Brand design is so much more than the artistic veneer it once was. It’s about orchestrating and delivering a total experience based on a deep understanding of what the consumer wants. When orchestrated perfectly, the design provides brand differentiation and delivers an experience that’s positive, memorable, and unexpected. In the fast-moving world of consumer goods, the opportunity for direct consumer experience with the brand is minimal. That is why Procter & Gamble’s previous way of thinking about design—regionally organized package and product design focused on simple aesthetics and technical aspects—gave way to a global design strategy based on the totality of the brand experience.

At P&G, (where I was formerly Director of Design), developing design as a core competency requires support by company “champions” who understand the potential role, value, and power of design in differentiating and building brand equity. Design is not an endpoint; it’s a journey based on the many aspects of humanity and an eternal quest to learn more. Like personal relationships, the total brand experience is the sum total of all the experiences or impressions. When business leaders understand the value of a global design strategy, nuances of the brand experience become integral to creating a design culture—one that delivers a holistic brand and the image of a product that has been carefully crafted for the consumer.

When creating a design culture, a company needs to cultivate design champions at all levels of management. P&G used anecdotal evidence at the ground level to help recruit those champions. The company was marketing high-quality, better-performing products in the feminine and baby care categories, but other “super brands” were gaining market share. Design champions helped P&G reaffirm its leadership in those two categories.

Here’s an example:

The Zest brand needed to expand from bar soap to body wash to stay competitive in the category. Ideation processes and deep consumer learning yielded an opportunity to develop an ergonomic, dynamic body wash bottle shape that has a visually arresting appeal on the shelf. The curvaceous package shape repositions Zest in the body wash and shower gel category.

If design is about the orchestration of end-user experiences, innovation is about the matching and connecting of brands and businesses with ideas that win for the consumer products company and the consumer. Innovation can be about leveraging consumer knowledge or the opportunity to deliver technology in new ways, solving previously unsolved problems, or a host of other connections between ideas and businesses that require the design of orchestrated experiences.

Read more of Phil Best’s insights on design champions.

By Phil Best, Vice President of Product design and Innovation, LPK Design