Since 1925, Goodmans had shaped how British households listened to music and experienced entertainment at home. Heritage, loyalty and genuine warmth toward the brand were not in short supply. What was missing, when they came to us, was a clear and confident answer to a single question: what should Goodmans do next, and what should it look like when it got there?
Answering that question, across a multi-year partnership, produced some of the most strategically complete and commercially rewarding work we have done. A brand that arrived uncertain of its future left knowing exactly what it stood for and with the product portfolio to prove it.
Any project that demands far-reaching changes to brand and product needs a set of guiding principles that reflect an organisation’s strengths and aspirations.
So, as a critical first step, we held discovery sessions to uncover the brand’s best attributes and extract their vision for the future.
Goodmans were proud of their long-established British heritage and sought to leverage their association with London to attract customers in international markets.
Equally, they wanted to extend their reputation to emerging consumer electronics categories and appeal to a younger generation of consumers. Together with senior executives, we produced a three-year roadmap which plotted the brand’s strategic path and its consumer offer in new categories of consumer electronics.
Further to this, we began crafting strategic industrial design exemplars that pushed the brand beyond audio experiences into a broader space. Our aim? To reposition the Goodmans brand as a leader in intelligent design.
To help articulate this to senior stakeholders, including the brand’s Chinese owners, we created a product brand document consisting of a series of statements that could help shape the brand’s design strategy. At the heart of this was ‘brilliantly simple’.
This philosophy went on to become the core message across all brand communications, and influenced our strategic industrial design, packaging design and digital experience design activities.
As a design studio, we produce our best work when we’re given the reins to lead on strategy and execution.
In the case of Goodmans, we proudly propelled the company into new categories through a repositioning that used strategic industrial design to allow them to tell their story as it should be told.
