Service design is one of the most important aspects on which companies have decided to invest as the key marketing tool in retail field, contributing to brand equity and customer loyalty.More and more brands should think about the physical space, working on an appropriate physical brand strategy to be declined on several physical touch points on territory in retail field, such as retail networks, temporary or flagship stores, according to the brand strategy of the company.
On this basis Crea International has been invited to the event to support the importance of Flagship stores as tools for retail positioning, to implement the customer relationship and loyalty, to centralize the flows and sales, and give awareness and local presence to the brand.
In Hotelplan’s headquarter in Milan, with a dynamic and interactive audience composed of top managers and entrepreneurs from the tourism industry and with, among the speakers, the direct store manager of Illycaffè – Elodie Horaist - and the holder of an important network of temporary stores - Paolo Comini of Sidecar Group - De Carli’s presentation has focused on Physical Brand Design’s way of approaching projects, starting from the brand identity, going to developing the design concept, always shaping signs and codes consistent with the brand, to get to the service design aiming to enhance brand positioning.
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Talking about Flagship store, the presentation has explored, among the others, one of the most distinctive of the italian brand design company: Wind flagship store. The aim was to create a flagship able to make the successes of the company over the years touchable to customers, with an upgrade of image to make the brand more fashionable and cool.
Everything supported by a physical brand strategy due to the biosphere as distinctive sign of an innovative design, sensitive to the balance of different chromatic and morphological elements, perfect habitat for a new empathic community in a totally new landscape.A work that led to the opening of the two Wind flagship stores, one in Milano (C.so Matteotti) and the other one in Rome (P.za di Spagna).
He has also shown how the Physical-Brand-Design methodology applied to a project as Welcome Travel has led to the creation of a totally new design concept of the retail-travel-agency and can be used flexibly by the network to give to customers a new place of meeting and sharing where the purchase experience and concept within the agency are redefined.
Present to the explanation of the retail travel project Gian Paolo Vairo, Ceo of Welcome Travel, who has explained how this physical brand design project is perfectly integrated in a a new company vision which joined the retail travel agency with web and mobile areas. The new Welcome Travel aspires to propose to customers new standards of services which are lined up with those of the main European markets: quality, training, efficiency, technology and customer service in order to renew the methods of distribution of the tourism product and create a benchmark for the whole italian market of travel agencies. He has declared to be extremely satisfied of the work and the Group aims to join new satisfactory results thanks to this new store design innovation
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De Carli’s intervention has then analyzed some other important cases starting from Tim retail network where PBD strategy has contributed to renew the whole network and distribution channels, in a consistent view with the historical values of the company of reassurance of the customer to reinforce brand identity and positioning; going to Lavazza coffe shop an international coffee chain supporting brand’s internationalisation, where the major challenge was to create a a service design concept which could be adapted to the international expansion of the company.
And finally in Air Bank branch project he has presented to the audience a bank model where service design and customer experience within the branch play a central role in the start-up asset of the whole project.
An intervention that certainly showed how Physical Brand Design strategy can be declined to different fields, with different values and expectations but all with the same objective to give distinctiveness and uniqueness to the brand, in a market that is becoming more selelective and where consumers, despite the crisis, are paradoxically getting more and more demanding.
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On november 30th, Welcome Travel press conference took place in fascinating Logotel headquarter in Milano to announce to journalists the new project by the first italian travel agencies network, property of Alpitour group and Costa Crociere. Among the speakers the leaders of the two companies who underlined the big impact that such a project will have on WT group and Marco de Carli, strategy director of Crea, to explain the design concept and the customer’s experience inside the agency. As professionally presented by Gianni Onorato, president of WTG, the project aims to trace the lines of future retail travel agency starting from a scenario analysis which underlines the transformation of tourism market with a marked increase in online sales. The first and important purpose of the project is to integrate the traditional sales chain with the web one.
This new innovative thinking of retail travel agency could not avoid a complete restyle of the store: the collaboration with Crea International starts from here with a new service design experience, transforming the agency from a traditional office to a place of meeting and sharing, in a fully opened space, with no barriers between buyers and sellers. This is one of the focal points of the whole project: the holidays package must be sold, not purchased, that’s to say that there must be an attention to the customer, right starting from the store, that must be perceived as the place to be driven in a path totally different from the past.
This was the brief of the client,as underlined during the conference even by Gian Paolo Vairo, ceo of the Group, and the point from which the italian retail design team has started to create an environment where transparency and recognition, lightness and modularity characterize the experience within the new retail travel agencies, starting from the new strategic idea "free to travel". The new shop aims to become a real point of reference for holidays and leisure that pushes people not only to dream a travel but to realize it, with the aid of specialized agents.
Marco De Carli, during the conference has presented the new innovative layout of the new agency where the traditional approach between customer and agent is replaced by a new fruition of space, an emotional experience which leaves from the outside of the agency with a new layout even of the window, totally opened that intrigues and invites people to enter.
Within the agency customers can choose what to do, if having a private consultancy with an agent in confortable areas or just have a look to the offers of the moment, download travel materials from the tablets that they can freely consult. Everything surrounded by a frame of images related to travel, as a real window on the world. “Welcome Travel project was a great design challenge – comments Massimo Fabbro, ceo of Crea International-. We have combined the need for efficiency in service and the need to renew the visual code that characterize the travel agencies .The new Welcome Travel has now a new agency which opens the way for a new, modern, light and easy language to use with customers .”
“The project tells a new retail story - says Marco De Carli,strategy director of the project strategy - a strong message of communication ready to strengthen and enhance Welcome Travel’s identity. The opening and immersion into the world of travel along with innovation and the new style of communication of the brand, makes the new space a place that WT, welcomes, involves and communicates with people in a new dimension of interaction between person, place, and brand. The promise of the project aims to strengthen the positioning of WT and to the serenity and the pleasure of the trip: “free to travel. "
Service design is becoming a driving element in defining a brand: the physical landscape in which company services are offered is one of the most important aspects able to communicate a company’s distinctiveness. The attention to the customer and his needs is an aspect which companies are more and more considering as essential in increasing their reputation because customer always expresses opinions and assessments firts of all trough the analysis of the touchable aspects of the service.
In this scenario it’s easy to understand the importance of projecting spaces that are strictly connected with the brand and the service model, that can fully embody brand’s values and spirit. That’s the first reason why, in her master’s degree in Bocconi University, Prof. Antonella Carù has invited Crea International to give a company testimony about service design.
Marco De Carli, strategy director of the retail design company, has held a lecture master to the last year Bocconi’s students, exploring how service design is the first step in retail concept innovation.
De Carli made an overview on Crea International’s way of working through the unique method of Physical Brand Design®: starting from exploring the different aspects of the process to define a service design strategy which lead to create an appropriate service model, retracing all the key points discussed with the client.
Most architecture and design projects are judged for their external aspect, but when it is the Brand that builds its space it is important to listen, to absorb its emotions, feelings and point of view.The aspect and form that will take its shape are the expression of its spirit and soul. That's PBD method, that’s the different starting point by Crea International from the others design studios. The brand identity is studied in every aspects, both digital and physical.Only by a careful analysis with the client a service model perfectly sewn on the brand can be created.
Marco De Carli during his speech focused on the steps which lead in creating an appropriate service design model, according to the brand’s values and expectations. He gave the example of Saudi Arabian Airlines,one of Crea’s important projects, to support this thesis : Crea's team spent 2 weeks in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, to try to understand how people live the spaces in places with different culture and habits.This period led to a better understanding of how starting in creating the space and experience and giving life to project.
Besides obviously thinking in creating an appropriate design it has been determinant to breathe the country, to observe people, to listen to their habits, to observe the landscape and, after that, possessing all the elements to start defining the layout. It's necessary to understand what kind of experience people will have within the space, what does the brand really want to translate in it to bring concept innovation to life, making the brand a unique one.
Service design must help to either innovate or improve services to make them more useful and desirable for clients, as well as more efficient and effective for organizations who are working to improve and innovate services. It is a very different way of approaching the way we think of the relationship between company and clients, through the creation of outstanding and innovative experiences, the tool through which companies can create competitive advantages and higher profit margins. But service design is not necessarily synonymous of innovation.
Before designing, a strategy must be put. And it is not always aimed to put high technologies, but sometimes the strategy is used to reinforce the brand’s mark. It must be said that surely technology has changed the relationship between clients and service providers, but it’s important to consider that clients are not so easy to understand, they have individual needs and expectations that are difficult to standardised. So Service design can really support the service market with new concepts, it can becomes the tool through which organisations can find a new way of standing out against competition and to offer new values. And there are a lot of ways of doing that: analyzing some distinctive projects of the retail design company as Air Bank and CheBanca!,Tim and Wind, Marco De Carli's presentation has focused on how service design gives a strong identity to the brand and strengthens its reputation and the relationship with the customer, aimed to make a client a faithful customer always according with the brand’s expectations.
Air Bank, basing on Agora model, is one of the examples where service design perfectly translate the relational model. Air Bank can be considered a store more than a bank, where the customer is free to do what he most desires: taking a seat and self-browsing, or being assisted by an attendant or just having a look to the new bank products. Whatever he decides to do he must feel free in a friendly and simply landascape, that wants to be noticed but be simply and fresh at the same time. A layout where feeling good and loose, easy to understand without renouncing to innovation, how the client who commissioned the project wanted.
CheBanca! instead is a start-up project that really wants to break down with the traditional bank patterns. It perfectly communicates through service design brand's values of a company that aimed to create a new positioning in retail banking field, without renouncing to simplicity, innovation, transparency and efficiency. A new concept which radically breaks down with the old bank rules, but offers a totally new landscape based on a opened and self browsing space in a friendly and intuitive layout.
Tim’s new layout instead was not so focused on new experiences for the customer or new technologies, but the brief of the company was to offer a space able to transfer to customers the historical value of the company, able to reassure the customer giving an accessible service model under a consistency of experience and language. The result is a highly understandable environment, emobodying brand's values, maintaining its colours and forms with the furnishing lines and the wall system all over the space reinterpreting the waves of the logo, symbol of technological and cultural evolution of a country which has always been accompanying the Italian customs and the trend and tastes changing.
Last, but not least Wind project underlines how service design has been able to reinforce the brand identity creating fashion oriented and glamour flagship stores, in Milano and Roma. Service design has been able, through the introduction of interaction areas through technology, to raise the brand’s identity and putting the company on a higher level among its competitors.
Marco De Carli comments below the importance of exchanging expertise beteween university world and company one : “ Generally speaking, service design is a strong asset helping the brand to reinforce customers’ relationship, reputation and distinctiveness versus competitors. We strongly believe that the uniqueness of a brand comes, beyond communication and branding, even from a strong experience within the store, in all its dimensions. The future of the brand is evolving and it ranges more and more among a lot of dimensions, between digital, physical and mobile ones.
Spaces can generate value, continuity and credibility within the dialogue between brand and customers.”
Crea International at Bocconi University: why not? - crea news - CREA International - italian retail design
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