Heuristic for brand artefacts co-design: a computer-mediated proposal

Abstract

Brands undeniably constitute a significant asset for a company and are usually specified in its organisational strategy. Typically, employees are not invited to participate in debates or decisions about branding since they access brand information in a unidirectional way. Many of them do not even know how to convey appropriate messages and fail to recognise the importance of brand consistency. In this article we propose a heuristic for an interaction structure aimed at brand artefact co-design, through a computer-mediated platform, so that employees may learn about the brand, develop brand knowledge, propose meaningful brand artefacts and manage the evaluation of their peers’ proposals. We prepared a non-functional prototype of a Participatory Brand Centre and tested it in focus group sessions with the University of Aveiro's employees. We found that though our proposal is consistent with employees’ brand-related needs, authorship is a sensitive issue.

Keywords::

• brand artefacts
• co-design
• employees
• heuristic
• computer-mediated communication

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the focus groups participants for giving their time to discuss the theme and get involved in this study. Further, the authors would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. Email: [email protected]

Additional information

Funding

For this research the first author was supported by a PhD scholarship, granted by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation, funded by the European Social Fund and by the III EU Support Framework (Grant No. SFRH/BD/77659/2011).