Design Discovery #2: Trends in Design Collaborations
Lamborghini with Asus, Samsung with Bang & Olufsen, Nike with Apple… what do these companies have in common? Within the last few years, there are many product designs born by merging the strengths of two companies to build up a stronger brand and product identity that could well benefit both companies.
Studio469 takes a look into the reasons behind these succesful design collaborations.
Making a laptop styled like a sports car to increase brand identity for both companies… was the strategy ASUS used to increase branding power of their company as well as Lamborghini. The Industrial Design team at ASUS studied many series of Lamborghini to attain the most accurate perception of the Lamborghini spirit - Lamborighini laptop VX2.
Available in both yellow and black, the Lamborghini VX2 adopts the trademark colors of the Lamborghini logo. With special mirror painting finish, the notebook looks and feels like a supreme supercar.This is one example where companies adopt another signature styling of an up-class brand to advertise its product design - pitching its products for high-end branding.
Designing a phone with high music quality and connectivity to break new markets for both companies… Serene Mobile - the fruit of a creative collaboration between Samsung and Bang and Olufsen. It was a good effort between both companies to conjure a novelist mobile phone design that captured the high-end market.
Both these companies formed a joint venture with the aim of competing with Nokia phone designs in the high-end mobile phone market. This partnership has drawn on the design strengths of Bang & Olufsen and Samsung’s mobile phone technology, therefore allowing Bang & Olufsen to re-enter the mobile phone market after an absence of several years and Samsung to expand into premium mobile phones.
This is one example of where both companies made combined both their expertise levels to bring forth a new design to break through new markets for both parties.
Brainstorming a track record concept to create innovative concepts… what happens when the leading name in sports and the leading name in digital music team up to take on your workout - Nike Plus is born.
Nike Plus is a technology that allows the shoes of a runner to communicate with their iPod Nano. The Nike+iPod Sport kit consists of a small oval pod that can be inserted under the liner of one’s Nike shoe, with a small transmitter that attaches to the person’s Nano. All these features facilitate a person to tune their run with their iPod data to track data captured in the soles of new Nike running shoes.
This is one example where the partnership of both companies create an innovative concept to target both the runners and iPod users market. Not only was it a significant collaboration that created expensive market attraction, both companies’ signature designs in shoes and MP3s are still retained and highly sought after.
But not all is good. Design collaborations can actually be very tricky and risky. As both companies collaborate, the issues of creating a balanced design that bears the signature traits of both companies arises. If both companies’ design styles and technology do not complement each other, what is created may turn out to be a mismatch. Markets seeing this hybrid product may not be able to associate the product design to the collaborated company brands. Therefore, such example of brand dissociation results in brand identity loss for both the companies.
Also, if the design outcome turns out to be a failure, it will result in a loss of brand confidence of both the companies involved in the collaboration. Such product failures may cause people to lose brand confidence in buying the companies’ other products entirely.
Therefore, design collaborations between companies is a complicated process which requires design & marketeers to work together closely in order to succeed.
Studio469 - Designers point of view
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