How are branding and service design connected?

A few years ago I attempted to introduce a service design practice within my company’s UX strategy & research org.

This attempt failed spectacularly. To be fair, it might seem to many that a marketing technology company has little to no need to offer clients service design. And in reflection, the way I tried to present and sell these capabilities was subpar at best.

I didn’t speak the language of our business and our clients. No one knew or cared what a service blueprint was because they couldn’t see how it could impact the business, and they couldn’t see it because I did a poor job of communicating it.

However, the organization I work for and the clients we serve do care, and they do resonate with the value of brand and customer experience.

This was my in. I have experience in brand strategy and design, so I shifted my focus away from UX and towards brand.

This is the background and context for my first design question for my academic pursuits and future writing on this Substack:

How are branding and service design connected?

My theoretical answer is that the best brand strategy and design can fail to impact a consumer if the experience of the product or service doesn’t align with what the brand is attempting to communicate. Marty Neumeier’s oft-quoted definition holds that a brand is basically defined by a person’s perception of the product or service. Yes, of course a brand’s identity, strategy, and communication intentions are important, but if the service fails to deliver, it’s all for naught.

I also believe it works the other way: too often, brand strategies and identities fail because they aren’t informed by the employee experience and the process of delivering and experiencing a product or service, both of which are core areas addressed within service design.

This, again, is my theory, and I wanted to see what I could dig up to either support or refute it. Let’s review what I discovered to help answer this question:

I was excited when I unearthed a paper by Simon Clatworthy, a professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, titled “Bridging the gap between brand strategy and customer experience.” The title alone gave me a feeling that I was on the right track in finding connections between brand and service design. In his paper, Clatworthy paints a picture of a brand megaphone that translates the DNA or personality of a brand to influence the delivery of service touchpoints. “Brand transformation for services requires transformation into multiple touchpoint behaviors,” he writes, as part of an overall argument for the experience-centric organization (which he has turned into an O’Reilly book). Clatworthy essentially argues that one of the most effective ways to translate a company’s brand strategy into something consumers will actually care about is through the service the consumer is purchasing.

There is also supportive content for the other side of the coin. Mauricy Motta-Filho observes that service design teams often feel ill-informed when attempting to translate desired brand communications into a service experience. This is largely because brand designers and strategists don’t often consider experiences and interactions when forming their guides and governance. In Motta-Filho’s paper “Designing for the Brand Experience,” he describes a “Brandslation” framework and process that essentially combines elements of brand and service design discovery into brand experience principles, designed to govern service delivery in a way that positively amplifies the brand and business.

Finally, in the Medium article “From Promise to Proof: Building Brands Through Service Design,” Ansı Rona-Bayıldıran puts it perfectly: “a brand only exists when it’s experienced.” Essentially, all the workshops, research, foundation writing, and well-designed identities and manuals become meaningless when a consumer has a poor experience with a business. That experience is the association that is created. Rona-Bayıldıran goes on to say that every journey, interaction, and service failure impacts far more than the usability of a product or service. It impacts the brand of a business at its core.

As someone who spent a good portion of the early part of my career working in UX design, I find it exciting that some of the methods that have been shown to work in product and service design can also work in brand strategy and design. Brand experts can and should co-create brand outcomes with employees and customers. Brand research is nothing new, but that research should include insights on the customer and service experience. When I build brand systems, I love including principles and governance related to the experience of the brand. I don’t think branding should take over service design as a practice, but it should at least consider the customer and service experience in the process.

Sooo…

Branding and service design are connected through the most important brand association: the customer experience felt through the delivery of a service or the experience of a product.

Therefore, it’s important for brand builders to weave elements of service design into their overall brand strategy and design process.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading and please feel free to challenge me, tell me I’m foolish, or bring up something I am missing from my attempt at answering these questions. I want to grow as a designer, writer, and educator and I can’t do that if no one ever tells me I’m wrong about something.

Further Reading:

https://designresearch.no/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Designing-for-Brand-Experience.pdf

https://servdes.org/pdf/2009/clatworthy.pdf

https://ronaansi.medium.com/from-promise-to-proof-building-brands-through-service-design-86cda52a2cbd