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Critically Exploring the Development of a Conceptual
Framework for Building Innovative Brands
Xinya Youa, Dr David Handsb
aLancaster University, UK.
bLancaster University, UK.
*Corresponding author e-mail: youxy429@hotmail.com
Abstract: The success of today's brands increasingly relies on consumer-centred co-
innovation. In this context, brands must play a role that is more proactive than their
traditional one of serving as a communication tool. Based on an extensive review of
the literature, this paper defines the new role of brands as a driving force for
innovation and, to illustrate the potential of that new role, proposes a conceptual
framework for building innovative brands that comprises the following five
dimensions: (1) the command centre—the brand management team; (2) the strategic
vision—the context of building innovative brands; (3) the organisational
foundation—the organisation's innovation capability; (4) the cross-cultural
perspective—driving innovation cross-culturally; and (5) the human-centred
innovation approach—design thinking. It is hoped that the comprehensive,
interdisciplinary, and strategic outcomes will inspire researchers and marketing
professionals to apply the findings described here and to conduct further study on
this topic.
Keywords: branding; innovation; design thinking; strategic management
1. Introduction
O'Cass and Viet Ngo (2007) suggested that building successful brands does not always
depend on the interpretation of feedback received from current consumers and competitors
but rather on an organisation's ability to innovatively develop unique ways of delivering
superior value to consumers. This challenge to management science (Ind & Watt, 2006;
Payne, Storbacka, Frow, & Knox, 2009) has been echoed for several years by those who hold
similar pioneering views. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive, interdisciplinary,
and strategic perspective from which to approach this challenge as an opportunity.
Initially, it critically reviews the theoretical background and analyses the context of the
challenge. It then addresses the research question of this paper: how does one build
Xinya You, Dr David Hands
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innovative brands systematically? To answer this question, a five-dimensional, conceptual
framework for building innovative brands was mapped out based on a broad literature
review of branding, innovation, organisation, and design theories. Design thinking, a
human-centred approach to innovation, was introduced to inspire the framework.
2. The New Role of Brands as a Driving Force for Innovation
2.1 The Early Era of Brands as a Communication Tool
The term brand can be traced back to 1876, when Bass Ale submitted its trademark and
became the first officially registered brand in the world (Millman, 2011). During the last
three decades, the term has developed and expanded to encompass a disciplinary status
known as branding. Not confined to consumer goods and services fields, branding has also
extended to business-to-business, to regions and countries, and to organisational
management domains (Allen, Fournier, & Miller, 2008). A brand is often regarded as a
communication tool and a part of the product strategy in brand development (Rooney,
1995). The following are two definitions that provide relatively comprehensive
understandings of the term:
A brand encompasses the benefits offered by a product or service, the consumer
experience, and the assets critical to delivering and communicating that experience
(Leventhal, 1996).
A brand is "a multidimensional construction, matching a firm's functional and
emotional values with the performance and psychosocial needs of consumers" (De
Chernatony & Dall'Olmo Riley, 1998, p. 417).
A debate on the "death of the brand" began in the early 1990s (Leventhal, 1996, p. 17), since
the simple world of mass production technology and television advertisement in which
branding theory thrived turned into a more complex world. This complexity is reflected in
various aspects of marketing, such as knowledgeable consumers, multiple media,
proliferating distribution channels, and the rapid development of Internet technology (Allen
et al., 2008; Leventhal, 1996). Accordingly, the role of brands as a communication tool
ended. This argument can be partly verified by the four eras of branding theory
development identified by Merz, He, and Vargo (2009; see Table 1). It is evident that the
debate on the "death of the brand" was initiated at the beginning of the relationship-focus
brand era; since then, involving multiple stakeholders to co-create brand value has become
the central task of brand development.
Critically Exploring the Development of a Conceptual Framework for Building Innovative Brands
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Table 1 The four brand eras identified by Merz, He, and Vargo (2009).
Brand Era
The Role of Brands
1. Individual Goods-
Focus Brand Era
(1900s–1930s)
Brands were considered identifiers that constituted a
way for customers to identify goods.
2. Value-Focus Brand
Era (1930s–1990s)
Brands were regarded as functional images and
symbolic images to meet customers' external and
internally generated consumption needs, respectively.
3. Relationship-Focus
Brand Era (1990s–
2000)
Brands were seen as knowledge, which considered
brand value to be the collectively perceived value co-
created by all consumers. Moreover, they were seen
as relationship partners, which highlighted the idea that
consumers formed emotional relationships with brands
and constantly co-created brand value through these
relationships. Furthermore, they played the role of
promises, which stressed the notion that employees
constituted important brand value co-creators by
communicating a certain brand image through their
interaction with customers.
4. Stakeholder-Focus
Brand Era (2000 and
forward)
Brands are identified as dynamic and social processes,
which emphasized the concept that brand communities
and all stakeholders are active co-creators of brand
value.
2.2 The New Era of Brands as a Driving Force for Innovation
As discussed in the previous section, the exploration of mutual relationships among
stakeholders to co-create brand value has been the dominant direction of branding theory.
Some constructive suggestions have been proposed, which can be grouped into the
following two approaches to building innovative brands.
Consumer-centred innovation: Norton (2005) indicated that some brands provided
consumers unprecedented innovative products and services and were thus responsible for
the company's market leadership. Further, Ulaga and Chacour (2001) pointed out the
importance of knowing what customers need and desire, and then developing and delivering
consumer-valued innovations, to the success of today's businesses. These findings led to a
newly established logic: consumer-centred innovation is the key to brands' success, a
conclusion that has been confirmed by many scholars in the branding field (De Chernatony,
McDonald, & Wallace, 2011; Payne et al., 2009; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004; Sheth &
Parvatiyar, 1999).
Cross-boundary collaboration: De Chernatony (2001) pointed out that brand development is
a set of cross-functional activities in the value-adding process. Similarly, Merz et al. (2009)
argued that stakeholders co-create brand value continuously, dynamically, socially, and
Xinya You, Dr David Hands
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interactively. Correspondingly, the collaboration relationship among stakeholders has
become an ideal opportunity for brands to survive and thrive (Cravens & Piercy, 2008; Hatch
& Schultz, 2010). As collaborative partners, stakeholders can contribute in many ways,
such as supplying economic resources and political support as well as the specialist
knowledge that provides mutual benefits for brand development and innovation (A.
Gregory, 2007; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004).
The two approaches are interrelated and therefore can be combined into consumer-centred
co-innovation, which implies the new role of brands. In this regard, Abbing (2010) put
forward a new concept, brand-driven innovation, and the following four-stage approach to
achieving it:
1. Human-centred branding connects the brand to the people who develop new
products and services, as well as to its current and future customers.
Organisations can achieve this goal by involving multiple stakeholders
throughout their entire brand-building processes.
2. Building innovative strategy involves developing an innovation approach that
sees the promise of the brand as a springboard. The question to answer is
"How can we deploy our capabilities and resources as best we can to develop
new products and services that delight our customers in every stage of their
relationship with us?"
3. Building design strategy comes into play after an organisation has discovered
its unique capabilities and gained an understanding of how these can be
transformed into value for its customers. A multi-disciplinary strategic
design will help to transform the understanding into practice.
4. Touchpoint orchestration is the course through which, every time the
consumer encounters a brand touchpoint, the organization has an
opportunity to strengthen the relationship with that customer.
In this way, Abbing (2010) creatively demonstrated the new role of brands as a driving force
for innovation. It can be said that the early era of brands as a communication tool has
been replaced by the new era of brands as a driving force for innovation. This classification
of the two brand eras offers a new perspective that raises brands to a dominant position in
businesses and reveals their potential power in continuously driving consumer-centred co-
innovation.
2.3 Defining the Research Question
While the latest studies towards the new brand era are inspiring, they continue to be
undeveloped and require improvements. For example, the four-stage approach of brand-
driven innovation has several limitations. First, it requires the fundamental knowledge of
branding theory as a prerequisite. In addition, the application result highly relies on the
organisation's innovation capability. Moreover, it simplifies the process of brand-driven
innovation (Abbing, 2010). As a result, organisations can hardly implement it without
Critically Exploring the Development of a Conceptual Framework for Building Innovative Brands
5
expertise. Hence, a valuable research approach is one that focuses more on relevant
topics, which is what this paper aims to do. In the new brand era, the core responsibility of
brands is driving consumer-centred co-innovation systematically and thus helping
organisations to achieve sustainable development. Accordingly, this paper defines a critical
research question: how does one build innovative brands systematically? To answer this
question, this paper presents a conceptual framework comprising the following five
dimensions: (1) the command centre—the brand management team; (2) the strategic
vision—the context of building innovative brands; (3) the organisational foundation—the
organisation's innovation capability; (4) the cross-cultural perspective—driving innovation
cross-culturally; and (5) the human-centred innovation approach—design thinking (see
Figure 1). Companies and public sectors are the two primary domains that need to build
brands. Due to space limitations, this paper concentrates on companies.
Figure 1 The five-dimensional, conceptual framework for building innovative brands.
2.4 Inspired by Design Thinking
The fifth dimension of the framework introduces a mature concept of design theory: design
thinking, an idea whose development can be traced back to the 1960s (Simon, 1969). Now,
a half-century later, the world has come to a common understanding of design thinking.
The following are two clear definitions of the concept:
Design thinking is a human-centred approach to innovation that integrates the
needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business
success (Brown, 2015).
Design thinking is "a human-centred innovation process that emphasizes
observation, collaboration, fast learning, visualization of ideas, rapid concept
Xinya You, Dr David Hands
6
prototyping, and concurrent business analysis, which ultimately influences
innovation and business strategy" (Lockwood, 2010, p. xi).
The essence of design thinking can be described as consumer-centred co-innovation, and it
is also the core idea of brands as a driving force for innovation. Hence, this paper suggests
that design thinking as a mature concept can be applied to inspire brand development.
3. The Conceptual Framework for Building Innovative Brands
Systematically
In Section 2.3, this paper proposed a five-dimensional, conceptual framework for building
innovative brands systematically. This section enriches the framework based on a broad
literature review and builds a solid foundation for further exploration.
3.1 The Command Centre: the Brand Management Team
Abbing (2010) argued that brand-driven innovation requires releasing the brand from the
marketing department into the entire organisation. This argument is valid, because
developing and implementing brand strategies within the marketing department is beyond
its capacity for in dealing with the complexity of consumer-centred co-innovation. Further,
Webster Jr, Malter, and Ganesan (2012) proposed an idea that a small "centre of excellence"
can be built to enable collaboration among an array of dispersed marketing elements.
Similarly, De Chernatony (2001) encouraged companies to grow and to sustain their brands
strategically by building a brand team composed of knowledgeable employees. Consistent
with these opinions, this paper presents the view that it is important to establish a brand
management team as the command centre of building innovative brands systematically. A
competent brand manager should be appointed to administer the brand team (Brexendorf &
Daecke, 2012) and to engage multiple stakeholders in developing brands together.
3.2 The Strategic Vision: the Context of Building Innovative Brands
The success of building innovative brands is closely linked to the strategic vision of thinking
of all key aspects of brand development as a whole. This paper identifies five key aspects
of brand development.
Key Aspect 1: Developing Business Strategy
The value of brand strategy and business strategy are equivalent in this new brand era.
Urde (1994) confirmed the equivalence by arguing that brands should be used as a starting
point in the formulation of business strategies through creating brand orientation.
Moreover, empirical evidence indicates that the most brand-oriented companies have
almost doubled the profitability of the least brand-oriented companies (Gromark & Melin,
2011). Business strategy comprises three key dimensions: (1) the product-market scope—
the heart of business strategy; (2) the value proposition—the prerequisite of new products;
and (3) strategic assets (such as research expertise and a well-recognized logo)—the
foundation of business strategy (Aaker, 2009). Based on these three dimensions, this
Critically Exploring the Development of a Conceptual Framework for Building Innovative Brands
7
paper maintains that the relationship between business strategy and brand strategy in
building innovative brands should consider the following:
The product-market scope: The consumer-centred co-innovation process of
building innovative brands can generate meaningful insights to help formulate an
appropriate product-market scope.
The value proposition: A unique brand promise should be constructed to connect
the organisation's capabilities and vision to the customer's needs and aspirations,
which is a precondition for developing the value propositions of new products.
The strategic assets: These assets should be legitimately deployed to support the
building of innovative brands.
Key Aspect 2: Formulating Brand Strategy
The brand vision and the brand promise construct one set of the most significant concepts in
building innovative brands. The brand vision should indicate the long-term intent for a
brand and must excite employees and enable them to understand how they can contribute
to the brand's success (De Chernatony, 2001). The brand promise is the statement made
by a brand to its customers that identifies expectations for all interactions with its people,
products, services, and company (Cameron & Wilcox, 2003). The corporate brand and the
product brand construct another set of the most important concepts. From the
relationship perspective, the corporate brand is the dominant master brand and drives the
product brand(s) (J. R. Gregory, 1997). From an audience perspective, the corporate brand
aims to develop a coherent brand promise to all stakeholders, and the product brand(s)
focuses on providing and communicating its benefits and value proposition to its consumers
(Schultz & De Chernatony, 2002). In practice, some corporations have adopted the multi-
brand strategy, which establishes a large portfolio of product brands to take advantage of
disaggregation (Dawar, 2004), whereas some companies apply the single-brand strategy,
which uses the corporate brand to communicate important messages on behalf of all its
product brands (J. R. Gregory, 1997).
Key Aspect 3: Managing New Product Development
Most companies begin with a single product and gradually become multi-product
corporations (Rao, Agarwal, & Dahlhoff, 2004). Usually, new product development projects
are conducted in three stages: the product strategy and planning stage, the product
development organizing stage, and the project management stage (Krishnan & Ulrich, 2001).
When new products are planned to be added, the product development manager needs to
answer five critical questions: what to launch; where to launch; when to launch; why to
launch; and how to launch (Hultink, Griffin, Hart, & Robben, 1997). It is valuable for a
corporation to build a product portfolio that includes many product development projects
targeting existing and potential markets. The creation of several product platforms is also
valuable to enable resource sharing across different projects (Krishnan & Ulrich, 2001).
Key Aspect 4: Customizing Brand Experience
Xinya You, Dr David Hands
8
Scholars in the branding field hold a common view that a brand is an accumulation of brand
experience collectively gleaned from all brand touchpoints (Davis, 2000; Meyer & Schwager,
2007; Rockwell, 2008). Therefore, the ultimate aim of brand management should be to
deliver a consistent and distinctive brand experience of the brand promise through every
brand touchpoint (Burmann & Zeplin, 2005; Mosley, 2007; Noble, 2006). The touchpoints
of a brand may include advertising, packaging, the out-of-box experience, the product or
service itself, customer service, and informational channels (Rockwell, 2008). The use of
mapping tools can help to improve or create brand experience (Patterson & Marketing,
2009), such as customer journey.
Key Aspect 5: Engaging Multiple Stakeholders
The stakeholders of brands usually include brand owners, corporate investors, financiers,
suppliers, consumers, employees, trade unions, competitors, and authorities (Ditlev‐
Simonsen & Midttun, 2011; J. R. Gregory, 1997). Among them, consumers are the end-
assessors of products and thus should be seen as the core stakeholders (S. Kumar &
Blomqvist, 2004; Pike, 2007; Willmott, 2010). Employees are also essential stakeholders: a
company needs to understand its employees' values and aspirations to unleash their
potential and to align their values with its brand promise (De Chernatony, 2001).
Moreover, stakeholders other than consumers and employees are additional value co-
creators for brands. Hence, it is necessary to think about how to engage multiple
stakeholders in building innovative brands to generate maximum value.
3.3 The Organisational Foundation: the Organisation's Innovation Capability
Companies need to distinguish the key factors of nurturing the organisation's innovation
capability, which supports brand development (Koberg, Detienne, & Heppard, 2003). This
section describes the following four sets of factors:
Key Factor Set 1: Tangible and Intangible Resources
Organisational resources can be categorized as either tangible or intangible. Tangible
resources include people, equipment, technologies, and cash. Intangible resources
comprise product designs, knowledge, brands, and relationships with suppliers, distributors,
and consumers (Christensen & Overdorf, 2000; Prahalad & Krishnan, 2008). Among all of
these, knowledge is the key resource in nurturing the organisation's innovation capability
(Anand, Gardner, & Morris, 2007; Gold & Arvind Malhotra, 2001). The organisation's
innovation capability can be translated into its ability to continuously create, absorb, and
integrate knowledge while adapting it to changing market conditions (Verona & Ravasi,
2003). As a prerequisite, however, organisations need to first figure out what type of
innovation they want to pursue, since different types of innovation require particular types
of knowledge and knowledge management (Koberg et al., 2003; Popadiuk & Choo, 2006).
Conceptually, explicit knowledge is firmly related to incremental innovation, while tacit
knowledge is closely linked to radical innovation (Popadiuk & Choo, 2006).
Critically Exploring the Development of a Conceptual Framework for Building Innovative Brands
9
Key Factor Set 2: Organisational Processes and Structure
Organisational processes constitute the patterns of interaction, coordination,
communication, and decision making that people use to transform resources into products
(Christensen & Overdorf, 2000). It is important for companies to pursue and to sustain
innovation by formulating organisational processes that encourage it. In this regard,
Mumford (2000) recommended the work styles that emphasize curiosity, persistent interest,
focused interests, self-discipline, and skills related to the integration of a variety of work
activities and interests. Organisational structure can be described as the orchestration of
processes (Damanpour & Schneider, 2006; Dhanaraj & Parkhe, 2006). Ramezan (2011)
defined it as the power and responsibility structure formed in the managing process, which
can find expression in the policymaking structure, the governing structure, the controlling
structure, and the information structure. The success of every strategy depends heavily on
its alignment with organisational structure (Jabnoun, 2005). There are some general
principles of designing organisational structure for fostering long-term innovation capability.
For example, organisational structures that are relatively flexible and decentralized but
integrated can support sharing, learning, and collaboration across boundaries, both
internally and externally (Anand et al., 2007; Chen & Huang, 2007; Gold & Arvind Malhotra,
2001; Koberg et al., 2003; Tsai, 2001). Additionally, organisational-structure design should
meet the requirements of reducing uncertainty and of focusing employee efforts on the
accomplishment of strategic goals (O'Neill, Beauvais, & Scholl, 2001).
Key Factor Set 3: Corporate Values and Culture
Corporate values refer to a company's institutional standards of behaviour (Kelly, Kocourek,
McGaw, & Samuelson, 2005). They are articulated and embedded in a company's practices
for purposes of playing the guiding role in the decision-making process (Brătianu &
Bălănescu, 2008). The fostering of an organisation's innovation capability requires
corresponding corporate values that set up the standards of innovation practices. Culture
refers to the values shared by a group of people that tend to persist over time, even when
group membership changes (Kotter, 2008). This definition also applies to corporate
culture. When a business grows larger and more complex, its corporate values become
increasingly important and gradually evolve into a corporate culture (Christensen &
Overdorf, 2000), which is an important determinant of climate for innovation (Sarros,
Cooper, & Santora, 2008). Innovation-supportive cultures can nurture expectations and
guidelines for members' experimentation, creativity, and risk-taking (Jassawalla & Sashittal,
2002).
Key Factor Set 4: The Development Stage of the Organisation
Companies can be classified into four different categories according to their size:
microenterprise, small enterprise, medium enterprise, and large enterprise (European Union
Commission, 2003). This classification indicates the four development stages of
organisations. As Knight and Cavusgil (2004) pointed out, smaller companies are more
Xinya You, Dr David Hands
10
flexible, less bureaucratic, and enjoy internal conditions that encourage innovativeness,
whereas larger corporations usually experience massive bureaucratization, which hinders
their innovative activities; this does not mean, however, that small companies are more
innovative than large corporations. Christensen and Overdorf (2000) demonstrated that
companies commonly experience a migration of capabilities during their growth: they start
in resources, in particular human resources, and then shift to processes and values before
finally migrating to culture. Therefore, organisations at different development stages need
to nurture their innovation capability with particular focuses and hold a long-term strategic
vision.
3.4 The Cross-cultural Perspective: Driving Innovation Cross-culturally
Many proactive research findings have been put forward regarding building innovation
brands cross-culturally. On the one hand, some studies have furthered the understanding
of cultural similarities and differences in organisational behaviour (Lytle, Brett, Barsness,
Tinsley, & Janssens, 1995; Mueller & Thomas, 2001). For example, Shane (1993)
demonstrated that high rates of innovation are closely associated with the cultural value of
uncertainty acceptance, individualism, and lack of power distance. On the other hand,
some studies have shown that there is a global formula for successful innovation (Murovec
& Prodan, 2009). For example, Lee, Lee, and Souder (2000) found that top management
support, research and development (R&D)-marketing integration, product champion's
influences, and project manager's authority, skill, and motivating ability are essential for new
product development (NPD) success regardless of the country in which a company operates.
These findings are valuable in providing a cross-cultural perspective of building innovative
brands. Moreover, driving innovation cross-culturally can be strengthened by engaging
relevant stakeholders of different cultures. The involvement can bring in-depth
communications and interactions that help to gain cross-cultural knowledge for building
innovative brands, which will then be able to connect the organisation's vision and capability
to the consumer's needs and aspirations cross-culturally. In this way, cultural similarities
and differences become cross-cultural innovation opportunities for brand development.
3.5 The Human-centred Innovation Approach: Design Thinking
This section discusses how design thinking can bring benefits to the whole process of
building innovative brands systematically. The discussion follows the sequence of the five-
dimensional, conceptual framework.
Dimension 1: The Command Centre—the Brand Management Team
Because it holds a central position in building innovative brands, the brand management
team should take the leadership in applying and disseminating design thinking throughout
the entire organisation. The team needs to engage employees from different departments
in working together to develop brands by applying design thinking. This method is
effective because it has been shown that there is a learning progression during the design
Critically Exploring the Development of a Conceptual Framework for Building Innovative Brands
11
thinking process that can transform a novice into an expert design thinker (Goldschmidt &
Weil, 1998).
Dimension 2: The Strategic Vision—the Context of Building Innovative Brands
Applying design thinking can bring strategic value to the systematic building of innovative
brands. Overall, design thinking offers companies a shared customer-centric language with
which to discuss the opportunities available to them (Design Management Institute, 2015).
Furthermore, design thinking can provide specific value to each aspect of brand
development. In developing business strategies, some of design thinking's non-
denominational concepts, such as teamwork and visualization, can help companies to create
a powerful platform through which to support incremental improvements and to drive
innovation. The improvements include reductions in time to market, increased margins,
and a better product/market mix. In formulating brand strategies, design thinking can
encourage companies to focus on building brand loyalty based on customer-centric empathy
and by aligning their internal culture with the external brand offer (Design Management
Institute, 2015). While managing new product development, design thinking provides a
fundamental process that can guide a company to translate its abstract brand vision, brand
promise, and capability to consumer-centred innovations. The process consists of five
steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test (the d.school, 2012). In customizing
consumer-valued brand experiences, design thinking is useful, as well. In 2006, for
example, IBM started to apply design thinking to improve clients' experience of visiting IBM
centres (Clark & Smith, 2008). Finally, design thinking offers an opportunity to open up the
roles that multiple stakeholders play in constituting value creation (Kimbell & Street, 2009).
Dimension 3: The Organisational Foundation—the Organisation's Innovation Capability
Design thinking can help to nurture the organisation's innovation capability by managing
each of its key factors. Design thinking is useful in managing tangible resources to enhance
the organisation's innovation capability. For example, its visual artefacts and prototypes
can help multidisciplinary teams work together (Kimbell, 2011). Likewise, design thinking
can contribute to managing intangible resources. For instance, knowledge and skills are
central to the design thinking approach, but they are embedded within an embodied
understanding of practice (Adams, Daly, Mann, & Dall'Alba, 2011). Moreover, design
thinking is about finding a better balance between exploration and exploitation and
between abductive, inductive, and deductive reasoning (Martin, 2009). This characteristic
makes it particularly valuable for inspiring the design of organisational processes and
structures that balance organisational tensions between divergent intuitive exploration and
convergent analytical exploitation (University of St. Gallen, 2011). In addition, the
comparatively organic process of design thinking that stresses interdisciplinary collaboration
also serves as a good example of developing organisational processes and structures that
encourage and enable innovation.
Xinya You, Dr David Hands
12
Furthermore, companies can train their employees to be design thinkers with the following
characteristics: empathy, integrative thinking, optimism, experimentalism, and collaboration
(Brown, 2008). These characteristics will lead to the establishment of corporate values and
corporate cultures that motivate consumer-centred co-innovation. As designer thinkers,
employees will be able to not only meet the requirements of tasks but also to solve
problems innovatively (Rylander, 2009). Additionally, they can be "knowledge brokers"
and "glue" in an organisation because of their ability to embrace many types of thought and
knowledge and to solve problem holistically (Hargadon & Sutton, 1999; Kimbell, 2011).
Encouragingly, design thinking is powerful for companies at different development stages in
practice. Some SMEs (e.g. Challs International and Oxford Biosensors) and some large
corporations (e.g. SAP and IBM) have already benefited from the application of design
thinking (Clark & Smith, 2008; V. Kumar, Ward, Runcie, & Morris, 2009; SAP, 2015).
Dimension 4: The Cross-cultural Perspective—Driving Innovation Cross-culturally
The value of design thinking has been confirmed cross-culturally. For example, Rau (2014)
and the d.school (2015) emphasized the value of design thinking in understanding different
cultures and, subsequently, their users. In addition, researchers have started to explore
the power of understanding design thinking in multicultural workplaces (University of
Canberra, 2015). Nevertheless, this paper presents the belief that there is more that
design thinking can contribute to cross-cultural studies, especially in building innovative
brands cross-culturally. Potential contributions include understanding multiple
stakeholders of different cultures, improving cross-cultural collaboration, delivering
outstanding products and consumer experience for different cultures, and nurturing an
organisation's innovation capability cross-culturally.
Dimension 5: The Human-centred Innovation Approach—Design Thinking
A previous portion of this section discusses the idea that the application of design thinking
would energize the entire process of building innovative brands. The utilization of design
thinking tools and techniques can significantly enhance the applicability of design thinking in
this process. First, the tools and techniques can be designed to train new design thinkers
from a novice level to that of an expert. For example, non-hierarchical mind-mapping
techniques are useful for training novice designers to adopt a design problem-solving
framework or processes of expert designers (Kokotovich, 2008). Secondly, generally
everyone can easily and quickly grasp these tools and techniques, such as the Empathy Map
created by The d. school (2015). Thirdly, these tools and techniques can improve the
efficiency and effectiveness of the collaboration among multiple stakeholders. For
example, sketches and visualization techniques allow design thinkers to represent problems
and solutions and to develop their ideas in conversation (Dorst, 2010). In practice, design
thinking tools and techniques, such as the Business Model Canvas, which has gained a high
reputation in business management and entrepreneurship areas, have proved valuable in
many areas (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010).
Critically Exploring the Development of a Conceptual Framework for Building Innovative Brands
13
4. Conclusion
This review of the development of branding theory clearly reveals that a new brand era has
arrived. In this new era, pursuing consumer-centred co-innovation is crucial if brands are
to survive and thrive. Hence, instead of their traditional role as a communication tool,
today's brands must take a more proactive role. This paper defines the new role as a
driving force for innovation and proposes a research question through which to illustrate the
new role of brands: how does one build innovative brands systematically? To answer this
question, a five-dimensional, conceptual framework was mapped out. According to the
framework, companies are first suggested to establish a multifunctional brand management
team as the command centre of building innovative brands. The framework then offers a
strategic vision of brand development by explaining its five critical aspects: developing
business strategy; formulating brand strategy; managing new product development;
customizing brand experience; and engaging multiple stakeholders. Next, it distinguishes
four sets of interrelated key factors of an organisation's innovation capability: tangible and
intangible resources; organisational processes and structure; corporate values and culture;
and the development stage of the organisation. Moreover, it adopts a cross-cultural
perspective by engaging relevant stakeholders from different cultures in brand
development. Finally, the framework elaborates how design thinking can bring value to
the whole process of building innovative brands systematically.
In conclusion, this paper suggests a new direction for further branding theory and, based on
that, creates a strategic blueprint for brand development that is comprehensive,
interdisciplinary, and strategic, and thus valuable in the real world. Specifically, the paper
offers an overall picture of running and sustaining innovative businesses; it encourages
companies to break the boundaries of different departments, stakeholders, and cultures; it
provides a simple and flexible framework for fast learning, easy application, and further
exploration; it implies a time dimension of gradually nurturing organisations and their
brands; and it equips organisations with a human-centred innovation approach. This paper
contributes towards design discipline by raising design thinking to a critical position in
building brands and by broadening an understanding of the value of design thinking in
helping companies to achieve their success. Nevertheless, further empirical research is
required to enrich and to verify the findings of this paper. The authors' next task is to make
a theoretical contribution to theory building and theory testing by conducting a multiple-
case study guided by the five-dimensional, conceptual framework. Building innovative
brands systematically, a previously unexplored process, will serve as the foundation for the
new theory.
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About the Authors:
Xinya You is a PhD student at Lancaster University. Previously, she
worked for two years as an analyst at Siegel + Gale. She obtained her
MA in Design & Branding Strategy (Brunel University) and BA in
Industrial Design (Tsinghua University).
Dr David Hands is Course Leader for MA Design Management at
Lancaster University. His research interests are varied and diverse,
encompassing design policy development; design briefing; design
leadership; designing against crime; and new product development.
