The design of BT’s recently launched Home Hub product is a powerful example of the way BT is now using product design as a core part of its brand strategy. Home Hub is a broadband router with VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) capabilities and can be fitted with an integral handset
The Home Hub was designed, says Mercer, to give tangible form to the BT brand in the home in the way that the domestic telephone handset had done in years gone by. Most broadband connection equipment, he explains, is hidden away under the computer or ‘in the airing cupboard.’ The BT Home Hub, by contrast was designed to be ‘displayed on the shelf, becoming part of the home.’
The Home Hub also forms an integral part of BT’s overall marketing campaign, appearing as a highly visible and central element of the company’s web site, and in its TV advertising campaigns. In this way it operates as ‘an icon for the brand.’
Product development
The Home Hub was a very short lead-time project, a response to a dramatic change in the broadband market. A competitor had started to offer free-of-charge broadband lines, and this threatened BT’s business model, which was to charge subscribers a monthly fee for their lines. So the company needed to respond by emphasising the value-added services that its broadband offering included.
As they were looking for response strategies, Mercer and his team were also involved in the final stages of commissioning a new, high performance router product. They saw an opportunity, says Mercer, ‘to re-establish a relationship with our customers through the design of a particular device.’
Mercer and his team engaged a designer, Paul Priestman of agency Priestman Goode, to look at how the new hub could be made more useful and more appealing than the ‘piece of grey plastic’ that BT would usually use as a router enclosure.
Priestman had to work in a highly constrained environment for the Home Hub project. Not only was the electrical design of the product already finalised, but BT was engaged in a tender process with prospective manufacturers, so the design had to be completed within three weeks, without any engagement with manufacturing engineers.
Despite the difficult environment, Mercer and the designer were able to dramatically alter the nature of the router. By turning the device onto its end, building in a cradle for a telephone handset and by including clever cable management functionality, they delivered a product that was appealing and easy to use for consumers.
They were also able to change the design of the packaging of the unit, ensuring that it was elegantly presented and logical to set up. The objective, says Mercer, was to give consumers a consistent experience through their whole contact with the BT brand, from seeing a piece of advertising, through buying, receiving, installing and enjoying the product.
Product as brand
The Home Hub has itself helped to evolve BT’s design process. The product has been so successful in marketing terms that advertising and marketing requirements are now being included in initial briefs for the next generations of equivalent products, with representatives from the departments and agencies involved in BT’s marketing becoming involved in early stage discussion to ensure that that everyone has a good idea of ‘how the design will manifest itself in advertising.’
Impact
In its first year of availability, BT has shipped more than 250,000 Home Hub units. It is hard to underestimate the importance of the Home Hub to BT’s overall strategy in consumer broadband, says Mercer. ‘Out of designing the casing for a piece of technology, all of a sudden we have managed to differentiate the brand fundamentally and stabilise the whole scenario in terms of BT’s main product. This is absolutely fundamental.’
BT has metrics for its overall brand value, to which design inputs contribute, but Mercer says that it is not possible to separate the direct contribution of design inputs from the building of brand value.
With thanks to BT
For the purposes of this study, our interviewees were David Mercer, Head of Design and Susan Roche, Brand and Identity manager – Global.
To find out more about BT, visit www.btplc.com