Oscar Person

Complementing intuition: Insights on styling as a strategic tool

Product styling holds several commercial benefits for companies. Still, managers often struggle in managing the styling process, giving it sufficient priority in company strategy, and coordinating it with other company activates. To support coordination in the decision-making process, we identify a number of intermediary goals of styling based on interviews with Finnish design experts and a review of the marketing and design literature. Each of these goals can be seen as pointing to a process of attraction, and as a precondition for the success of styling in the marketplace. In addition, we propose that strategic decisions on styling can be described according to three dimensions: decisions about the present product portfolio, the succession of product generations, and the products of competitors. On each dimension, we recognise that companies can strive for similarity or difference with existing products and discuss the strategic implications of each alternative.

Brand Styles in Commercial Design

Introduction Style has long been an important concept for distinguishing the works of individual artists and classifying works of art and architecture into groups, schools, regions, and periods.1 However, there is no reason why discussions of style should be limited to objects of art and architecture, excluding everyday objects of design, such as cars or shoes. As already noted by Alpers,2 the art historian Heinrich Wolfflin pointed to similarities in style between Gothic cathedrals and Gothic shoes to illustrate that style extends beyond objects of art.3 In fact, all human artifacts may be said to represent or exemplify characteristics of a style,4 and historians and philosophers of art and architecture have often referred to everyday objects such as cars5 and toys6 when attempting to refine their classifications. However, with a few noteworthy exceptions,7 everyday products made for commercial mass markets have seldom been discussed in the context of the treatment of styles in art and architecture. In the product design literature, the style of new products was quickly recognized as an important subject, especially in relation to the market reception of new designs.8 In addition, the skills associated with producing a style for a brand also have long been recognized in the management literature as a key contribution of design.9 Still, both literatures (on product design and management) have only briefly addressed the historical and theoretical assumptions underlying the notion of brand styles in products. In general, styles are explained as invariant (formal) elements that represent a brand, both in individual products and across product ranges, but little is said about the origin of these elements or what they refer to. The cursory treatment of style in design and management may be linked to its elusive character.10 At first glance, we may readily recognize and classify objects as representatives of one style or another. Yet, in the pursuit of a more general theory of style, the assumptions underlying our classifications tend to collapse under scrutiny. In this article, we will discuss the notion of brand styles in commercial, mass-produced products as a concern for designers working for companies in competitive markets. Departing from earlier texts on style in art and architecture, we will discuss some of the current challenges with the concept of a brand style in design, and then explore a new conceptual framework that separates the production of brand styles from their reception in the market. Our contribution will be twofold. First, we will extend the art historical

Reestablishing Styling as a Prime Interest for the Management of Design

Styling is plagued by prejudice in the literature on the management of design – making it a taboo to talk about styling and designers as stylists. At the same time, the ability of designers to shape the look and feel of products still represents the most defining work of designers. However, reduced to superficial changes in form, styling has been misrepresented as simplistic decoration that is of limited strategic interest for managers of design, especially when compared to the more immaterial (processual) qualities that the discipline has to offer. In this chapter, we question the validity of the conceptualization above, arguing for a renewed interest in the work of designers as stylists. Building on a general reassessment of style in art and design, we appropriate Ackermans (1962) work on style for studies on styling and the management of design. In doing so, we propose that styling relates to the problem-solving activities of companies, in which designers create and shape solutions and their expressions. By defining styling along these lines, we account for the ‘‘everyday’’ view that designers (as stylists) shape the look and feel of products, but we no longer disregard the central concern of designers to integrate their decisions on form and function when shaping the look and feel of new products in practice.