How Does Branding Relate to Interior Design?
Have you ever felt that you really got to know someone after visiting their place, exposing a whole new side of their personality? Or maybe it looked just like you imagined, but either way, their home was telling the TRUTH about them at some more profound level.
Our homes are extensions of ourselves - they reveal our personality, past and present. Through the choices we make and even the ones we don’t, we let people know who we are the moment they cross our threshold. The same concept applies in business as well. Be it in retail or the office, space always has a personality. Sometimes a very bland one, but never neutral.
Why should Interior Design be part of your brand strategy?
Beyond a logo design or website, a brand stretches into the real world, into the space it occupies. Continuing the exploration of the senses, touch may not be an obvious tool in experiential branding. But touch expressed through Interior Design can invite us in, guide our actions, make us feel welcomed or relaxed, make us feel like we belong... or not.
Touch is the first language we speak. It’s the first way we have to understand, explore, and interact with the world. But once we acquire new skills, we tend to underestimate its effect on us. All the more when we design the touchpoints our clients have with our brand. We perceive our environment through sound and vision as well as through touch. Engaging all the senses elicits a stronger feeling that connects us to the space.
Good design accounts for the entire user experience. Every space is an opportunity to showcase the brand’s essence: the values shared by the business and the customers it targets. It’s not only about painting the walls in your brand colors. This is where we design feeling experiences - in the realm of touch.
How do space and environment affect us?
The Mind+Body connection is a widely accepted paradigm: our physical health affects our thoughts, and in turn, our mind has the power to affect our physical health. After a series of new findings, the third variable was included in the feedback loop: MIND + BODY + ENVIRONMENT.
Roger Barker, one of the founders of environmental psychology, demonstrated that physical and social context influence human behavior to a greater extent than the individual’s internal world.
For example, children score better on IQ tests given in classrooms with high ceilings. Or a less positive example, the small, low ceiling, lookalike apartments in communist countries were used as a tool of oppression by brutally repressive totalitarian regimes.
Living in a man-made environment means that we live in spaces that are deliberately constructed, by decision, or by default. The intention is what separates the two. Design functionality concerns itself with the best flow and use of space. But in that multitude of arrangements, choices can be made to encourage cooperation, solitude, observation, movement, and serendipitous encounters.
Where to start?
You start by discovering your brand values and work with the architect or interior designer to integrate those values into a concept. That will attract your ideal customers and employees.
If brand strategy answers the questions: How do I want to be perceived? and How to reach my ideal customers? then branded interior design boils down to:
What do I want my customers to feel when they step through the door?
When you’re (re)designing your space, ask yourself:
What are the brand values? What is the message I’m trying to send through this space design?
What are the customers’ needs? How will customers engage with the space? For example, does it encourage customers to keep on moving or to linger?
How does it contribute to the psychological and physical experience of the customer?
What colors and materials best support the intent of the design?
How will light, sound, and temperature contribute to the experience throughout the day?
BLANDING
With the rise of Pinterest and Instagram, we are collectively developing an eye for interior design, albeit for the same type of design. To use Thierry Brunfaut’s term, the creative director and co-founder of Base Design, branding has turned into blanding. As a result, spaces become indistinguishable from each other, wherever they happen to be in the world.
A quick search on Pinterest for office interior design, for example, returns an expansive pallette of... beige and taupe.
We should not forget that the purpose of branding is to identify and distinguish. Yes, design and interior design in particular do their job in communicating the brand values and attracting the ideal customer. But does it also help distinguish your space from the one next door?
Brand strategy comes first, and interior design follows. With the support of a brand strategist and interior designer, you should establish a solid collaboration that will leverage branded interior design to reinforce your message, your image, and the relationship you’re creating with your customers.