Last Tuesday Koos went to the Design Management Network meeting in Breda. The subject was ‘Emotional innovation in design’ and included a special presentation by father and son van Kralingen, who have recently published a book called ‘Emotional innovation‘. It was quite an interesting talk and it gave some good food for thought.
Their main theory is that people consume emotions and are always looking for positive emotions and try to avoid negative ones. As long as you consume more positive than negative emotions, you feel happy. Business – and their products and brands – should focus on creating these positive emotions. But brands are mostly described as a set of values, which are derived from a certain context. These values can then be used by designers to guide their creative efforts. These brand values are multi-interpretable and ‘sec’ do not provide enough inspiration. Au contraire emotions. There are 3000+ emotions and people are capable of distinguishing at least a thousand of ‘m and can pinpoint exactly how they feel at that distinct moment.
Using these emotions as an enrichment of brand values can provide designers with better guidance and inspiration in their creative process. As an example they presented a case. They were creating a new cola and the main brand value was ‘naturally’. They asked young designers to come up with ideas for packaging and these ideas were pretty lousy. Then they enriched the brand value ‘naturally’ with 6 emotions and again asked these designers to come up with packaging designs. The result looked much better. But they were cutting some corners here. The level of detailing of the two designs (a rough sketch vs. very detailed rendering, incl label, water drops, etc.) was a lot apart and if you would have given them one emotions and later on 6 values, what would have happened?
The presentation was very lively and rich of examples, but their own ‘proof of concept’ was not that convincing. The absence of context – although they did acknowledge the influence of context on emotions – is also something that raised Koos’ eyebrows a little.
Overall we definitely see the use of emotions to enrich brand values and transfer the intention to designers. We see it as one of the tools of strategic design with the goal to bridge the gap between strategy, marketing & research and the development of service & products. And we are already working with emotions. It’s actually the content of one of our workshops, a half a day session, which provides you (a.o.) with approximately 250 emotions to help you express the ‘feeling’ of your brand. A good way to make your brand tacit and it provides you with the ability to discuss it with others.
