In this post-industrial society, the ability to turn information into knowledge and assets is gaining precedence over manufacturing capacity.

Recognizing the scope of this opportunity, Arnell Group Brand Consulting in New York City created A3D, a collaborative industrial design group, to integrate unique and proprietary creative solutions into brand architecture and the overall strategic brand building process. The brand is a client’s greatest equity and asset—it is more than a trademark, it is a promise-mark that differentiates a promise associated with a product and identifies the source of that promise. Within this framework, a product then is the tangible evidence of the truth of that promise.

We believe that building brand loyalty for our clients is the basis for their enduring profitable growth. Marketing and communication are not considered more important than strategic product development and design. Rather, industrial design at A3D is integral to our brand architecture and brand-building process, which we call PowerBrand®. 

PowerBranding is a comprehensive process that develops the image and identity of a company, its products and plans for long-term, comprehensive communications. With it, we also work strategically and creatively to build and revitalize existing brands through programs and products tailored to each client. Our approach is consistent, ensuring that our results are proprietary to each brand. 

We begin the process by drawing information from the market and our clients’ brand equity to create a brand’s architecture. Cross-pollinating ideas from history, the sciences, literature and popular culture, we learn all about a product or idea. The point is to bring the market to the product. For example, we look for ways a global brand can transcend and resonate with local cultures by speaking to a very deep, emotional place in human nature. 

A powerful brand is more focused on consumer lifestyle than on an industry product category/service. As Virgin’s chair, Richard Branson, once said, “a clear understanding and ability to anticipate where specific consumers live, where they go, their wants and aspirations empower brands to transcend categories.” Likewise, a product also needs a “place” to live by virtue of its functionality, it needs a design language, as well as strategic communication created around it. Within the context of PowerBrand, every moment of contact between the consumer and the brand constitutes a manifestation and communication of brand culture, regardless of whether the medium is the product, a printed collateral, an advertisement or a proprietary sound bite.

As such, successful brands must fundamentally have design consistency, a consistent look and feel and a high level of design integrity that goes beyond aesthetics.

Our mission is not unlike that of the first comprehensive corporate design program, when German manufacturer AEG employed Peter Behrens as an industrial designer, architect and graphic designer in an endeavor to establish a holistic corporate identity among its products, buildings, advertising and packaging. Creative and holistic thinking is perhaps the most valuable asset of the profession, but the role of industrial designers has often narrowed since Behrens’ days. The current role of industrial designers is often laterally limited to specific product categories and vertically limited to mimicking its process over and over again, applying creativity only at a formal, ergonomic and manufacturing level, and therefore limiting itself to giving formal definition to traditional products.

When industrial design performs at its fullest potential, it is integral to the delivery of an experience through a product or environment. As an integral part of successful brand management through PowerBranding, their solutions become the essential ingredients in our clients’ brand culture as well as user and purchaser personae. To orient the solution toward the user, we work to understand user lifestyles, trends and cultural patterns, addressing function, innovation, ergonomics and emotions, and distill these elements for the fulfillment of the brand’s promise.

At A3D, the design process extends beyond the traditional confines of industrial design, fully integrating our activities with those of Arnell Group Brand Consulting, which is vertically integrated among new business development, creative development groups and production, as well as horizontally integrated across different disciplines, such as branding, image management, marketing, design and advertising. Thus, it provides the backbone and support structure that enables A3D to work within such a unique paradigm of the industrial design process. 

A3D believes that the constant application, displacement and convergence of technologies give birth to new products with genuine innovation beyond styling, and product “attitudes” beyond aesthetics, driven by a deeper under-standing and anticipation of consumers’ needs and lifestyles. 

It is essential for the fulfillment of our mission that we maintain a high degree of flexibility in process and present unique solutions to each client—storytelling through infinite and proprietary visual languages, the tone and manner appropriate to each client. We deliberately avoid imposing a set aesthetic style upon our clients; instead, we try to provide consistency of thinking and a core set of processes. 

Improving the quality of life and the quality of a brand’s message are two of the ideals of A3D’s approach to industrial design. Granted that good design will continue to creatively improve function, aesthetics, ergonomics and manufacturing of objects and environments that surround us in our daily lives, it also needs to better products and environments in terms of, as Sir Terence Conran said, “Aspiration and desire, in the dream of how life might be.” Industrial designers have a tremendous opportunity to use this paradigm of design within the strategic branding process to empower and extend the relevance of its role. Apart from con-tributing our creativity, industrial designers can also serve as powerful translators, bridges and catalysts between marketing and engineering.

By establishing A3D, we are seizing the exciting opportunity to shift and expand the current paradigm of the industrial design consultancy toward the most integrated approach and integrated system of processes in strategic brand building.

Peter Arnell, chair and founder of A3D, founded Arnell Group Brand Consulting 19 years ago after studying architecture at Columbia and Princeton universities, as well as working professionally with renowned architects Michael Graves, Frank Gehry, Aldo Rossi and James Sterling. He designed and created the original DKNY retail environments and communication program and has published 18 books on contemporary architecture and three books on his photography, the latest a 20-year retrospective.