The whole experience has been cathartic. It made us look at the whole way we present the company and its products. It took us beyond our comfort zone, but that wasn't a bad thing Trevor Foster, Managing Director, Titan Enterprises
Watch a film about the design support received by Titan Enterprises on Vimeo
Titan Enterprises, based in Sherborne, Dorset, manufacturers flow meters - devices to measure flow of a fluid - which are used in a wide variety of automotive, medical, aerospace, pharmaceutical and hospitality sector applications.
The company has always developed new technology solutions to meet its customers' needs as the uses for the flow meters it produces have diversified. And Managing Director Trevor Forster has believed for some time that the future of flow measurement would be non-mechanical and non-intrusive, so almost a decade ago, Titan began developing a new product using a radically different ultrasonic technology - a first in the flow meter market.
Research and development was done in collaboration with the Process Systems Engineering Group at Cranfield University. By mid-2008, the technology for Titan's new ultrasonic flow meter technology had been developed, tried and tested. ‘The technology was there but we needed a product to put it into. Given our confidence in what we had achieved at that point, our priority was to develop a great product and powerful brand to hit the market hard,’ Forster explains.
But the company had little in-house experience of these aspects of design, product naming and how this would be visually represented through a brand identity.Titan Enterprises was unsure how best to proceed. ‘Everything in terms of design and branding up until this project had been functional - form had dictated design, and all the marketing materials we had spun off from that. We were, and still are, a small business and it was a narrow perspective. We needed to lift ourselves beyond that’, says Managing Director Trevor Forster.
Response
Forster sought advice from his local Business Link which introduced him to the Designing Demand service and partnered him with Design Associate Kathryn Hughes, who worked with the Titan team to help outline the best approach for the design project, write a design brief, select a design agency and co-ordinate the design development.
‘My first impressions of Titan was that it was a very technically able and well-run company with an open and positive business culture,’ says Hughes. ‘But while the new technology was clearly spot on from an engineering point of view, there was a clear lack of understanding about how best to use design to turn the technological innovation into a market-leading product.’
Hughes organised an initial workshop to help Titan's management team decide on the scope of the project. Forster already thought the company brand should be refreshed to attract the new business partners the company would need to launch its new product. Hughes readily endorsed this: ‘If you have a world-beating product then it needs to look like it's come from a world-beating company,’ she says. ‘The business knew this instinctively, but committing to a properly-resourced corporate re-brand is a big step for any business.’
An update of the company branding was added to the design brief. Forster says that he found the initial brainstorming session extremely useful despite worrying beforehand that it would be a waste of time: ‘It provided a clear structure, form and direction for the project that followed and, as such, it proved invaluable.’
With a direction and strategy in place, Hughes worked with Forster to find a design agency able to design the product and come up with a name and brand identity. Four design agencies were invited to pitch and Bristol-based product design agency Kinneir Dufort was chosen.
‘What impressed us most about Kinneir Dufort was looking at the designs they'd done before and hearing the approach they proposed to take with us,’ he says. ‘Their history and their methodology were key - both gave us confidence, and when we began working together we were quite hands off.’
Titan gave Kinneir Dufort technical specifications and a project brief to develop concepts for the new product. One requirement was that the product should have a unique look and feel. Another was that it would look appropriate in a variety of environments - sitting as comfortably within a laboratory as an industrial setting, for example.
The designers started work, refining different product design concepts after gathering feedback on prototypes from some of Titan's key customers - a process which ensured a user-centred approach to developing the design. A pre-production prototype was also tested before manufacturing production specifications were created for Titan's manufacturing partners.
They also developed designs for installation units to be used with the device in different environments, as well as a brand identity, logo, packaging and other assorted marketing collateral for the product, and a redesign of the Titan Enterprises company brand. This integrated approach allowed powerful visual links to be made between the new brand identities for the product and the company with colour and style references uniting both.
The end result is the Atrato, an ultrasonic flow meter, launched in April 2010 alongside a second product, the Pulsite, also designed by Kinneir Dufort. Titan Enterprises' new brand identity and marketing materials, including a re-designed web site, were introduced gradually over the weeks following the Atrato's launch.
Impact
Though early days to gauge the impact of the new product in the marketplace and on Titan Enterprises' business, the Atrato launched with advance orders worth £10,000. Internally, however, Forster is in no doubt that the Designing Demand experience has created significant change.
‘The whole experience has been cathartic. It made us look at the whole way we present the company and its products - from literature to calibration certificates - in a different way. And it has raised my understanding and awareness of the business role of design,’ he explains.
‘Working with an outside design agency took us into new areas and led us to new concepts we'd not necessarily have achieved working alone. It took us beyond out comfort zone, but that wasn't a bad thing. We’d certainly look to using external professionals on design, presentation and marketing again.’
‘Knowing how to write a design brief and what to look for in a design agency is an important legacy,’ Hughes observes. ‘Invaluable, however, is an understanding of how a user-centred approach to design can turn a good product into a great one.’
Also striking, Forster adds, was the cost. ‘I don't believe it took a lot more money in the end than it would have cost us to generate the ideas ourselves but to a much inferior level. All in all, we've spent around £50,000 on designing and producing the product and creating the name and brand identity so far,’ he says.
‘Over the nine years it has taken us to develop the Atrato, we've spent in the region of £500,000 on this product alone - a significant investment for a business of ten people with a £1.25m turnover. But the money spent has been on a new product that will replace perhaps 90% of our mechanical devices and should take the company through the next 20 years at least, if not beyond. For us, it is an extremely big deal which will transform us from a manufacturer to a global licensing business’, says Trevor Foster.
Designing Demand is part-financed by the European Union’s ERDF Competitiveness and Employment Programme and the ERDF Convergence Programme. The South West Design Programme, which delivers Designing Demand in the region, secured more than £2 million of ERDF investment through the South West Regional Development Agency.