The strategic arenas shaping consumer choice
Designers already know that form follows function – the more pressing question right now is whether form follows brand.
In this piece, we look at how design leaders are using the material language of design to translate principles into positioning that people can see, feel and trust.
We explore three strategic arenas shaping consumer choice right now.
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Power and Performance
Power and performance have risen in both prominence and ambition, changing dramatically in appearance over time. The importance of expressing capability and sophistication is evergreen, aspirational, and deeply legible.
What’s new is the visual language doing the expressing.
Automotive expression
Automotive expressions of power continue to evolve, with the growing prominence of EVs accelerating a shift towards new surface languages. The range is striking: from Range Rover’s refined Defender and Discovery, to Hyundai’s retro-modern concepts, to Audi’s minimal, engineering-led vision, the spectrum feels broader and more deliberate than ever.
Radical tech
At first, Nothing’s transparent, exposed-component aesthetic felt like a throwback – the clear iMac, reimagined. As the brand has evolved, it now reads as something more forward-looking: a performance language built on visibility, where technical expression becomes an art form.
Performance of you
Centred on material innovation, the sport and adventure landscape is currently a visual feast: expressive, adventurous, and increasingly sophisticated. Expect clashing colours, dynamic forms, and CMF that communicates performance before the product is even on the start-line.
Domestic Expression
Competition is pushing appliances into new territory as markers of taste and identity. Right now, three distinct aesthetics are emerging, each staking out a different position on what aspiration looks like at home.
Confident minimalism
Recently, restraint has resurfaced as a marker of status. Dark metallics, pure uninterrupted forms and surfaces stripped of the superfluous are having a resurgence – particularly for appliances that are chosen carefully and lived with long-term.
Offbeat celebration
Occasion-led products are increasingly freed from the expectation of longevity or seriousness. Here, delight matters more than coherence, and a new wave of launches reflects that: bold, clashing, genuinely unexpected colour and surface texture choices that signal joy over restraint.
Approachable characters
Alongside these, a softer aesthetic is rising, most visibly from Korean brands. Soft forms, off-whites, muted pastels, and environment-aware footprints occupy the space between restraint and celebration, communicating attainability without feeling like a compromise.
Sustainability Leaders
Sustainability has grown up. What began as a design movement defined by raw materials and visible restraint has matured into one of the most sophisticated and varied expressions in the market today.
Cultivated sophistication
The new eco-aesthetic is highly engineered, visually distinct, and unapologetically premium. Sustainability has become a genuine marker of distinction and high-tech innovation, and the materials are finally being treated that way.
Repair, replace and recycle
A second expression has emerged through the circular economy, where modularity, repairability, and material honesty shape products from the outset. Framework, Fairphone and Sony bring repair and replacement to the surface through form and CMF, turning technical logic into a confident expression of tomorrow .
Expressed by packaging
Increasingly, brands are using packaging to communicate green credentials, resulting in some genuinely compelling expressions of alternative materials. Samsung’s Bojagi concept repackages their Freestyle projector as a reusable wrapping cloth rooted in Korean craft tradition.
From principle to product
CMF, detail and form have become the vocabulary through which values become visible.
The brands setting the pace understand this; they treat every material choice and surface junction as a moment of communication.
From packaging to product finish, each decision builds a more considered picture of what the brand stands for. Over time, that coherence is what gives a brand its competitive ground.
