IMPROVING BUSINESS OUTCOMES FOR NEW BRANDS IN TAIWAN
Service design strategy
PROJECT CONTEXT
The Taiwan Immersion Program is a partnership between IIT Institute of Design and Drive Catalyst, an innovation lab within Far Eastern Group in Taipei, Taiwan. As part of a small team from IIT, we spent 5 weeks within Drive’s office taking on an active project.
Summer 2019
Design team
Andreya Veintimilla, M.Des IIT
Brian Siegfried, M.Des IIT
Jason Romano, M.Des IIT
Pinakee Naik, M.Des IIT
Marty Thaler, prof IIT
Brands embark on a complex journey and decision making process when entering the Taiwanese marketplace. Retailers are key partners in this process. Though each party has different motivations and business goals, each benefits from meeting consumers needs and delivering moments of delight.
Through four weeks of research — including 13 customer interviews, 5 facilitated discussions with business leaders, and many hours of observational ethnography — we developed insights into new value flows and introduced four preliminary concepts seeking to improve the process and outcomes for brands and retailers.
KEY INSIGHT
The first step is relationship building.
A key barrier that we identified to innovating in this space was the nature of the brand innovation lab itself — in a business culture that values loyalty and seniority, an outside organization wanting to challenge the status quo is looked at with deep skepticism. To lay a foundation for future collaboration with the Far Eastern Retail (FERG) business partners we ditched the power point presentation in favor of a round table discussion mediated by printed booklets.
Our assumption was that on plain paper the ideas we shared were malleable, new perspectives could be added and incorrect assumptions fixed, generating a new baseline of shared knowledge and understanding. What we found was that and more — the discourse surfaced unknown silos of knowledge within the business unit itself as well as a desire to share and learn — and proved that facilitating internal alignment would be a key facet of developing innovative service solutions.
PROTOTYPING A SERVICE
A core part of our research was prototyping what a Brand Lab offering might look like and do for a brand. We partnered with a Singaporean health foods brand to conduct market research and generate brand strategy insights for the Taiwan market. This included both primary and secondary research including 13 one-on-one interviews with consumers.
NEW VALUE FLOWS
We synthesized our research by mapping the journey a brand might take to launch in Taiwan by understanding the core functions and key stakeholders within the supply chain — from brand to customer. Using our partner brand as a case study, we developed preliminary concepts for a Brand Lab that would create new value flows between the Far Eastern organization and retail brands.
