YW White Paper Changing Behaviour by Design

August 2014

CHANGING BEHAVIOUR, BY DESIGN

Design is seldom given the respect that it deserves. Like

many creative fields, it is often seen as a beautiful add-on;

the fluffier side of marketing that isn’t completely necessary

but that is quite nice to think about if you have the time.

Businesses ask for a new logo like it’s a lick of new paint,

with very little thought having gone into the objectives and

the strategy of the redesign, and an underestimation of the

value that smart design can bring to marketing and business

challenges. Design can be a powerful strategic tool to

change perception, behaviour and business fortunes.

Design is, at its heart, about problem-solving and finding

better solutions. For this reason design requires solid insight

into a problem and a clear set of objectives that derive from

the strategy. It is important to ask the right questions and to

frame the problem correctly.

Introduction:

An Underappreciated Discipline

August 2014

CHANGING BEHAVIOUR, BY DESIGN

© 2014 YELLOWWOOD. All rights reserved. PAGE 3 www.ywood.co.za

Solving the wrong problem 4

30Part Four: Things to do Differently

5Part One: It’s Easy to Get it Wrong

7Part Two: Constant of Change

21Part Three: Creating an Experience to Change Behaviour

CONTENTS


During WWII, Allied Forces were engaged in a campaign of bombing German cities, targeting munitions and aircraft factories. The campaign was relatively successful, but the losses suffered on the Allied side were enormous.

As many as four hundred bomber planes were shot down during an attack one night, resulting in hundreds of lost pilots and other trained air force men. With such fierce German defence, the question arose: how could the design of the bombers be improved to better withstand the anti-aircraft fire?

A decision was taken to examine all of the planes that returned to the base in order to determine which parts of the plane were most frequently targeted and hit by the German fire. Data was collected on the most commonly damaged parts of the planes, and a plan was put forward to Avro, the manufacturer of Allied planes, to reinforce and armour-plate these parts of the plane. The Air Force was convinced that the redesign would make the planes much less vulnerable to attack – it was based on rigorous analysis and design that answered the problem.

That was until Abraham Wald, a brilliant statistician at the time, made the surprising declaration that they should not strengthen the areas that were commonly damaged by German anti-aircraft fire. They should reinforce those areas that appeared unscathed on the planes.

His logic, although counter-intuitive, was spot on. The sections that had been hit and damaged on their sample of planes had not prevented those planes from returning to base. Those were not the most vulnerable parts of the plane. They would only know which sections of the planes were really vulnerable by examining the planes that had been shot down, and since they did not have that information to hand, it stood to reason that it was precisely the areas that were not hit in the planes that had returned to safety.

Solving the wrongproblem

Of the 7,377 Avro Lancasters that were built, a total of 3,249 were lost.


Did you know that the world’s most elite restaurant rating system, the Michelin star, was started by the same Michelin brothers who founded Michelin tyres? It was conceived, in fact, as a marketing tool for Michelin tyres. At the start of the 20th Century, travelling by car was not something that many people did yet – and so the Michelin brothers decided to put together a guidebook that encouraged people to travel: a guide of interesting restaurants, hotels and attractions. The idea behind the guide was to make it as widely available as possible, and so it was given away free of charge. It was a marketing tool, after all, so how could they charge for it?

After a period of enormous popularity, Andre Michelin stopped in to visit a tyre retailer and noticed that a pile of his guides was being used to prop up a work bench. He was outraged. The Michelin Guide was no longer respected! People don’t respect what comes too easily, he thought to himself. Two years later, Michelin started charging for the guide. It became a valuable resource for travellers and a status symbol for restaurants.

Inversion of Intent

Part One: It’s Easy to Get it Wrong

Almost everything around us has been designed by someone. From the buildings that we live, work, shop and learn in to the products that we consume and the devices in our pockets, we are surrounded by the designs of others - people who have put forward their solution to a specific problem. These designs change our perceptions, our emotions and our behaviour – and often they do so in ways that were not anticipated by the designers at all.

“Everything around you that you call life

was made up by people that were no

smarter than you.” Steve Jobs, 1994


Today, 114 years after it was started, people travel the world to experience Michelin-star restaurants. Unfortunately for the founders, they do so more by plane than anything else. But it goes to show that changing people’s behaviour takes more than making something easy and accessible: you need to make it desirable.

Designing something that has the opposite to the intended effect is alarmingly common. In education, for example, it has been found that trying to raise standards by reducing the different ways in which people are educated and adhering to strict universal standards has actually worsened outcomes.1

In branding, nothing offers a starker warning than New Coke. In the 1980s, Coca-Cola was frightened by the results of blind taste tests in which it lost to Pepsi and so they redesigned their product to be sweeter and taste a little more like Pepsi. What was intended as a new lease on life for the brand resulted in an overwhelmingly negative response from the market. Consumers were furious. And within three months, Coke had announced the return of the old “classic.” In the end, sales of Coca-Cola increased significantly and the whole drama did arrest Coke’s decline, but certainly not in the way the company had intended. In a purely visual case study, GAP also famously had to retract their logo redesign after a strong backlash from the market.

Design mistakes can be enormous. Unlimited, in fact. The results of poorly thought-through, badly researched design can be worse than simply ineffective to the task at hand – they can destroy what you set out to do. It’s worth remembering that people are resistant to change (and the longer they are exposed to something, the more affinity they feel for it – we will cover this principle later)

– so a redesign is bound to be met with some backlash. But the importance of market research cannot be over-emphasised. And the handling of the relaunch is almost as important as the design. It’s important to tell the right story, tap on the right emotional cues and get internal buy-in before going to market.

In late 2012 Yellowwood embarked on a major re-brand project with City Lodge Hotel Group, from repositioning to marketing planning to brand asset re-design. We put the redesign of the four brands to the test with focus groups, to ensure that the right brand attributes were coming through and to ensure that customers could instinctively and correctly position the four brands in relation to one another. Did customers understand how the tiering of City Lodge Hotel Group offerings worked? While the initial redesign was met with positive reactions and triggered the right associations, customers perceived City Lodge (the second-to-top offering in the portfolio) to have shifted downwards in relation to the other three brands in the Group’s portfolio. Based on the qualitative customer feedback, Yellowwood altered the colour and descriptor of this particular logo before launch, resulting in a clear hierarchy in the portfolio. Without market research and testing, the design solution would have been successful for only three of the four brands.

Case Study: City Lodge Hotels

1The Opposite Intended Effect: A case-study of how over-standardisation can reduce efficacy of teacher education


Part Two: The Constant of Change

How the World Has Changed

“The growth in the internet, 24-hour television and mobile phones means that we now receive five times as much information every day as we did in 1986.” Says Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent for The Telegraph. On the production side, humanity now produces as much information every two days as we did from the dawn of civilisation up until 2003, according to Google CEO Eric Shmidt.2 It’s safe to say that we are thoroughly overwhelmed and distracted by information, messaging, brands and news.

In the 1940s, when Abraham Wald was fixing how the Allies thought about plane design, news was delivered through three channels: print, radio and newsreel shown before movies at the cinema. These channels were consumed one at a time, and none of them streamed news that was live. The news would have to pass through the Office of War Information, took days to reach its audiences, was censored and filtered to make sure it sounded optimistic.

2http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/schmidt-data/


Today, news couldn’t be more different. It’s live, unverified, multi-media, uncensored, participatory and consumed across various channels at the same time. We’ll sit reading twitter on our phones, with the TV on in the background and our laptops open on our laps. And news isn’t the only thing that has changed. The volume, format and speed of news delivery are merely symptoms of the real change taking place in the world: accelerating technological advancement.

Moore’s Law dictates that microchips’ performance doubles every eighteen months – getting both smaller and more powerful. We now have phones in our pockets with greater processing power than the computers involved in the first lunar landing. Self-driving cars are coming soon. And virtual reality contact lenses seem to be not far behind. How does all of this relate to the topic of this paper? It means that attention is in ever-shorter supply. If your design doesn’t catch attention in this barrage of distraction there’s little hope of establishing a brand relationship. It also means that the tools with which to influence people have changed. And they have changed radically. There are so many more channels, formats and techniques to influence what people know and how they feel than there have ever been in the past.

And since people’s perception of the world is created by their context, the more that their context changes the more their perception and behaviour deviate from that of previous generations.

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THEN (1940’s) - How we GOT the news...

NOW - How we GET the news today

NewspaperDaily

Radio3 times a day

Newsreel (Movie Theatres)Once a week

Medium

Bus, train, home (or anywhere)24 hrs a day


And yet, even in this context of staggering and rapid change, a few key things remain constant: universal design principles, and the human brain.

These are the result of evolution, the development of the human brain and body and they do not change with design fads or technological changes. The core elements of design (colour, shape, line, texture, space and size) have been used to communicate and influence our perception for millennia. In fact, they have been controlling our impression of things since long before they were defined.

Colour, for example, can be warm or cool, passive or active and it can be used to influence people’s moods and stimulate their emotions. How we interpret colour, and the associations we make with each colour, may vary from person to person and from one culture to the next, but the fact that colour changes our mood is universally true.

These core elements can be combined to develop universal principles of design. We would like to propose that there are four key principles that govern how people perceive things:

1. Alignment2. Contrast3. Repetition 4. Proximity

1. Understanding the universal principles of design

How we see the world, and what contributes to aesthetically pleasing and functional design, have not changed.


1

2 Repetition: Repetition gives design a sense of unity. It is used throughout design – from the creation of patterns (textile design, premium packaging, security patterns on banking collateral) to magazine layout. In branding, repetition is used to create consistency across all brand touch points and to entrench a brand mark in the viewer’s mind. Like alignment, repetition creates a perception of stability and calm. It is also an effective way to give a sense of consistency and predictability, making viewers feel safer and more confident at a subconscious level.

Repeat, geometric patterns are a common feature of African design work - from shwe-shwe fabrics to the bold, bright, geometric patterns on Ndebele homes - and can be an effective way to give designs an African aesthetic.

“But that’s not why people watch TV. Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared.”

Philip J. Fry, Futurama

Alignment: The way in which elements align and connect is important for the perception of balance. When elements are perfectly and symmetrically aligned, they contribute to a sense of stability and balance. When they are deliberately misaligned or aligned irregularly, they can seem casual, relaxed and quirky. But they can also feel clumsy and uncomfortable if handled poorly – particularly to audiences with OCD!

Because alignment is central to how we perceive things, it can be used to great effect in optical illusions. The famous ‘Café wall illusion’ which uses alignment and misalignment to make a series of lines seam tapered, has even made its way into architecture (None of the lines in the image above are anything other than perfectly vertical or horizontal)

In the natural world, organisms align when travelling in groups. This phenomenon, also known as flocking, occurs at both microscopic scales (bacteria) and macroscopic scales (birds). These patterns can be simulated by creating simple rules and combining them. This is known as emergent behaviour and is used in game development to simulate life and natural behaviour.


Repetition is used in advertising (often badly!) to ensure that a jingle or a catch-phrase sticks. It is used in TV shows and even books, where plots become formulaic and different shows or episodes follow the same pattern. And it is used in early childhood development – repetition aides the learning process by giving children the opportunity not only to practice, but to ‘predict’ the next sequence of events. This strengthens their memory and makes them feel safer and smarter.

While the ‘exposure effect’ (discussed later) dictates that the more we are exposed to something the more affinity we feel for it, designers and marketers can overshoot this mark, creating repetition that becomes tedious, monotonous and dull.

3 Contrast: Contrast can be created by using colour, shape, scale/size, texture and even direction. It is a simple way of creating tension and dynamism in a design. In art, the method of accentuating the contrast between shadow and light is called chiaroscuro. In interior design, for example, one can contrast materials - using wood in a bathroom to bring warmth and nature into what is usually a quite clinical space.

From a behavioural point of view, contrast can be used to guide or channel movement. Think about foot and cycle paths that are divided by contrasting textures or colours.

4 Proximity: The relative closeness of objects and elements to one another has an impact on the tension, balance and mood of the design. A spacious shelf or document layout will feel premium and luxurious. Cramming merchandise together gives a perception of chaos.

Proximity helps determine relative importance and hierarchies of information. Because of its connection to size in a visuo-spatial sense, proximity can catch attention and influence behaviour by triggering the part of the brain that relates to perceived threat.


Guiding Behaviour by Design: The Basics

The primary goal of design in a marketing context is to guide how people perceive the brand – whether it’s to make the brand feel more premium, more accessible or more contemporary.

Design is used to give brands ‘an energetic feel’, make them feel ‘natural’ or ‘African’. And it must do all of this, of course, while differentiating the brand enough from its competitors that you’ll notice and remember it, but not so much that it’ll confuse the customer by disrupting all the category rules.

But design is also used to do more than change how people perceive the quality, provenance, taste or experience of a brand or item. People have been using design to change how people physically behave for generations – from architecture and urban planning directing how people move, to the minutiae of product design. By simplifying processes or guiding navigation, designers can send end users down specific paths, change how they interact with objects and influence them to do things differently. On the next page are a few key techniques for influencing people:

Based on the insight that you don’t pay attention to the packaging in categories that don’t interest you, Ice Tropez utilises the shape, colour and visual cues of the cider category to attract the attention and interest of cider drinkers to wine. Ice Tropez is a wine-based cocktail launched by winemakers Le Domaine Tropez and proves that you need to speak the form language of the audience you are trying to attract. Which category conventions do you break and which do you harness to change behaviour? It all depends on whether the intended audience is made up of existing users of the category or not.

Case Study: Design to Attract New Users to a Category


Change Perception• Exposure

Exposure is a key method of influencing how a person feels about design. Increased exposure to design has been proven to increase affinity for it. The trick is to balance consistency across all touchpoints with a little variation so that the viewer does not get bored. Design the experience for each unique touchpoint, but keep consistency of colour, shape, mood etc. This increases brand recognition and recall – helping to put your brand into the subconscious world of memory and instinct.

• MoodThe most important job of a brand designer is to influence how the customer feels. Design gives products and brands their mood – intelligent use of space, colour, line and shape can dramatically alter the mood of a brand.

• QualityDesign alters a consumer’s perception of quality. If the goal is to premiumise the product, then the designer will need to understand what denotes ‘premium’ in that category, that market and that time and place. Minimalism may speak ‘premium’ in an Apple store, but rich texture and embellishment may speak premium in a night-club, and a rough, natural, organic feel may speak premium in the restaurant business. Designers should be very familiar with the quality trends, customer insights, category codes and the brand’s strategy so that they can create designs that hit the mark.

Change Behaviour• Constraint

By thinking of all available responses and limiting what these can be, designers can ensure end users don’t waste time doing the wrong thing. For example, a major design flaw in USB ports is that it is impossible to tell which way is up and they seem to always be the wrong way around when you try to use them. Designers should contemplate how many options the end user will try, and make it obvious which of these is incorrect.

• NavigationThe modern consumer is met with such overwhelming choice that designing for quick navigation becomes imperative for brand consideration. Take cottage cheese, for example. It has variants in terms of texture (chunky or smooth), fat content (low fat or fat free), flavour (plain, chives, tzatziki) and brand. It is also packaged in similar containers to sour cream and cream cheese. The designer has a complex task when designing the SKUs to ensure that each looks the same and yet instantly recognisable as different. It requires an understanding of which category conventions must be kept because they ease navigation (the colour conventions of full-cream, low-fat and fat-free, for example) and which can be broken. It requires an understanding of which elements of design people see first and how to guide them to the right part of the shelf, and through the hierarchy of information using shape, colour and texture.

• Intrigue The human imagination is powerful. We’re a species of dreamers and storytellers, and we love to imagine, solve mysteries and fill in the gaps for ourselves. A powerful design technique is to create layers of meaning, and leave certain things unsaid and hidden. This piques the viewer’s interest and tempts them to solve or imagine. This kind of forced interaction builds a repartee with the user. The more they interact the more they discover.


Not all design principles are universal. Many of the ways in which design influences opinion are heavily dependent on time (trends), geography, culture and the individual. In short, our context determines how we interpret design, and understanding your target market’s context is absolutely essential if you hope to convey the right brand meaning.

Symbolism is entirely contextual and dependent on the viewer’s past history, experience and associations. An important lesson for marketers is that the meaning of a symbol is built over time from repeated exposure. Whatever symbol you design for a client, the meaning you seek to attach to it will depend on the success of all your marketing across every consumer touch-point. The design of the symbol alone will not convey your brand message. The swastika is one of the world’s most recognisable symbols. It evokes an immediate and powerful emotional reaction in most people – an intense horror and withdrawal. As a symbol, it is powerful in its simplicity and distinctiveness.

But this modern meaning of the symbol was built over the course of the twentieth century through the actions of the Nazi party. The origins of this symbol actually have nothing to do with Hitler or anti-Semitism. The swastika is an ancient symbol originating in the Hindu tradition and used throughout South and East Asia to represent life, its origins and cycles. It is an auspicious symbol that couldn’t be further from what it represents in a Western context.

The Red Cross may strike us as the universal symbol for a hospital. But hospitals had no universal symbol until the 19th Century. Today, you will find a red crescent as the symbol for hospitals in Muslim countries, and the red crystal was launched in 2005 to cater for countries unwilling to adopt either a cross or a crescent. The meaning of these shapes thus varies by geography and context. Designers should be very aware of differing associations and meanings in different countries and with different target markets when creating symbols for brands that hope to trigger unconscious associations.

From Universal to Hyper-Local

Colour is hugely important in design – it has a powerful and immediate impact on the viewer, influencing both what they notice and how they perceive what they have noticed. In a recent study, The Impact of Colour in Marketing, researchers found that up to 90% of snap judgements made about products can be based on colour alone.

Unfortunately, there is a staggering amount of pseudo-science and downright speculation about colour psychology out there. While it is undoubtedly true that colour has a psychological impact on all of us, it is not true that this psychological impact is the same in every one of us. We cannot predict the specific emotional impact of any one colour because our reactions to colour vary by personal preference, age, gender, culture and context. The meaning and association of colours also change with time. The fashion industry is an excellent example of how any colour can suddenly be “so last year”. Fashion, in fact, drives a lot of colour preference in the market and you will notice that colours start on runways and make their way through various different categories until they end up in the automotive sector. What starts as a camel-coloured trench coat ends up as metallic rust colour on your car five years later.

The semiotics of colour

Source: Joe Hallcock, study into colour preference and assocations, 2003

MALE

FavouriteColour

35%FEMALE

FavouriteColour

57%

23%

14%

14%

9%


There is a profound duality to the psychology of colour, in that both positive and negative associations can be attributed to the same colour. Below are a few examples of this.

Colour’s complex duality

There are, however, a few principles around colour psychology that can be applied universally to branding. The first, known as the

“isolation effect” dictates that the more an item stands out from its surroundings, the more likely it is to be noticed and remembered. Using colours or colour combinations which are not yet represented in a category is a good idea.

This must be tempered with the second principle, which is that of perceived appropriateness. While it is desirable to own a unique colour in the category, consumers judge a brand’s colour on whether it is appropriate to what is being sold.

LOVEPASSIONSENSUAL

TASTEHOT

WARNINGPAIN

BLOODVIOLENCE

EVIL

CLEARCALMPURE

STABLETRUTH

COLDSAD

TASTELESSFRIGID

BRIGHTHAPPY

OPTIMISTICWARM

SOURACID

CAUTIONINSIPIDBENIGN

NATUREFRESHCLEAN

LIFEGROWTH

ENVYGREEDTOXIC

MOULDSLIME

PREMIUMSTATUS

QUALITYDEPTHSPACE

DEATHQUIET

UNKNOWNHOPELESS

CLEANPURECALMCRISPFRESH

STERILEEMPTYBLANKBLEAK

GENERIC

Perceived appropriateness: is pink the right colour for a luxury car? Would BP want to be

seen as a ball of fire?


The appropriateness and meaning of various colours comes about from their connection to natural phenomena (the sky, forests etc.) but also from repeated use and convention in each category. Red, for example, is understood to signify ‘low-fat’ in the milk category. In politics, it has long been the colour of socialism and communism. This dates back to the red flags of the French Revolution, and it has been used from Communist China to the British Labour Party (until the 1980s). The EFF’s use of red berets and red overalls to signify radicalism speaks this same semiotic, building on the existing meaning and symbolism of the colour.

There is nothing “inherently” left-leaning about red except for convention. The conservative Republican Party in the US, for example, also uses red.

Red, green, yellow and black often represent the ideals of pan-Africanism or of Rastafarianism – and combinations of three or four of these colours are used in the flags of many post-colonial African states, such as Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Benin and Senegal. The meaning attached to these colours stems from the traditional flag of the Ethiopian Empire and all that Ethiopia represented: a proud, historically important African civilisation that had not been colonised.

Colour combinations are perhaps easier to “own” as a brand than individual colours are. But it’s important to remember that these colour combinations still take on their particular meaning from their context. The meaning associated with green, black and gold may not carry from politics into retail design or food packaging. It is all about context.

The Politics of Colour


Yellowwood’s redesign of Chinese perlemoen brand Abagold involved a rigorous analysis of what ‘premium’ means to a Chinese audience. As well as colour, texture and material analyses, we unpacked the various historical and contemporary styles of writing Chinese characters and symbols. Our research revealed that while a minimalist and clean typeface speaks ‘premium’ to Western audiences, the Chinese respect and appreciate a more graphic, handwritten type. The importance of local understanding cannot be overstated.

Case Study: Finding the Right Premium Cues in ChinaGood design balances the universal principles and

techniques of creating and/or changing perception and behaviour with culturally specific insight into the desired target market. From symbolism and colour, to the style of your typography, every element should be based on deep insight into your customers and their visual context.

Context

Emboss style

Slimstyle

Pictorialstyle

Engravestyle

Brushstyle

a design that combines the techniques of

traditional calligraphy and modern computer

known as Shou Jin Shu

- Slim Gold Style, the signature of Emperor Sung

stems from original Chinese oracle

scripts with a pictorial inference

represents the Ngai Bei stone engraving style

intricately created by hand with the Chinese brush.

This custom design is one-

of-kind done by calligrapher Tai Oi Yee


We can turn our conscious mind onto something that has caught our attention, but what exactly is it that makes it catch our attention in the first place?

Our environment is abuzz with stimuli. There are noises, shapes, colours and smells all around us. There is an entire spectrum of electromagnetic rays raining down on us, of which we can only see a tiny fraction and feel another small fraction as warmth. All of these stimuli would be completely overwhelming if we had not evolved a filtering system. Our eyes adjust to the brightness of a space. Our minds take in only so much information at a time, and no more.

Information about our environment is received in the brain from our senses – sight, smell, sound, touch and taste (as well as the lesser-known senses that didn’t make the 5 sense cut-off, such as our sense of temperature). In order to allow us to do other things besides sitting in a darkened room trying to cope with everything that is around us, our brains prioritise this information. Whatever stimuli are new, or pose a threat to our security, are those that automatically catch our attention and the rest is largely ignored. Because of the evolutionary drive for survival and being ready for threats, our brains are hardwired to be on the look-out for anything novel, unusual and unfamiliar.

It’s for this reason that when we’re travelling in a foreign country we take in so much more than when we’re sitting in traffic during our everyday commute. The experience is richer because we are paying attention to everything.

John Laurence of HeadSpace Neuromarketing says that “the brain is a cognitive miser.” It tries to avoid having to process things unnecessarily. Sille Krukow makes a similar point of how we process information. We have two kinds of thinking: automatic and reflective. Our automatic processing is what recognises that a person in front of us looks angry. Our reflective processing is what we engage to solve a maths problem. To try and conserve energy, we try to do as little reflective processing as possible.

This means we often rely on memory and past experiences, and we instinctively avoid complexity or having to think too hard. Once something becomes familiar, we stop paying it conscious attention.

The tension between familiar and unfamiliar

2. Understanding how the brain works

Our minds are the tools with which we make sense of the world, and although we like to believe we are in control of our thoughts and reactions, the way that we perceive is almost entirely subconscious.


We think that we see exactly what is in front of us, but our brain is constantly filling in the gaps, looking for patterns and making sense of the confusion. Pareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing significant symbols in seemingly random visual stimuli. Faces, as a primary and universal symbol, are seen throughout the world in pieces of toast, clouds, foam and buildings. Bizarrely, we respond to these “faces” as we would a real face – hence emoticons trigger an emotional reaction, and onlookers will stop to see what a shifty building is “looking at”. A number of famous brands utilise hidden meaning in their logos. Once this symbol is seen, it’s impossible to ‘un-see’ and adds a depth of meaning to the identity.

Sony Vaio moves from an analogue wave to digital, an arrow is formed in the negative space of the FedEx logo.

Seeing things that aren’t there and connecting unrelated things is what makes us such an amazing species. As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world.”

The Power Of Imagination

There is no need to consciously stop and evaluate what to do at a red traffic light, for example, because we know exactly what to do because we’ve done it a million times. The neural pathway has been stored and repeated, and our perception of most traffic lights takes place at a subconscious level that does not engage our conscious mind. You almost certainly can’t remember how many traffic lights you saw on the way to work today, but I imagine you’d notice and remember if you saw a flying car.

A large part of branding, in fact, is about utilising this cognitive laziness. Brands seek to become so familiar to the consumer that the conscious mind is side-stepped altogether: we see the symbol we recognise, and a host of carefully constructed and managed associations trigger and we put the product into our shopping cart without stopping to really think about what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. Most brand purchases take place on this level. They are subconscious and triggered by a ‘gut’ reaction.

This is important from a design point of view because it means that creating something to catch attention relies as much on the context and personal history of the intended audience as it does on universal design principles. Designers should seek to understand exactly what visual cues and traditions the intended audience is accustomed to, so that he or she can blend the right balance of familiarity and novelty in the design solution. Just enough familiarity to communicate to the end user what kind of category the brand is in in, whether it’s premium or cheap etc without them having to dedicate much mental energy to deciphering the signs, and just enough novelty to pique their interest and effectively position the brand. Each designer will need to decide which category conventions to retain to ease navigation, and which conventions to break in order to get the brand noticed.

PRIMAL & UNIVERSAL NEEDS:Greater universality of

symbolism / design

SOCIAL / CULTURAL / INDVIDUAL NEEDS:Greater specificity of design interpretation

& contextSelf Actualisation

Self esteemConfidence, respect, status

BelongingFriendship, community, family

SafetySecurity, employment, health

PhysiologicalFood, sex, danger

WHAT VISUAL CUES ARE FAMILIAR TO US?

So familiarity makes us comfortable with a brand, its category and products – but novelty is what makes things stand out.


From a design point of view, it’s important to understand how our minds prioritise visual information so that whatever design solution we put forward has the correct hierarchy of information to ease navigation and processing and to catch and hold attention long enough to influence a customer’s perception and behaviour.

Getting Noticed

We notice that which stands out from its surroundings, and we pay attention to what we’re interested in, looking for or intrigued by. If your brand doesn’t capture attention and imagination with its form and colour, it won’t get much of a chance to dazzle at the texture / detail level.

Top Down and Bottom Up Attention

1 Movement

As we’ve seen, a lot of what influences how a customer will respond to a design is dependent on what they have seen and experienced in the past. Although the world is globalising and our contexts are becoming more similar, South Africa (and most emerging markets) is still a massively diverse nation. Will a young Zulu guy who grew up in the KZN midlands understand your design in the same way that a middle-aged Sandton executive will? Will the symbols, shapes, colour associations and patterns evoke the same thing? It’s impossible to predict which designs will work and which will flop without a detailed, grainy and comprehensive view of your target market’s visual lives, as well as their needs and expectations at a brand level.

BOS Ice Tea disrupted the category conventions of Ice Tea and attracted scores of new consumers to the category. But they did so by borrowing heavily from the visual aesthetic of other iconic South African brands and products, such as Lion matches. Their Afro-pop design shows insight into the visual trends and cool factor that are hyper-relevant to the local context but well beyond the category.

The Importance of Visual Context and Customer Insight

Tip: Unpack each target segment’s brand repertoire to look for trends and conventions. Spend as much time as possible identifying and understanding their visual history.

On the other hand, the more familiar a user is with your category and brand, the more attention they will pay to the detail. The joke that all white people look the same illustrates this point beautifully. It’s only once people become familiar with a set of items (people, brands, products, categories) that they notice the details and the differentiators. Someone who isn’t interested in cars isn’t going to be able to tell the difference between two models that look completely different to a car fundi.

“We don’t see the world as it is;

we see it as we are.” Anaïs Nin

2 Shape / Form

3 Depth

4 Colour

5 Texture

TOP DOWN STIMULIThings you look for based on a

specific goal (eg. looking for food)

BOTTOM UP STIMULIThings that stand out from the

environment (eg. Moving objects)


Part Three: Creating an Experience to Change Behaviour

Great brands understand the power of experience to shift perceptions and change customer behaviour. In a context of commoditisation and enormous customer choice, it’s those brands that understand how to create emotionally engaging experiences and connect with customers’ on a subconscious as well as a conscious level that will win. As already mentioned, many customer decisions are made without any thought at all – simply gut reactions to stimuli that spark a memory (childhood, for example, or a pleasant past experience with that brand) or an association.

Your brand purpose, your products and promise and your business model may be what your customers fall in love with. But the path to reaching them and getting that across is their senses. Nothing enters the human heart or mind without first travelling through the senses.Creating a powerful sensory experience, then, is one of the most important things that a marketer can do to grow his or her brand.



Winston Churchill said of architecture, “we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” There can be no more powerful way of influencing how a customer feels than by immersing them in your space. This is an inherent advantage that retail brands have over product brands – they can create an experience that completely envelops the customer. It is no surprise then that our research earlier this year3 found that four of the top five favourite brands in South Africa are retail brands and the fifth, Nike, has its own retail presence as well.

By designing space to be claustrophobic or airy, dark or bright, colourful or muted, brands can shape how those in their space feel, reinforce their brand proposition and create a memorable experience that influences consumer behaviour and the stories that they tell.

Surrounding the customer

Most designers charged with packaging wine will dedicate all of their attention to the label – they’ll create elaborate, gorgeous labels with all the right premium cues, from heraldry to illustration. An understanding of how the mind works shows that texture / detail is the last thing that a potential customer sees. They navigate wine bottles on shelf by movement, shape, depth and colour first. An unusual bottle shape can draw non-users of the category in, and movement can be used to catch attention as the shopper walks past the shelf.

Case Study: Wine Labels

3Yellowwood, Building brands in a rapidly changing market: Lessons for South Africa, May 2014

The Fontinel bottled water range makes use of the translucence of both the water and the label to create a dynamic overlap between the logo and the illustration and gives the dragonfly a sense of movement as customers walk past the bottles on shelf.


The Apartheid Museum expertly uses space, sound, light and architecture to take visitors on a journey through the darkest days of South Africa’s history.

The monumental scale and brutal use of concrete, steel and stone in the approach makes the visitor feel small and fragile. It’s an aesthetic closely associated with prison design.

Your ticket classifies you as European or Non-European and the entrance you use is determined by this. Moving through galvanised steel turnstiles into a narrow passage with caged identity cards (‘dompas’) spread floor to ceiling. The space is dim, constricted and claustrophobic. Throughout the museum, harsh and industrial materials are used, artefacts are ‘caged’ and natural light is kept to a minimum (and entirely absent in the darkest periods). Visitors are forced through solitary confinement cells and up against a Casspir sitting menacingly in the dark.

This is contrasted with broader, lighter spaces for reflection. Visitors leave through fresh air, surrounded by pillars of modern South Africa’s constitution.

Emotional impact: Grief and angerBehaviour change: Introspection, reflection

Designing Powerful Experiences: The Apartheid Museum and Woolworths Flagship Store

Woolworths’s flagship Waterstone Village store in Somerset West won the Grand Prize for Design at the Association of Retail Environments in Las Vegas, the only South African retailer to do so and putting it in the company of brands like Karl Lagerfeld, Apple and Whole Foods.

The store has an intuitive layout, simple and consistent signage, and utilises natural, raw and reclaimed materials. There is natural light throughout the store and green innovations to capture and use wasted heat energy from refrigeration units to heat the store.

From a customer experience point of view, the store has high quality, natural finishes, and is light and spacious. The unconventionally generous allocation of space is particularly evident in the till area. Tills are located two and a half trolley-widths apart, banked by walls of floor-to-ceiling glass, resulting in a till area that is larger than the Café. With space at such a premium, this is a bold move from Woolworths that puts customer experience at the centre of the design. It results in a stress-free and luxurious shopping experience.

Emotional impact: relief and relaxationBehaviour change: keep coming back!


Surrounding the customer or visitor is important, but many companies are finding that the behaviour they most need to change in order to be successful is that of their employees. Workspace design is the discipline dedicated to getting the most out of employees. It can produce some pretty avant-garde solutions, such as the famous Japanese ‘sleeping pods’ to allow employees to recharge with a nap. But workspace design is not given much thought in South Africa.

As with all design fields there are both universal truths (we need quiet in order to focus) and trends (open-plan, no fixed desks). It’s all dependent on what behaviours you hope to encourage. Is it increased productivity and focus? Is it increased collaboration and idea generation?

To Google, “good times” is the most important ingredient in building a collaborative, creative work environment. Alex Cuthbert explains that “what really makes people work together better is having a sense of fun, noncompetitiveness, non-hierarchy. I’ve always described Google as a kind of mix between kindergarten and a classy law firm.”

Google has created the Garage, a “commons” where people from different parts of the business come together to experiment, design and build. The space is flexible and fun – with walls and tables that can be written on, brightly coloured car parts on the walls and everything on wheels so that people can move things around, reconfigure themselves and come together for projects.

Humans are visual creatures. About 80% of the information we receive to make sense of the world around us is visual. But while vision may be our dominant sense, it is not the most influential sense. The sense which most powerfully triggers memory and association is, in fact, our sense of smell. And because one of the core objectives of branding is to trigger memory and subconscious association while short-cutting conscious decision-making (we’d all like the customer to just put our brand of mayonnaise into the trolley without even thinking about it), smell is a powerful way to build brands.

Designing the right smell is becoming an advanced science. Abercrombie & Fitch has an iconic fragrance that it releases into the air in all of its stores. The smell is so strong that you can smell an A&F nearby before you can even see it, and the fragrance is now the best-selling fragrance in the teenage market, according to Landor.4 Retail designers incorporate smell in their store layouts – positioning bakeries and florists near the entrance, to draw shoppers in with the positive smell associations. Some go so far as to release pepper and spice smells in their butcheries.

Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa created fruit juice packaging which strongly evokes the tastes and smells of fruit simply by replicating the touch and appearance of that fruit. The result is simultaneously otherworldly and natural.

Touch, Smell and Sound: The Forgotten Senses

4Landor, An Unexplored sensory world

BMW pays attention to the aural side of brand experience. The company has a specialist team of aural engineers who ensure that everything, from an engine starting to a car door shutting, sounds appealing. According to Landor, “BMW uses sound to brand its vehicles. The sporty sound of a Mini’s exhaust contributes to its playful reputation. And the 7 Series, which attracts the serious driver who wants to

‘own’ the road, features a lot of insulation to dampen sounds.”

Case Study: BMW designing the right sounds and smells


Design that can get the customer to do something different will greatly enhance a brand’s affinity and recall. Getting the customer to do something that reinforces the brand proposition is so much more effective than flighting a clever ad. We learn by doing, as the old educational mantra goes. There are a number of brands that have used design in ingenious ways to strengthen relationships with their customers and have some fun in the process.

Packaging – Coca Cola utilised brilliant packaging design to reinforce its brand platform of sharing. Part of wider marketing initiatives such as individually named Coke bottles, the company brought out a limited edition twist-cap bottle that can only be opened when connected with another bottle. The campaign, rolled out on the first day of college to encourage new students to get to know one another, forces people to pair up in order to open their Coke. It is sheer design brilliance.

Design that invites interaction

Product – Dorito’s introduced an element of fun with their Roulette flavour – a product design innovation where 75% of the chips in a bag are a regular Dorito’s flavour, and the others are eye-wateringly spicy. There is no way to know beforehand which kind of chip you’re putting in your mouth, of course, hence the homage to Russian Roulette in the title. This turns the eating process into a game, making it unpredictable and fun. Consumers have taken to YouTube with videos of themselves eating the chips and being caught by surprise, creating great brand advocacy for Dorito’s. This ‘wild-card’ product design can also be seen in menthol cigarettes and points to the ability of smart design to reinvigorate a commoditised category without having to reinvent everything about the product.


Gaming – there can be nothing that influences behaviour quite like gaming. With a combination of defined goals, rules, repetition, rewards and progression, games mould the gamer’s behaviour and can become addictive. The design of games such as Candy Crush shows that games don’t need to be complicated to succeed. Where some rely on hugely experiential virtual worlds, it’s possible to generate compulsive interaction with nothing more than bright colours, movement and a rewarding popping sound when things go well. Gaming is being used in industries as diverse as education, healthcare and aviation – and is a powerful way for brands to design experiences that are interactive and engaging. The design challenge is how to align the goal orientation of the game to achieve an authentic expression of the brand’s purpose and personality.

Interactive Design – driven by technology, design is moving beyond encouraging once-off interactions. By utilising data about how a customer behaves and then feeding it back to them directly, designers can motivate long-term changes in action. An example of this is wearable tech.

Wearable tech, such as wrist-bands that track your calories burnt every day, provide live information to the wearer thereby helping to motivate them to get to their goal. As Sean Madden of Fast Co-Design says, “Whatever the medium, the conceit is the same: provide someone with fast, understandable feedback on something that’s clearly tied to an action he just took, and compare it with expected behaviour. It’s a powerful way of shaping behaviour, and small, smart devices are suddenly making it easy to apply, practically anywhere.”

Design can be used to broaden the appeal and affordability of certain categories, thereby encouraging non-users into the category. A well-known example of this is Unilever’s sachets for consumers in India who cannot afford full bottles of their products. This redesigned format has been so successful that Unilever is now innovating ways to convert old sachets of their products into liquid fuel, indicating a move towards cradle-to-grave design.

Hollard used pioneering design in South Africa when they created ‘starter-packs’ for life insurance and funeral cover. Borrowing design ideas from unrelated categories can generate disruptive and powerful design solutions.

In an emerging market context such as ours, design can play an enormous role in social inclusion and bringing the informal and formal economies together. This can involve the redesign of existing value chains to include customers in revenue-generating activities (such as the reselling of airtime), designing products and services specifically for informal retail, redesigning store layouts and product mixes for the needs of a particular area, and the repurposing of designs for alternative uses.

The Mill Junction Project in downtown Johannesburg utilises shipping containers and an abandoned grain silo to create affordable student accommodation.

Design that broadens access


While most marketers would love the opportunity to create multi-sensory and immersive brand experiences for their consumers, the reality is that this is seldom realistic. Often, products are sold in someone else’s environment and the only touch-point that you have with your consumers is visual. Don’t fear! With a little creativity, design can shift perceptions and change behaviour with only two dimensions.

Think of The’s Ant-Theft Lunch bags are a quirky and fun way to change your colleagues’ lunch-pilfering behaviour. With their printed green blotches, these bags make even the most freshly-prepared sandwich appear mouldy – keeping it safe until you want to open it.

The absence of branded design shows how influential these elements actually are in guiding behaviour. In an attempt to make smoking lose its ‘cool factor’, all branded elements have been removed from cigarette packaging in Australia. The dirty khaki colour, plain typeface and prominent and graphic health warnings all combine to make smoking undesirable.

Early research suggests that the re-design is working. Smokers now often cover up or hide their cigarettes and smoke less frequently when others are around. Some users even reported that cigarettes taste worse since the shift.

There have been some unintended consequences of the redesign. By removing all embossing, foiling and other costs of branded packaging, cigarettes are now cheaper to produce and sell. And most importantly, the category has become much more difficult to navigate – those who were trying to change the way in which they smoked (for example, by switching to lighter cigarettes) rather than give it up completely are now struggling to find the mild variants. However, the design intervention appears to be reducing the amount that people smoke over-all and Ireland became the second country to roll out the programme in June of this year.

2D design that changes behaviour

Empowered with data and behavioural research, design can be used to influence what consumers focus on when they see an ad or read a menu. Menu design utilises a number of design ‘tricks’ to get customers to notice and focus on the most profitable items – such as blocks of colour, borders and changes in font and relative positioning of dishes. The top left of the menu usually catches attention first, and dropping the currency from the price list makes items appear less pricy.

Eye Tracking and Influencing what the Consumer Sees



Changing Behaviour for GoodMany common human behaviours and habits are deeply problematic – from those that damage ourselves (such as eating badly, smoking, not exercising enough) to those that damage our environments (littering, not recycling, leaving the water running) and those that hurt one another.

Many governments try to curb these behaviours through the use of punishments and deterrents, but a more effective way to achieve behaviour change is to make people want to change.

The problem isn’t always lack of information. We are inherently resistant to change. And often we are just too damn busy or distracted. The trick to shifting behaviour is understanding instinct and motivation.

Sille Krukow points out that many people do things they know they shouldn’t do. And most of us, to use her words, “have a really hard time following our good intentions.”

Part of the problem is our attention span. We may mean to recycle but keep forgetting to buy the right bags. Part of it is that we rely on automatic thinking, as mentioned earlier in the paper. And part of it is that we are heavily influenced by our pack instinct. We are a social species and we are influenced by those around us more than we know. This instinct often overrides what we know is right. And so we find ourselves parking where others have parked, even when there is a sign telling us not to.

All good strategy starts by asking why. Good design is no different. Why are people currently doing what they’re doing? The chances are, they are doing it because it’s convenient, easy and because they find their behaviour rewarding. If they aren’t, it means they are unaware of their alternatives or those alternatives are untenable. Design solutions, therefore, should seek to create processes and outcomes that are:

1. Beneficial to the objective2. More rewarding to the end user than their previous behaviour

Great design, then, is compassionate and centred on the experience for the end user. It should seek to change behaviour by making the desired behaviour enjoyable.

A simple approach to solving the right problem:1. IDENTIFY THE CURRENT BEHAVIOUR Big Data can be extremely useful in identifying exactly what is going on. For example, data is available to track the movement of traffic through high congestion zones, foot flow or purchase decisions. Ensure you are looking at the right data (don’t use the returned aeroplanes to make decisions about those that were shot down, for example)

2. ASK WHY Why are customers doing what they’re currently doing? What insight do you have into their motivations, restrictions and limitations? Why are your current solutions not addressing the issue? What have you missed?

3. DESIGN POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS

4. TEST FOR UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Test to make sure you will not create spin-off actions that invert your original intent. Test to make sure the target market understands your design and finds it useful, rewarding and easy to use.


Changing behaviour, by design

Can you design something more

rewarding?

Eg. More N2 bridges -wider, safer and policed

Is is habit?

Is lack of information the problem?

Build rewards & incentives

into the solution

Is lack of alternatives the problem?

N

Y Design Alternatives

CurrentBehaviour

Is the behaviourrewarding?

N

Y

Design for constraint

& obstacles

Is it easy /convenient?

N

Y

Design a simpler,easier processN

Y

Eg. Erect barriers to stoppeople driving in bus lane

Eg. Address navigation, UX design etc.

Eg. Jay-walkingEg. No safe places to

cross N2 in Cape Town

N

N

Y

Improveinformation & feedback

Y

Eg. Wearable tech tracksenergy consumption & compares to others

Change theenvironment

Eg. Experience / Storelayout redesign to break habit

Did that work?

DesiredBehaviour

Y

N

Eg. Google office designrejuvenates workers

Eg. Poor healthchoices

Eg. Unaware of how lazy I actually am


Part Four: Things to do Differently

• Balance familiarity and novelty:

Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater when redesigning a product, brand or experience. The human brain wants a little familiarity – it’s comforting and it helps us to recognise what the product is, where it fits into our life and what category it belongs to. On the other hand, novelty catches attention. There is no golden rule for which category conventions to keep and which to disrupt – it will all depend on your strategic goals. Are you attracting users from a different category or enlivening your brands to current consumers? Use repetition and consistency to build the brand, but don’t get boring. Monotony will invert your intent.

What does all of this mean for brand-builders and those hoping to change their business fortunes by design? Here are ten tips of things to start doing differently:

• Look to other categories for trend predictions:

The shifting aesthetics of ‘cool’ can often be seen in other categories. Keep an eye on the fashion industry, in particular, for hints as to what will influence product design and become aspirational to early-adopter consumers. Minimalism started in architecture and art before cascading out; colour choices often start in fashion.

With a good understanding of where your brand interacts with other categories, you could even design something in a related category that changes behaviour in yours – perhaps you’ll be the next Michelin star system.


• Design for every sense:

An immersive experience is the most powerful way to influence your customers’ perception and behaviour. Surround them with your design – from how the product feels against the skin, to the smells and sounds and tastes of your brand. Strong visual design is only part of the final solution.

• Be visual, not wordy:

We receive most of our information through our eyes. A picture catches attention better than a headline; iconography and graphics can catch attention in our distracted age better than paragraphs can. Once you have your viewer’s attention, deploy story.

• Don’t forget the people:

People remain the same despite all the technological and contextual change. Don’t become too distracted by trends and new technologies. Changing behaviour will always be about people. With insight into the motivations of your people, and what appeals to them, design can be truly effective as a business tool. The psychology of what appeals to people is timeless, and culture is as important as channel when influencing how people behave.

• Make it rewarding:

Marketing is all about making the customer feel good about themselves for choosing your brand. Design is no different. If you hope to change someone’s behaviour, think about how you can make it more rewarding for them than their previous behaviour.

• Build meaning across every touch-point:

Meaning is built over time. Brands create positive associations in their consumers’ minds through consistently positive and engaging experiences. Identity design helps them identify your brand, and it’s important to get the differentiation, navigation, symbolism and significance of your design right (based on customer insight), but design won’t save your brand if you don’t follow through with an artfully designed experience.

• Trigger the customer’s imagination:

Imagination is so much more powerful than reality. Tease the customer, leave things out, hint, build the mystery and the intrigue. Tempting the consumer to fill in the blanks with their own mind appeals to their natural curiosity and establishes a relationship with your brand.

• Keep it as simple as possible:

Our brains are hardwired to avoid complexity and so establishing a connection with customers is that much harder when the design is complex. But simplicity is not always about reducing the number of parts; it’s about having the right number of parts for the job at hand. Minimalism isn’t always appropriate; some settings or desired associations are ornate, for example. Simplicity applies as much to the strategy as to the design that stems from it. In both cases, it’s about solving the problem in the simplest way. As Stephen King says of writing,

‘your main job is taking out all the things that aren’t the story.”

• Ask the right questions:

Design is ultimately about solving problems, not slapping a coat of paint onto an ailing company. For truly business-changing design, marketers need to ensure they are asking the right questions and finding the right insights into their people, business context and market. Once you are fairly sure you have identified the problem you need solved, brief the designer with the problem, not a checklist of design elements. Creative problem-solving is how design proves its power. To designers who are given requirements rather than problems to solve, in Thomas Heatherwick’s words,

“break the brief.”



Good design is critical for business and brand success. Every interaction that a customer has with a brand has been designed – and the amount of thought and sensitivity given to that moment of interaction will profoundly impact the customer’s experience. From processes, products and packaging to logos, websites and in-store environments, design has the power to influence how people feel and the ways they behave.

To achieve a reaction that isn’t entirely random requires a deep understanding of human psychology and motivation, and a consideration of our human limitations in terms of attention and intention. Great design that shifts perception and changes behaviour is empathetic. It displays insight into why people behave the way they do, what they notice and what intrigues them, what associations they may have from their visual histories and contexts. It requires rigorous analysis of current behaviour, category trends and conventions as well as a solid grasp of the principles of design.

Design can change our behaviour through any or all of our senses. It’s about asking the right questions and solving the right problem in the most elegant and effective way. It’s no easy task but, fortunately, it’s quite a fun one.

Good luck!

Conclusion

REFERENCESThis report was put together by Richard Stone, Marios Flourentzou, Ross Thornton-Dibb, Amanda Murray and Alistair Mackay.

Special thanks to Nicole Velleman for her research support and to David Blyth and Dr Carla Enslin of the Vega School of Brand Leadership for their insight and feedback during the writing process.

Get in touch

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3 SANDOWN VALLEY CRESCENT

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Tel: +27 21 425 0344

Fax: +27 21 425 0338

David Blyth, Group MD

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Documents

YW White Paper Changing Behaviour by Design