Competing through brand style: A systematic approach to explain style strategies in product design

Abstract

Brands selling consumer products are known to strategically use a distinct and consistent style or design language across their portfolios, in order to communicate their brand identities and differentiate themselves from competitors. However, these styles vary from brand to brand, and across consumer product categories as well. How can a brand’s style strategy be defined, what factors affect the choice of a particular strategy, and how can designers decode these strategies? This paper unravels answers to these questions, and proposes a framework. The framework juxtaposes category-level and brand-level factors with brand style parameters, paving the way for understanding and explaining brand style strategies. It is assessed using pilot case studies. An important insight is that the array of influencing factors often have contradictory effects, opening up interesting opportunities for future research.