Stephan Merkle has joined ABB Building and Home Automation Solutions to build a new design team. In this interview, the new Global Head of Design explains how he is combining global design consistency with user-centric innovation to create emotional customer experiences and maximise the potential of the ABB, Busch-Jaeger, Niessen and EVE brands.
Interview by Thomas Huber
Mr Merkle, you are new to the role of Global Head of Design. Why did ABB create this global role?
ABB wanted to create a central authority to design compelling customer experiences across the company. That’s why we have made the design discipline a strategic function across the entire product group. Our team’s vision is to make significant contributions to the relevant product development and customer relationship design processes. From global design consistency to local user-centred innovation and differentiation, we aim to take on key areas of responsibility. At the same time, we will support the BHAS brands such as ABB, Busch-Jaeger, Niessen and EVE through industrial design and UX/UI design activities as well as the creation of guidelines for various product development needs.
These four brands are already very strong in the market and have a strong design profile. Where do you see weaknesses?
I don’t see any weaknesses in the four strong brands of the ABB Group. Instead, we want to work with the brand managers to strengthen their strengths and derive design decisions directly from the respective brand values. In this way, we can play up the emotional dimension of the customer relationship in a traditionally engineering-driven market environment, in addition to the technical features. When the product experience is aligned with brand communication, customer satisfaction and repeat purchase rates typically increase. Better exploiting the brand potential therefore opens up significant growth opportunities for the ABB Group.
How do you do it? How do you bring emotion into a technology-driven company like ABB?
Quite simply by using the existing design competence more intensively to create overarching customer experiences and to emotionalise communication in order to fully exploit the strengths of the individual brands. There is a lot of potential here. For example, certain target groups in the market segment of well-informed, value-oriented and digitally savvy customers want to use specific products to save money or energy, experience comfort and well-being and gain more security. To date, ABB’s brands have only fully addressed rational motivations, and less so the emotional and everyday dimensions that play at least as important a role in purchasing decisions. The same users may also want to have fun with original and intelligent products, enjoying creative use and entertainment. Having a great technical product and being able to play on emotions significantly increases a brand’s desirability and inspiration.
The common wisdom among all designers is that you need to get to know your customers better in order to improve their product and brand experience…
ABB brands already know their customers very well. We can build on strong customer relationships. Our job is to operationalise the knowledge of societal trends and the findings from market needs studies, target group analyses and other consumer insights. This knowledge is refined internally by business unit and used as a basis for discussion in all relevant business decisions that define the product and user experience. As in any business, it is crucial to involve the design function as early as possible in the product development process to ensure that brand values are translated into customer relationships from the outset. This is exciting not only for us designers, but for everyone involved in the user experience. The analysis of socio-economic and cultural trends broadens the horizon and provides inspiration for everyone involved. It also shows that intensive user research can quickly improve the customer experience. In addition, the designers are tasked with deriving design stories from each brand’s positioning and adding emotional and aesthetic differentiators. Over time, this leads to globally applicable design principles for each brand, ensuring the contextualisation and alignment of individual product design activities and greater internal networking in the development of the overall customer experience.
Your role also gives you global responsibility. What does that look like?
The ABB-BHAS Group with its brands is present in many markets around the world and is positioned very differently in each one. There are cultural and historical factors that need to be taken into account. You need to be very sensitive and rely on local insiders rather than taking an overly centralised approach, which is often difficult for designers. But regional differences are not trivial. They include different technical specifications in the grid, regulatory requirements, certifications, installation habits, training standards for installers, and so on. There are also very different local needs in terms of aesthetics, materials, colours, cultural idiosyncrasies and social mentalities. You can’t just paint everything with a global brush.
Designers are often derided for dreaming in their ivory towers of beauty and simplicity and not knowing how to work on the front line with customers. How do you embed these design principles in an organisation as large, global and complex as the ABB Group, with its many different brands?
We don’t want to be experts in an ivory tower. We want to make our work democratically accessible throughout the company. Structured work on the customer experience will, over time, develop a clear and simple set of rules that will effectively support all employees involved in creating the customer and product experience and define the necessary standards across the company. This greatly increases the process efficiency of the entire product development team – the keyword being time-to-market. Everyone can rely on and apply these principles. Ideally, there is no need for a design police force to constantly intervene with sirens and megaphones. Nobody wants that.
What have you achieved so far in your new role?
First of all, we developed a roadmap or a step-by-step plan of how the design function, in close collaboration with the brand and product teams, will approach its contribution to the customer experience, embedding design more and more in the different phases of innovation and product development. We also set up an Experience Lab, bringing together experts from different disciplines. We put the product on the operating table and examine it from all angles. On one side, we have the product manager who is looking at the time-to-market, and on the other side we have the engineer who has experience with specific LEDs. Then there’s the tactile quality of surfaces, the sound design of a light switch, or the different aesthetic requirements between a Scandinavian and an Italian market. All of these small decisions have an impact on the user experience, which the design team consciously addresses in these formats, and which ultimately result in experience requirements for further product development. So this Experience Lab is an exciting experiment that is already showing great potential and is seen as a significant added value within the company.
Do you believe that design can add value to a large organisation?
Pilot projects that demonstrate the design lever can indeed lead to stronger customer loyalty, higher customer satisfaction and increased repeat purchase rates, while significantly supporting the acquisition of new customers. This evidence, coupled with internal advocacy, will lead to the integration of the design function throughout the product development process being seen as a success factor within the organisation. As knowledge of user needs and experience dimensions grows, a valuable repository of business intelligence will be built up across the organisation over time. This business intelligence can then be used to develop new products and systemic solutions, as the company will have a much better understanding of which market needs require which innovations. This greatly increases the chances that these innovations will be successful in the marketplace and contribute significantly to the overall growth of the company. I believe that the design function promotes value-based business decisions. With the right design principles in place, product and service processes can be made more focused and efficient, minimising the risk of failure. This increases the chances of convincing existing and new customers with a technically and emotionally perfect new solution offering. The design function thus creates useful and highly desirable portfolios that justify a premium price. By better exploiting market potential, the design function can indeed make a significant contribution to increasing shareholder value. Design is equity!
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