analyzing the brands and their customers, using Service Design methods, we think this could create a foundation for differentiation and give Service Brands something more relevant and credible to say and do towards their customers. Creating memorable experiences within services is something service designers are experts in. A service designer can give the company deeper insight into their customers needs and create stronger relationships between the company and their customers. Service designers can also provide the companies with tools of measuring experience, means of collaboration and give useful insight into how it is possible to accommodate the customers. Even the most mundane transactions can be turned into memorable experiences. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore

6 The reward for consistently meeting expectations on brand values can be immense! Livework Interested in learning more about service design? Go to com/ or Written by Marianne Sælensminde and Vivienne Nürnberger. Course: Design Management at AHO (Autum term 2013).

7 References: Websites: html, Books: Design Management - Managing design strategy, process and implementation, Kathryn Best. Designing Brand Identity, second edition, Alina Wheeler. The Experience Economy, B. Joseph Pine the second and James H Gilmore. Branding and Product Design - An integrated perspective, Monika Hestad. This is Service Design Thinking, Mark Stickdorn and Jacob Schneider. Servicedesign, Søren Bechman. The Fundamentals of Design Management, Kathryn Best. The Essential Brand Book, second edition, Iain Ellwood.