“Tribal Aspects of the Brand”, Nicolas Minvielle, Design consulting group

“TRIBAL ASPECTS OF THE BRAND”, OCT 23-24, LJUBLJANA
Nicolas Minvielle, Design consulting group, France

Nicolas Minvielle served as Philippe Starck’s brand manager for seven years. He then created the Design consulting group, a multibrand company specialised in all aspects of design management. He holds a PhD and is now professor at Audencia School of management, and also teaches at the French national school of design. He has published two books on design management and numerous research articles on the subject.

Nicolas Minvielle examines strategies used by some designers in order to create and develop their brands. Some aspects of these strategies deal with licensing and co-operation strategies, tribal aspects of the brands and IP protection of their assets.
For numerous years, says Minvielle, designers have been hired because of their design capacities. Charles and Ray Eames, he points out, are now historical figures of the profession, but at their time, they were purely recognized as state of the art professionals.
But things have changed – quite a lot. Design is everywhere and one sometimes wonders, he offers, if this practice or this product is really “design” or “designed”. The press and media reconnaissance around designers and the importance of their names can be seen in a slow but important transformation of the legal relationships with their clients. More and more deals, Minvielle points out, are now made on a “brand license” rather than on a “drawing license” basis. “The difference is extremely important and underlines the fact that designers are now becoming brands, companies hiring them on their name and communication as well as on their designing capacities”, says Minvielle.
The different techniques that have been and are currently used by designers in order to create is of particular interest for Minvielle. “Most of them are linked with the subtle choice of partners and licensees in order to create a sufficient buzz. In order to be able to capitalize on this however, designers need to communicate clear values in the same sense as other brands do. This differentiation process will allow them to set up a notoriety management system.”
All the components in the system must of course be protected in order not to allow other possible concurrents enter the market. This can be done, offers Minvielle, by taking advantage of aggressive IP strategies – naturally – but also by developing informal links with additional partners and, from time to time, by shifting and changing partners.

more: www.design-consulting-group.com

Back to Big Design Conference Programme
Month of Design Conference - register here