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New Product Development for an Air Purifier
Branding, positioning and product design to bring a competing product type to market
ACCO Brands is a global manufacturer of office products with 11 main offices around the world. The products themselves are sold in over 100 countries and help comprise the nearly $2 billion in revenue that the company creates. The company is home to some of the world’s most iconic academic, consumer and business products such as Mead® (composition notebooks), Swingline® (staplers) and Quartet® (whiteboards).
THE OPPORTUNITY
The innovation team at ACCO brands was bringing a new product to market. This product was going to be an air purifier with a modern design aesthetic aimed at consumers with a medium to low price point. As part of their strategy they needed help putting many of the pieces together that looked to relate brand to market to positioning and to design.
The team approached us in order to work in tandem with them in developing this new product and bringing it to market…successfully. With an abundance of research and data from the business development team, our stage was set to help dive in and get to work.
Client Type
Industry Leader
Employees
6,700
Headquarters
Lake Zurich, IL
Solutions
Strategy, Experience
Services
Workshops, User Experience, Branding, Visual Media
“We are a small team within a large matrix organization that is trying to make a difference in the innovation culture.”
THE APPROACH
When dealing with new product launches and consumer perceptions one of the most critical points for us to work with clients to focus on is their own perception of how they imagine making an impact. Therefore our entire relationship was based on an extremely high level of discovery and communication. Having this as a standard to our approach, it ensured that before executing anything we had the appropriate discussions, workshops and agreement on what to do and why.
Following our framework of RADC (research, analysis, discovery, coalescence) to produce valuable inputs, we started with a series of questionnaires and data dumps (research and analysis) to help get us in the know about the perceived product market fit and opinions by management and the innovation team of the product itself. From there we worked to schedule multiple workshops (discovery) in which we built on the collective understanding of what would work and where we could go to produce the largest impact that matched the overall visions (coalescence).
This constant ebb and flow among the RADC components helped to make sure we were constantly acting on the most useful information to drive decisions, and to stay flexible enough in knowing the deliverables we produced actually matched business value and market needs.
THE RESULTS
We worked with the ACCO team to deliver a comprehensive brand identity. What exactly is this? Well besides a complete understanding of who the brand is internally and what mission we are all driving towards, it was a number of “delivered” documents that the marketing team could build from in future campaigns.
The first set of deliverables fell into the “messaging and positioning” bucket. These included the culmination of “who the brand” was in accordance with the research, analysis, discovery and coalescence afforded to our teams through workshops. The deliverables themselves were such things as brand personality, brand profile, market analysis, personas and target market components.
The second set of deliverables fell into the “design and style” bucket. This included the creation of the logo design and brand mark itself, as well as the necessary taglines and trademarks associated with the product. On top of that, we created the brand guidelines showcasing usage and meaning requirements for the identity system.
Overall the product launch went off without a hitch. Launching in the first quarter of 2019, TruSens has had a positive bottom line impact on the nearly $2 billion in revenue of the company. Creative has stayed consistent with the guidelines set up from the start and the product itself has had rave reviews in terms of functionality and design.