Good evening everybody, and thank you for coming along this evening. Jane, thank you very much for that whistle stop tour through what I know has been a huge amount of work over the previous year, so thank you for that. I thought the best thing to do would be to introduce you to your panel first. I’ve got a very tight time schedule that I have to stick to here, my watch broke this afternoon so I’m not quite sure how I’m going to do that, but we’ll keep to time.
So, I’m actually going to run through them in order as they appear on stage, so …far left to you, woman thing, my lefts and rights doesn’t work! – Christine Losecaat, Director of Little Dipper, international market development for creative industries. She’s been doing this for 10 years and she is someone who I know travels an awful lot and in actual fact her passport is now so full there are no blank pages left to go to China, so she’s got to renew that. I’ve got all sorts of watches being passed down the front now, excellent! I’ll take my pick of them later, thank you very much. I can see you are as concerned as I am to get to the drinks as fast as possible! Christine…where was I? Yes, no pages in her passport but critically she is also the Creative Industries Advisor to UK Trade and Investment and Design Partners.
Next to her we have Gus Desbarats – Chairman of The Alloy and he is a design survivor, you can just hear the music now I think. He’s been in the industry for 25 years, their business specialising in brand expression through products, 100% of their work has an international component to it, albeit 50% of those are international clients, could it be outsourcing and so on that makes up the other 50%, and they work for their overseas clients from Farnham as a base. It’s closer to Heathrow than London, so that’s his positioning statement for the international clients.
Next to him we have Tim Corvin, Managing Director of SiebertHead, who have been in business now for 35 years this year specialising in branding and packaging, 30% of their work comes from overseas, and is really part of the lifeblood of the company. Their founder was an American and for that reason it’s been a part of their business proposition since they’ve set up and interestingly they have an office in Warsaw.
Next to Tim we’ve got Clive Goodwin who is Senior Creative Design Manager at Samsung in London, so he’s the client in our midst. He’s been there for seven years, but he’s been in the industry all told for 18. He’s also worked on the client side within consultancies and as a freelance and interestingly he is working for Samsung, who are a Korean company, who have located in London. We’ve got news just this week that LG are moving to London, and Nokia of course are already here. So, interesting opportunities from an inward investment opportunity. There are about 25 to 40 people in the design team, it fluctuates because of the way they work. They call themselves an in-house consultancy, so not an in-house design team, so he’s our buyer of design representative here this evening.
And, last but not least, we have David, who we heard from earlier. Now, what we are going to do is we are going to ask all of them to give us a five minute heads up on their take on the information that’s been fed through to us this evening. They’ve seen it in advance of this, and then what we are going to do is plough through some questions to them and back into the audience.
So, Christine, why don’t we start with you first?
Right, three points I want to make – one, to pick up on the 30% of designers that said they didn’t know where to start. Really, international business development should just be an extension of your UK new business strategy. The problem that I see very often is that most UK consultancies don’t actually have a UK new business development strategy, so how you then turn it into an international one sort of doubles the problem, which brings me on to not being surprised at all at the fact that 50% of the designers who do work overseas do it initially as a result of accident or happenstance. There’s nothing wrong with that; what’s important then is to build on that work, a) to make you more competitive here, but also to win more business where you’ve just started to gain some experience and some skills, and to build on that.
What I do find slightly shocking actually is that half of the designers who don’t currently undertake work overseas or 42% have no intention of doing so. What world do we live in? This is really a world where everyone is so global and so international, I don’t see how some consultancies can afford to even have that opinion and I don’t know whether that’s because they are scared, or whether there’s a strategic decision, which actually I doubt, or whether it’s just general lack of interest and myopia that we need to address.
So those are my three points.
Deborah: Great, thanks! Gus, your five minutes starts now.
One of the points I can really buy into is that I’m one of the 50% that do a lot of training and adaptation of the service to work under. As Debbie mentioned earlier, we work in product design, which is a world that…does anyone know what the words “disaggregated supply chain” means? It means that the process of product innovation is being divided up into little bits, each one of those bits is being sourced locally and product design is just part of that. So the first thing we’ve had to do over a long period of time is simply build the skill set to be able to give clients the confidence that they can design something in one place and generically make it in another, and actually have that project deliver a result. That is actually breaking a very strong habit in the design process, in the manufacturing process, where people think the designer needs to be next to the factory. That’s very important because actually one of the big things that’s going on here is that it’s not necessarily that the design businesses are facing a direct threat from Chinese buyers, it’s that a lot of manufacturing is being outsourced to China. As a result, anybody that’s in the market that’s actually developing as a brand has a choice to control design or to buy something in that has been designed. So we don’t compete much against Chinese design consultancies, we actually compete against the in house teams of Chinese original manufacturers. Now, is that a good strategy? Is that a place to be? Bear in mind that they give this away for free with orders etc. So if you are planning on competing against Chinese design on that basis, on a project by project basis, it doesn’t work. So our strategy that the other most important bit is go to strategic – in other words, follow brand. The strength of the market for us is in design, being close to customers, understanding brands and being very sophisticated and playing as part of the marketing mix in being able to make our first strategic offer to people and then deliver it wherever happens to be relevant. We’re kind of twisting globalisation on its head, we’re competing against the likes of Idea and Zeeba where UK designers actually are quite cheap in respect to the US. Not really globalised points but that’s really our take.
Debbie: Great Gus, thank you very much. Tim, moving on to you.
Just to briefly correct you, I would say that only 30% of our work is in the UK rather than 30% of our work is overseas. Probably is more overseas, I don’t have up-to-date figures but certainly more than half of our work is now overseas.
One of the comments that overall I’d like to make is that I find it remarkable that, sitting here in 2007, talking about the UK, the world is a global marketplace, we’re in London, London is a global melting pot of all sorts of cultures and nationalities, and just to share with you a little anecdote about that. For instance, this island mentality we seem to have is, well, I know it’s an old argument, but a North American collaborator who worked for a supplier who also worked with one of our clients came over to visit us. We had a meeting on Monday morning, and I knew he’d come over at the weekend. I asked him what he did at the weekend. He said, I spent the weekend on the mainland, referring to the continent of Europe. We really need to get out of this mentality, with this country defining orders. For a start we’re already in the European Union, which is extending. Our experience is that, just like Gus, all of our projects have international implications. I don’t remember actually a project in recent times that was just on a national basis. Always there will be, even if it’s a UK brand, there will be an export element to that brand so you’ve got to consider that context. And just to emphasise the point about the international melting pot, in our London office here I was just totting up, we’ve got people from Sweden, Israel, Greek origin, I’m half Polish (second generation), we’ve got people from Italy. Our business is bit like a Benetton advert I suppose, but even our office in Eastern Europe in Warsaw, which is growing very fast, is not just Polish personnel, but it’s Bulgarian, people from France etc. The cultural mix is really very beneficial. In the research the point about the UK being a reason that people come to London, the UK brand if you like, but let’s face it the predominance of that is London in terms of the design industry. Probably be shot now by somebody for that! But that’s because clearly London clearly is a global melting pot. You’ve got all of those different perspectives in the community here that really actually make it a creative hub. I think that’s my piece.
Debbie: Tim, thank you very much. Clive?
Interesting, because we call ourselves an in-house consultancy because we have competition as well. We have competition from Samsung Design, which is the Korean headquarters, because we actually work for a design company, so we call ourselves an in house consultancy because we have to pitch for work from Samsung, it’s not given to us. We also work with China as well and they have to pitch against us and we have to pitch against them. So this whole thing about competition from overseas, we’re already facing it, even though we are working for a Korean company. So I found that really kind of interesting. Also the whole thing about the global make up of offices, I think Tim was going through the list of people in his studio, we have Russians, Indians, Americans, Germans, Scandinavians, Mexicans, Philippines, Koreans and Hong Kong and it’s the same kind of mix in the Milan studio, same in the China studio, the New India studio that’s been set up – there’s all these weird mixes of people so it really isn’t competition from different designers, it’s more different cultures is the competition for us. All the studios are made up of the same type of people. There’s this weird cultural thing that makes a difference and that’s what I’m going to bring up later on when we do some of the talking, where we talk about whether language is a barrier. I don’t think it is a barrier but there are other barriers. So a very quick one from me, I think.
Debbie: Excellent! David, moving on to you?
Well, two points: First of all, I’d pick upon Tim’s point. On the one hand I agree with what is it to be British? What is UK design? What does that mean? We live in a globalised economy and I buy all of that, but then on the other hand I can see that over 150 years we’ve made an extraordinary investment in a thing called “design education” in the UK. That investment has paid off phenomenally for us and we’ve developed the most remarkable and talented industry which has grown up and it has supported and serviced our UK national business base. It’s the part of the reason, it’s part of the success story that we have in this country, and we’ve got a design sector that contributes £11 billion to GDP and it’s made up of about 185,000 people working in in house studios, and also working in design consultancies. It’s a considerable force to be reckoned with, but what we can’t ignore, and I think that’s what we are talking about here, is actually what’s happening all around the world, and it changes some of the dynamics, and we have to be aware of that. I think that’s where Jane’s argument and conversation really came in. I would suggest that what was really interesting was to see that by and large that 2% figure, that clearly over here at the moment in what you might see as the domestic design base, most people are buying from their local design firms. But actually of course they are design firms that have grown up and developed in the UK and are themselves actually exporting a large part of their services. That’s what they’ve being doing for a long time and that’s partly because we’ve got a great tradition and strength.
Gus: One of our biggest clients, a professional broadcast brand… the marketing departments… They’ve being buying out professional service companies over the last three or four years. So they have 15 engineering teams on three continents and the manufacturing spread on three continents, and their entire corporate ID is coordinated by us centrally, so people buy hugely across the world. The financial barriers are much less than they used to be.
Debbie: Any other views from our panel?
Tim: I guess that the main thing is that if you go by the old adage that 80% of your new business comes from existing clients, there’s a combination here of there will be some opportunistic stuff going on, but it’s how you respond and recognise that opportunity and build upon it I think is the key thing. Our Polish office was purely an opportunity, we had some experience in the marketplace anyway, but we had relationships with some people in another company out there and they approached us about wanting to join us. So we did our market research to identify which would be the key potential clients in that market, and quickly established that there was a very big opportunity there, so we pulled that team out of that company, and set up our branch office there. So I think that there is a combination of how you go about it, and I think it’s very dangerous just to say, “Right, we’re going to target that market, without some sort of idea of direct opportunities that are there in the first place.
Gus: There are some traps there as well, a good example, through UK brands that source into China you meet Asian ODMs (overseas design managers). You stop working for Asian ODMs so you get referral work, but you find that because of the nature of the introduction, it’s very practical work, project by project, and very very price-driven so we actually got a lot of that experience quite early on and got in, and now we’re going back on from very strategic brand perspective because that’s the only way to actually go into these companies with any significant value.
Debbie: Great. So we’ve had a varying number of responses on that. I’m going to cut straight to the voting on this one so that I can involve you in the discussion on the next four, so we’re going to practise now. The first thing I’d like to ask you is, who’s represented in the audience here? So can we have a show of hands for the number of people who work in design businesses? So it’s probably just over half. Who didn’t put their hand up, put your hand up now? What do this row here do? – UKTI, Design & Demand, Design Council, economist, Mike – Design Week, the press. We have some hands here that have disappeared. Creative Capital. So actually well over half are design businesses, so bear that in mind when we are voting on these issues. What we’d like you to do know is to tell us what your view on the issue is, so if you think this happens by fault, if you’ve never had a strategic plan for your international work, you’re going to hold up a green card, and if you do think it happens through strategic planning, and we’ve got the wrong measure of this, we’d like you to hold up the red card. So, from your personal experiences and as businesses and from your perception from people you’ve spoken to, given your interaction with design businesses, how many of you think it’s just happenstance? I love the way you’ve put it actually – “unforseen circumstances” – I did wonder, well I won’t go into what that might be. If it is unforseen circumstances that take you into international markets, you are holding up the green card, and if it was a strategic plan that took you there, you’re holding up the red. Right, show of cards. There’s always some that muck things up in the middle there and hold up both!
Predominantly green, the greens have it! So I think the first thing that we can take out of this evening is that we need to do something about being a bit more strategic in our overseas development work. There’s a link to size, size matters on this one. Are you saying that large consultancies are more strategic?
Gus: Yes… it’s much easier for larger consultancies to be strategic. Small consultancies can’t afford to fly someone out three times a year to actually have a plan, they rely entirely on resources.
Debbie: OK. We’ll end on that as we’ve got five other questions to move on through. So our next one is… can the reputation of UK design offer a key foundation on which to compete in all overseas markets? So what we are saying there is, are we so good that our reputation will carry us into these new markets? Gus, I’d like to ask you on that one?
Gus: Yeah, I’m here because of the power of the UK design business. I’m a comedian, did my undergraduate education in Canada, came over here toz study the ICA ‘81 so in a way I’m certainly answering this question. But beyond that, we have a reputation for being very competitive in the home market and a multi-cultural centre in London – that’s it, it’s not really enough to get you beyond the shortlist. I think that the companies that go through are the companies that have a very strong well differentiated offer they can make to businesses, it’s as simple as that. I think one of the sad things is that there isn’t enough of that in the UK. There isn’t enough market positioning of individual businesses.
Debbie: So differentiated offer, jack-of-all trades, isn’t going go cut it?
Gus: Jack of all trades doesn’t cut it, I’m a designer therefore you need to get a result doesn’t cut it, you have to be able to say why you are actually better. Here in marketing services we can’t differentiate ourselves and explain our own brand, what qualifies us to talk to other people.
Debbie: David?
David: Yes, one of the things that I’ve noted as I’ve gone round the world and when I’ve met with client businesses, particularly manufacturers, is that actual genuine concern that are our UK designers close enough to the manufacturing process? Physically close enough, do they know actually what it means to be a manufacturer in a modern world? At the moment you’ve got the biggest, most complex, manufacturing plants around the world, in Russia, in China, they’re not here, and there is a genuine concern from client businesses that have we got the in depth knowledge and understanding? In fact, I spoke the other day, and I thought it was very interesting, to the professor of one of the industrial design courses, I think it was at Coventry actually, that is now going to fly over for one year and export their design students over to China, so that they’ll get one year of their experience closer to the coalface.
Gus: (starts to speak)
Debbie: Gus, I’m going to stop you there, because I know that we want to involve Clive in this one and your experience of the Asian market.
Clive: It’s really interesting. The one pull that Samsung actually came to London for is they considered that design was invented in this country, because of the Industrial Revolution, so it’s one of the big things they believe happened in this country. The other thing which they find quite interesting is that obviously Samsung and Korea are going through at this moment as a big manufacturing powerhouse, but they see China and India as pulling some out of the way, so it used to be stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap. Now they realise that design really does make a difference. What they’ve seen with the UK industry is that obviously we don’t manufacture any more, so what do we do? And the bit that they can’t actually get their hands round and do at the moment is the “why?” and “for who?”. So it’s that intelligence that they actually come to us for.
They’re not interested in manufacturing from our side, whether we understand it or not, but they are interested in the why, the story – that’s really important for them. We’ve already lost design skills; Samsung have seen in seven years surpass my studio more or less in design skills, but what they can’t surpass is the thinking, and they still can’t do that thinking bit. And a lot of it comes back from your culture and also the heritage, and the fact that Samsung is trying to propel itself much more premium, because it can’t stack ‘em high any more. And where does premium come from? Premium comes from Europe, so we’ve got it embedded into us already. It’s all that heritage they’re after, that’s what they are trying to soak up at the moment, so we get more and more scenario based work now rather than actually hands-on product design. It’s all that cultural thing they can’t do.
Debbie: To show you the pace at which we have to rush through this, we’re going to have to get you to vote on this one now, because we’ve got another four questions to get through. The issue here is, if you think our reputation will carry us into these markets, then you are holding up your green card. If you think it’s not going to stand us in good stead, you’re holding up the red.
If this may or may not be from personal experience obviously, so your gut feeling on this one. So, cards up please. Ooh, I think it’s slightly in favour of the greens.
Excellent, so we’re arrogant enough to think our reputation will carry us into the overseas markets. Interestingly I was talking to some Dutch design consultancies not all that long ago and their reason for not exporting was that – and I’m being hugely generalist here because this if four companies I am basing this assumption on – was that they don’t pretend to understand overseas markets and they do actually consider us to be quite arrogant in our view of International markets – the fact that we think we can design for everybody.
Clive: Yeah, I get the …
Debbie: So you won’t be competing against the Dutch.
Clive: I get the word colonial used every so often.
Debbie: Great. Right we need to move on at a pace.
The next question we’re going to ask our panel to have a look at. Actually, do you know what I might do? I might throw this one open to the audience. Is the collaboration of UK designers with local design consultancies critical to success in any given market? Who’s got experience of working overseas with… Great, so we’ll go to Jerry and to Mike.
Gerry Postlethwaite – Dog Star Design: OK. I think there are certain types of projects we can only pitch for the project and win the project with a collaborator.
Debbie: Right.
Gerry: I would choose design and build in retail design. You’ve got to have a local architect working with you and I think if there’s a major bit of creative artwork on a huge packaging project and I’ve only every done my design work outside the UK, so from the UK studios and in every case, you need a collaborator but the most important thing and I just must emphasise this, it must be a different set of skills that you need for the local market expertise because you’ve got to split the fees at the end of the day and you’ve got to make that work both sides and the client must not be getting screwed and paying twice.
Debbie: Great.
Gerry: So splitting the fees is a key part of it.
Debbie: Excellent advice there. Mike?
Thank you. I have a very small design company so it’s been very interesting. I think it was Gus who picked up the point of how it’s much easier for big design companies to have bit strategies of new business development and so on but about a third of my business historically is being done overseas and it happened by accident which is the way most business comes to small design companies so I would be interested actually if the panel could talk about opportunities for the 70% of companies which employ less than 5 people in the UK because we’re all hungry for that sort of chunk of business and actually there is a lot of really good design companies, lot of talent out there. So that’s something for that, but I worked on a major project overseas, was foisted onto the local agency who weren’t doing a particularly good job and we did manage to spend 8 years working together by happily having a demarcation between responsibilities and roles and it was very clear what my role was because, I couldn’t service them on a daily basis because I have 3 people working for me and actually, they wanted the experience that I brought as the boss, rather than what my staff were doing which was much more expensive in the local agencies so that’s the kind of key thing just echoing the point. Not only sort of clearly identify the contractual arrangements but the roles and responsibilities, then it’s very successful.
Debbie: Great, I think this one’s going to be a difficult to vote on because it would appear that and depending on the sector in which you operate your answer might actually be different but we’ll try it anyway. So, from your experience, do you think that collaboration is critical to your success in International markets or, and if you’re not working in International markets, what’s your gut feel on this one? Right, cards in the air. It’s an… beg your pardon. You mean you can’t… Green yes, no red.
Trying to get designers to make decisions! Right I think that’s a hung parliament on that one. So, we’re going to move swiftly onto question number 4. Right we’ll flick back to our panel for this one. Is language a legitimate barrier to prevent a small design firm working internationally? How many people here speak a second language? Right, I think if we were overseas or in continental Europe, all the hands would go up and if I said, two, most of them would stay up and if I said three, I think we would still have half a room. Barriers to international export. Issue here was …
Yeah, so it could be that you are employing people with other language skills.
David: Debbie, could we find out, that would be an interesting one?
Debbie: OK, how many people here employ designers who speak another language?
So that’s how most people get around that. I’ve got another question for you. We didn’t do well in languages at school so we employ others who did. How many of you trust that person to negotiate at a senior level? Two, so the language skills are there but there are some challenges I think for business. Right. Who did we have looking at this one? Clive, I was going to get you to have at this.
Clive: That’s cool, yeah. Language is not a barrier because I’m talking personally again, with Samsung their international business language is English. The barrier comes with senior management. Senior management are still in the old school, they only speak Korean so you can’t actually get to them in the first place so that’s the biggest barrier I think. It’s not the language but I think culture pays a bigger part than language because the business culture in Korea and Asia is quite different than it is in Europe. Hopefully, I’m not going to get lynched but, the business culture, I mean I wasn’t around in the 50’s anyway but the business culture is much older, it’s much more kind of dictatorial, much more, if your boss is wrong you can’t actually tell him he’s wrong. That’s just how it works. So, I think culture is the main one for me. What was I going to say, to give you an idea as well, it’s quite common to do a 4 month project and get 4 minutes to present it so it’s how you can get across a 4 month project in 4 minutes without using English or actually using Korean either. So, everything is very visual and very, very quick so, the real sad thing is, that strategy branding quite often go out of the door and you just have to show the end result and hope that his minors understand they can kind of badger him to understand what’s going on. The other thing about the barriers again, is that for the Asian countries, you have to keep showing your face so the investment’s very high, you have to keep going there, 5/6 times before you get any work. So, the investment is massive. Thousands and thousands of pounds to get a few thousand pounds back sometimes because I’ve seen it many, many times. You have to face 5 or 6 times before you get any work whatsoever.
Tim, you’re working in the Russian market, one would assume that senior Russian businessmen maybe don’t speak English, same issues? Do you have to visit as often?
Tim: These days, most of the senior Russian businesses do.
Debbie: Right.
Tim: Particularly, I mean we actually because we’ve had our fingers burnt a couple of times, tend to only work with companies that are international companies operating in Russia or at least, companies that have international investment in them so, as a consequence, the senior management are, they’re collaborating internationally so they do have that international, the international languages as Clive said but I really build upon that point that culture there, and the culture side for me works in lots of different ways, there’s business culture, the way of doing business referring back to Russia, you cannot imagine because you haven’t experienced it, what it was like for those people growing up in a communist regime and then for that to completely fall away almost overnight, you know, and you’ve got people who have been educated completely through the communist regime and then suddenly when they left school or university or whatever, they’re suddenly in a capitalist market. You know, that is just, you cannot in that cultural thing, unless you’ve experienced it I think it is very difficult to understand. The other side of it from a design prospective, design is so culturally based, you know, we are designing food products, we are designing drinks products, everything, these are part of the thing that define culture and so the nuances of communicating, you know, in a visual language or tactile language of, you know, if you are dealing in 3D or in whatever medium you are working in it is absolutely essential, so that cultural understanding from a business and design perspective is fundamental. Modern language.
Debbie: Great. I’m actually going to contradict what I said, when I was in Russia recently, I asked the taxi driver why so many people spoke English, I’d forgotten about this and he said, we were taught it at school because our enemy was the States. So that’s why they were forced to learn English. Right, we’re going to move on and vote on this one. Clue as to how you should vote, so if you think language barrier does prevent small firms from working internationally you’re going to put up your green cards if you really don’t think that’s an issue for a small firm then hold up the red cards. Please, hold up your cards.
Right I actually think the reds have it. So I think there are more people there who don’t think that’s an issue than those who do. Right our next question, should UK consultancies focus on overseas markets for greater margins given the increased involvement of procurement in UK design purchasing, sorry I’ve missed out a word there. So given that they are running rough-shod over us in the UK is it easier to get more money out of the maybe not so discerning overseas buyer? Right who shall we throw this one at, Tim? What do you think of this one?
Tim: The short answer is not bloody likely I think!
Debbie: So you are not ready to retire yet then?
Tim: There are a couple of things to bear in mind here. Why are UK companies looking to overseas. Some of you are probably familiar with the notion of red ocean blue ocean. Red ocean being the shark-infested waters of the competitors market places in the UK and blue ocean being actually the calmer and less competitive waters that you tend to experience in an overseas market. So one of the major reasons for going overseas is because it is less competitive. Having said that you tend to get lower fees. It does depend on what market you are operating in. I spent probably 2 hours today negotiating with a marketing director in Russia about a contract a project that will take us for about the next 3 months or so on figures, all on figures, on what is included and what isn’t included, you know you’ve got to get those things set up very much. I think it is actually more about volume of work to sustain a reasonable size business than it is about high value work in international business.
Gus: It must depend entirely on who the client is. One of the sadder things is that the bigger companies with global reach tend to be overseas. So for example I started dealing on Friday with a company in Greece. Money is not the issue because they are not owned in Greece so they sell all over the world so if you are competing in very price-sensitive terms, in tactical terms in China, forget it, the margin is through the floor, whereas if you are actually competing as we are in the US and other places you are close to the brand, the margins will be there. So the main point to make is that if you are being beaten down on price it is like any other product, it is because you are not actually making a value proposition that people understand and I think the design business really really needs to nail this you know because we can’t just go waving our flags and saying design is wonderful and everybody should have it. We have to sit in rooms with, like Clive’s point, people of very conservative business cultures. Most of the people driving the manufacturing companies we work with are engineers. That point was made by David earlier. We need to convince these people that we can actually work with their engineers and get results even though they are 3000 miles away. That is the kind of stuff we have had to do.
Debbie: Do we have someone here who is prepared to own up to bigger margins working on overseas work? Bill, would you like to tell us how you’ve done it?
Just bigger? Mainly because I collaborate with a Russian company and what they are asking for is they are asking for if you like classically in design stages, I work in branding, they are asking for the ideas and the look and feel to come from us and then they are doing the production locally in other words you don’t get the money in production you get the money in ideas. And of course it is the idea stages which are the better fee stages anyway. I don’t want to compete with Russian art workers for art work so it is the concept stuff they are paying for. So that is how you can make better margins because in fact we never finish off the projects, we dump it on them.
Debbie: Great. So we get the front end bit which is the bit we want, and then we leave the other stuff to them. David.
David: Yes I am just quite interested to know whether what people’s experiences are when they are competing in the US or in more developed European markets and so forth because the impression that I get is that our cost base is very high in the UK and indeed the exchange rates actually work against us.
Debbie: Right we are going to get you to vote on this one. So do you think you could earn more by focussing on international markets? Yes green, no red. Right that is a depressing no I think. So probably clearer propositions, we had an interesting seminar at the end of last year from a guy called Blair Ends who has an interesting website if you email me tomorrow I’ll tell you what it is because it has slipped my mind at the moment. And his view was that the issue here is around a clarity of propositions that makes it impossible for the client to swap you for someone else, that your offer is so clearly defined that you don’t get yourself into the pricing war that you get down at the jobbing end of the market. Now if you are in that end of the market I have seen businesses operating there that are very profitable but they have the machinery to be able to do this through-put of work at a rate that you wouldn’t believe so his view is if you want to be up there it is the front end it is what Bill was talking about and it is a very clear proposition for the business. Right and last but not least question number 6. Does the market knowledge of local designers place UK consultancies as a major disadvantage when pitching for overseas work? So when you are out there pitching against the people from the local market place are they winning over you? Does their local knowledge mean that they are beating you to the work? I am going to throw this one open to the floor. Who has a view on this one?
I mean I think the issue here is where the product is going to sell, not where the product is manufactured so it is almost an impossible question to actually get your head around. I mean I think it is extremely important that if the product is going to sell into Europe then a European designer is bound to have a better understanding of the culture than somebody in China but it works the other way round as well so it is entirely market specific not manufacturing specific. I think as a general point this is really very very important I mean the splitting of manufacture from where the product is actually sold is key to the whole discussion.
Debbie: Les thank you very much. We had 2 hands here.
I was just going to say that actually I think there is another side to that. We’ve just been commissioned by a Pakistani company because we don’t have the local knowledge of their market, they want someone with a fresh view of it they want us to actually investigate the market for them with a very non-attached view so that we can do a better design hopefully for them.
Debbie: Any more comments on this one?
Thanks Deborah. Jonathan Withers from JAB Design, Liverpool hurrah! Yes I think it depends the sort of work you do. We’ve had a very top-down model of the design industry. I mean you should be talking about the type of work you do. We’ve moved in like a lot of product design consultants into much more innovative work, where it is about the thought process. It is not about brand and if you are talking about big boxes, shifting boxes, brand, brand, brand that is one sort of work but we’ve got invention, we’ve got creativity, we’ve got lots of other stuff that goes on here that we are also exceedingly famous for. I still love Fred Dibnah showing us all the old stuff we used to do. But that is a real advantage, there is some real innovation, some real insightful stuff which isn’t local. It is about real clever thinking that we do here, we need to celebrate that, that is about mindsets of people and the way they’ve grown up culturally to solve problems.
Debbie: Great, we’ll take Christine then we’ll take one more view over here.
Christine: Just building on what Jonathan had said and going back to the reputation of UK design offer a key foundation, it does beg the question of what is UK design. Going back to this island mentality, when we go overseas and I am talking about we in design partners sense, a collaborative team of various design organisations that go around selling UK design. What we try and sell is an approach to design, we don’t sell UK creativity, we take that as a given, the company has got the best design education in the world, but the best creative industries in the world park that now what we can do for you is this thinking and this strategic approach that the Italians and the Germans and the Japanese and the Koreans are not so good at. And that is our real competitive advantage internationally and it is something that other people find quite hard to emulate and to copy so it is very very important.
Gus: Hugely important. The UK industry has had to work out why it exists from the first principles and place those arguments into business. And one of the most important ways businesses dealing with humanistic issues and dealing with creativity is under the headline of branding. And so one of the things to think about and just push back on a bit is this decoupling of innovation, creativity customer experience from brand because they are one. Modern branding is not about slapping logos on packs. Modern branding is about making ethical propositions that you deliver. Product design, industrial design is key. You know the countries that have had cultural design heritage like Italy and Germany they don’t quite know why they do it. I once was at a DMI talk and the head of design Braun he was explaining the brand process and how they did things and I asked him a question at the end I said how do you differentiate between your brand of German design from Krupps and Rolenta. And he just went very blank it was one of his famous blanks for 100 people in the auditorium. He could not explain his own brand profile as distinct from the competition.
Hi my name is Marianne, Marianne Baker from Twenty Twenty. I remember I think it was the IGD who basically came up with these figures about the UK as a test market and particularly London as a test market and I think not being English I can see how this country particularly and particularly London is actually probably at the forefront of a lot of innovation generally. Even as far as consumers are concerned. Apparently people in London and in the south west of the UK are more willing than anyone else in Europe to try a new product so particularly on the manufacturing side that would be an argument for us to actually understand what people are willing to try and where the future lies going forward. That is one thing. And the other thing is obviously having a lot to do with retailers you do end up having to deal with the local people and I do think that it is very important to understand. I think that if you look at retail development whether it is in food or whether it is in apparel we have one of the toughest competitive situations in this country and therefore a lot of people come here for best practise. We have nameless clients who do trips to London rather than the States these days and even rather than Paris. And if anything is happening anywhere that is more exciting than here it is definitely not in Europe or America it is in Asia.
David: Deborah can I just?
Debbie: Great yes, David one more point.
David: Just another little anecdote from my India trip but I just think it is – I found it very interesting. You can usually look to WPP because they are bound to have thought about these issues because they are so big and they have the opportunity to invest their large. And I thought it was interesting in the context of India that they’ve obviously looked at this very hard and I understand they’ve been over in India for many many years actually investigating the whole Indian market as it has been growing. And of course they’ve been in there as advertising for decades actually in fact one of the things I found interesting was that much of industry in India thought that design is advertising. It was quite fascinating actually. But in all its shapes and sizes and it is only in very recent years that an idea of design has actually really really emerged and in that context of course they want to be there. The root that they’ve taken was to buy an Indian design firm, in fact they’ve just bought the controlling share or almost the entire share in Ray Kashavan which are a leading brand and design consultancy. But that is not the only example as well, Landour are obviously well established in that market as well and I’ve just picked up recently that via major global businesses there are quite a number of UK firms that are establishing themselves in India. But again always through some sort of local partnership.
Gus: Yes they are much more open about that funnily enough. China is something we’ve been trying to crack and we’ve had a few successes whereas India you find yourself at 4-5 talks a year you have people nurturing conversations, they are very keen to learn and do dialogues and that type of thing.
Debbie: Great and I know it is an impossible question but I am going to force you to vote on this one. So if you agree with the statement you’re holding up your green card, and if you disagree with this, then you’re holding up your red card. So can we get you to vote. There is only 1 person, no 2, who agree with. Or are you just shielding yourself there Tim? I am sorry you are right in the light there. Great, well thank you very much, that is a definite no on that one. For any of you that know me you will know that it is actually impossible for me to give you a summary of this evening’s proceedings because I’ve had my hands full, couldn’t write anything down and I have the memory of a goldfish. However it all comes back the next day so if you want a summary tomorrow phone me up! I have a marinating brain so I am really sorry about that. I am absolutely delighted to thank our panel for their contributions this evening so Christine, Gus, Tim, Clive, David thank you very much. Thank you all very much for coming along. Jane thank you for doing the research, for prompting this and if we can encourage the Design Council to do even more research that would be great, and –
David: Is that possible?
Debbie: Is that possible? Can they do any more? And if you have any issues that have been brought up as a result of this evening’s debate if you want to email me or any of the rest of the team at DBA, if you feel there are issues that we should be addressing that we are not, then we would like to hear from you. Otherwise the bar is open and I think we will all be here for you to have a chat with. And a biscuit. Was there a biscuit you mentioned?
David: Well crisps.
Debbie: Crisps. Yes I was intrigued by our wine and biscuits. So do help yourself to a drink. Thank you very much.