An Investigation into Design-driven Approaches within Fast Moving Consumer Goods Brand Development.

Lee, Younjoon (2012) An Investigation into Design-driven Approaches within Fast Moving Consumer Goods Brand Development. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

The attention of design has evolved from developing new products to developing a mechanism to offer more innovative and competitive products. Driven by design thinking and design-driven innovation perspectives, expanded roles for design have been highlighted in academia and business and have been identified as a means to bring innovation to organisations through the application of designerly approaches. Such approaches are often applied to diverse organisational activities in a manner that is at odds with conventional roles for design. However, there has been little research investigating how to undertake such a new role for design corresponding to specific industry contexts. In addition little research has explored using (the role of) design in the FMCG industry: research has predominately been confined to design's contribution to brand identity development. Therefore, this PhD aims to propose a way to underpin a new role for design within fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry, via the following research phases. First, preliminary research in the form of content analysis of relevant literature was undertaken to discover how an expanded role of design is defined and the manner in which they are being adopted in a number of sectors, which entails a concept of design-driven approaches (DDA): approaches to applying a way of designerly conceptualising and exploiting tasks. Secondly, based on the features of DDA, this research was conducted through transformative mixed methods: a sequence of online survey and in-depth semi-structured interviews in order to explore phenomena which enhance and/or hinder design's integration within business. Grounded on the findings from a series of research activities and empirical data analysis, this research proposes a conceptual model - a framework and roadmap - of how the FMCG industry can overcome impediments to design's integration within brand development and organisational management by establishing a collaborative designerly frame to encompass activity-based and relational perspectives and elucidating contemporary and expanded roles of design. Finally, via member-checking validation, this model proposes an appropriate way to embed designerly ways into FMCG brand development by underpinning a collaborative ideas generation phase, especially for establishing environmental and organisational change to enhance designerly application.