Are you selling something that is hard to get your arms around? Cloud storage, vital advice, or an idea, for instance. As technology advances, products and services have grown increasingly abstracted from everyday life. To market these types of products well requires making them less abstract.

Here’s how Harvard Professor, Ted Levitt, puts it:

“The less tangible the generic product, the more powerfully and persistently the judgment about it gets shaped by the packaging—how it’s presented, who presents it, and what’s implied by metaphor, simile, symbol, and other surrogates for reality.” [source]

In an increasingly digital world, we have fewer physical indicators of a brand to evaluate it by. You can’t smell the rich mahogany of a lawyer’s office or be impressed by the cleanliness of the showroom floor if you are engaging with them through their online portal or eCommerce site. This means that everything around the experience in that digital space and beyond shapes a greater share of the perception of your product or service. Brand supplies metaphor, simile, and symbol, which enable you to communicate “meaning” in a single instant of digital connection.

A straightforward way to represent this:

Many companies try to address this by describing what their product does, how it works, and what it accomplishes. However, describing features and functions isn’t the same as having a strong brand.

A strong brand is immediate. It shapes perception within the first few seconds of interaction. And those first few seconds are crucial if you work in crowded markets with large buying committees.

 

Making the right impression on 5-11 different people

According to Gartner, “the average enterprise B2B buying group consists of five to 11 stakeholders, who represent an average of five distinct business functions” [source]. So part of the buying journey is about persuading procurement heads, commissioners of public services, or potential partners that you are the ‘right fit’.

Here’s the thing. Your product doesn’t do this job; your sales team doesn’t even do this job. Your brand does – it’s the platform that underpins product, sales, and customer service – and brings it all together into one salient message that communicates instantly.

Questions for reflection:

• How is your product “packaged” now?
• What does it communicate?
• What impression does it make on the people who need to sign on the line that is dotted?

 

Making “digital service design” more human

When we started working with NEC Digital Studio, we found that they had a fantastic service offering, but an overarching idea that was much bigger.

Working collaboratively with everyone from their senior leadership team to their employees to their customers, we created a central brand proposition ‘made for life’ which informed a new visual and verbal identity.

With this in place, their digital services now have greater tangibility. From the first time they introduce themselves (whether in an email, ad, proposal, or pitch) to the last interaction, “made for life” carries through and provides a mental cue for what makes them uniquely helpful.

This makes their service design offer more tangible, human, and meaningful.

View the full case study here.