Marketing

Design and brand core

For more than 60 years the German design Council is committed to the German Design. For a year, received the German Design award is also an award for brand leadership is coming now.

Driving pleasure in the 21st century. Century? BMW Hybrid i8

Competitive products with good Design and in all the world-export – with this strategy, the German economy should come after the Second world war on the feet and on the successes of earlier decades to build. So anyway, it was the members of the first Bundestag in 1951, which suggested at the time, the creation of a Foundation. Two years later, it was time for the Federation of German industries (BDI), raised with a number of companies in the spring of 1953, the German design Council from the baptism. Today, there are organized more than 230 design-oriented companies from various industries.

To make the company fit to compete in the world market, especially in the beginning was the head of the Frankfurt-based Design-conveyor concerns. “They wanted to promote German Design, and made it to the front bring,” the chief Executive of the German design Council, Andrej Kupetz, and to the point. As before, the international representation is part of German Designs on world exhibitions and the awarding of design prizes. But for the first time will be awarded this year in addition to the traditional Design-price is also a price for brand management.

Brand Design is always important

“For some years now, we note simply that we can no longer look at the topic of Design detached from the brand positioning, the brand strategy in the company. Because, above all, by the globalization and internationalization of companies, especially SMEs, is clear: The brand must be considered holistically, Design is a part of. Design is the implementation, the visualization of the brand strategy.” And thus the brand, Kupetz, a total work of art same. So that’s why the German Brand Award.

The theme of the brand is cross-cutting, comprehensive, as is the question of the pure product Design, says Kupetz. “Because it is the question. Where should I position myself as a company. What is the idea I was actually standing behind my products?”

Model brown Design: Steve Jobs presented in January of 2007, the iPhone

Apple is about as a brand to consumers great products, an iPhone or an iPad. But the important thing is that Apple have a good Story that Steve Jobs had brought decades ago with the “Think different” to the point. In order to have success, preached the Jobs that need to sell dreams, not just products. And as pioneers of German Design in the Silicon Valley in mind. When Apple brought out in 1984 its Macintosh Desktop Computer, IIc, stock Apple founder Jobs to the calculator of the German Designer Hartmut Esslinger design, which had previously made as a product designer at TVs a name. Later developed Esslinger and his company Frog Design for Microsoft surface from Windows XP.

When the first iPhone design by a German designer, the godfather: the analog calculator of the German Design firm Braun, designed by Dietrich Lubs under the brown-chief designer Dietmar Rams, the has dominated for four decades, the products of the electronics device manufacturer is decisive.

Braun calculator ET 44 (1987)

Think differently, do it differently than the other – that is, until today, the brand essence of Apple, explains Kupetz. “Everything You do in a company, one should follow a strategy, a core. And if You now in Your Offered to do, with Your products, Your messages that You send in the direction of consumers in direction of customers, the need to be everything rigorously. The must be led and because of the Design of a product at the end is only a part-aspect of it.”

The birth of German industry-design

Michael Thonet in Boppard on the Rhine has invented basically the industry Design in the 1830s chairs with his so-called Bentwood, which is only made up of six individual pieces of wood and eight screws passed, and after the relocation of the company to Vienna for many decades, 50 million copies worldwide and shipped was produced. “This idea of simplicity, of simplicity, of course this is one of the core statements of German design, but also has the Problem that it is not really identifiable or allocable to, such as Italian Design.”

Million production: Thonet bentwood chair

To be among the world’s admired German brands with prestigious products, especially German car manufacturers such as Mercedes, BWW, or Porsche. BMW experiments with his Slogan “sheer Driving pleasure” as well as Mercedes with the motto of Gottfried Daimler’s “The Best or nothing”, its core brand in the minds of consumers.

But other companies are in terms of brand strategy is extremely successful, says Kupetz. Vorwerk about was “a brand that’s going on at the time. A few years ago I would have thought, Vorwerk, the real cleaners, dried up with dust, the “leprechaun”. You are almost at the same time with a product that they call the Thermomix and in the circles of professional chefs such as Ferran Adrià in Barcelona to cooking, working mother around the corner to the cult product, and at the Pomadigkeit of the Kobold vacuum cleaner completely pulled over. That’s pretty huge.”

With Kobold and Thermomix to billion dollar companies

“I think it’s fascinating to see that they are a brand that completely different areas of the business has to have to do that with each other, the Goblin is a Element and Thermomix is a different Element. And it is highly interesting that you now have to deal with begun to study in depth a cross-brand Design, what you have not operated before. Now you say: We try to business areas that are very independent, but similar Design, in order to allow the customers of this total experience of ‘Vorwerk’.”

Vorwerk’s Headquarters in Wuppertal: billion transactions with the vacuum cleaners and kitchen appliances

Already now, the family swims company from Wuppertal, Germany on a wave of success. With its luxury-kitchen machines, vacuum cleaners and cosmetics of the group turnover last year increased by 23.9 percent to EUR 3.5 billion. With a sales plus of nearly 50 percent to 1.4 billion euros from the sale of the kitchen machine Thermomix is now the most important business field of the more than 130-year-old company, reported Vorwerk-partner Rainer Christian Genes at the end of may. Worldwide, the model is already sold in 13 countries. In Germany alone, the 2015 sales of more than 1000 Euro expensive kitchen machine with an increase to 90.6 percent had doubled to 429 million euros, almost, reported Gene. And, soon, the Wuppertal-start the Thermomix for sale in the United States. There is planned to transfer the at Vorwerk usual selling parties on the Internet, even living further away allow customer participation in the brand experience.