ThemeProcess & Planning
CardCard 46 of 64
Questions5 to explore

Products

How products look, work & are perceived

The product is the part of the brand that people actually live with.

Product brand covers how the products in a portfolio look, how they work, how they feel to use, and what they mean to the people who own or use them. It is the intersection of industrial design, UX, packaging, product naming, and the emotional associations that accumulate from all of these over time.

Most product brand problems are coherence problems. Individual products are designed and named without enough consideration of how they fit together, what they communicate relative to each other, or how they reinforce or undermine the parent brand. Product decisions made in isolation tend to produce portfolios that look like collections rather than expressions of a point of view.

How strong brands handle it

The same building block, handled well. These are approaches and illustrations from how brands tend to work, not rules, and never a ranking of companies.

Design language as brand system

Braun and Dieter Rams established a design language for products that is so distinctive it influenced Apple decades later. Every object in the range reads as part of the same family, which is a brand statement in itself.

Naming as navigation

Sonos names its products (Era, Arc, Roam) to evoke feeling and function while maintaining a clean family architecture. The naming system is a product brand tool, not just a labeling convenience.

Unboxing as product brand moment

Apple and Glossier invest significantly in packaging as a brand extension of the product itself. The first physical encounter with the product sets expectations for everything that follows.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

If someone looked at our full product range, what point of view about design and value would they conclude we hold?
How does our product naming system communicate the relationships and differences between what we offer?
Where does the physical or digital product experience contradict or confirm the brand promises we make in marketing?
Which sensory or interaction qualities of our products are the most distinctive and worth protecting?
How do new products we are developing fit into the brand system we already have?

Things to notice

Feature-led product development can drift from brand-led product design. Adding capabilities without considering how they fit the brand's design philosophy tends to produce incoherence over time.
Price architecture and product naming interact. When the naming system does not communicate the value hierarchy clearly, customers make decisions based on price alone rather than fit.
Product brand does not end at the physical or digital surface. Customer support, warranty experience, and update quality are product brand moments that affect how the product is remembered.