Discovering Opportunities through Insight

RKS offers broad research services that reveal ecosystem opportunities and identify unmet needs and desires of participants across the value chain. Our quantitative and qualitative methods enable appreciation for consumer lifestyles and interactions with products and services, to better inform strategy and design. The exploration involves framing, planning and executing the necessary research while mining available internal resources for insights. We study users in their environments, markets, trends, and cultures. We do this in-depth and globally.

Research Services:

• Global Ethnographic Research
• Behavior Studies / Scenario Storyboarding
• Stimuli, Probing and Concept Evaluation
• Focus Groups/ Participatory Design
• Co-creation Workshops
• Survey Development
• Market Analysis, domestic and global
• Contextual Studies
• Quantitative Analysis

Translating Insights into Actionable Design

In today’s highly competitive market, companies are looking for new ways to innovate consumer experience. Data alone won’t drive a successful process. We create strategies that align clients’ products and services with their business architecture and consumer targets, and apply our proprietary Psycho-Aesthetics® methodology to analyze and communicate opportunities for innovation though design.

Our strategy services are optimized to translate insights unveiled in the research phase into actionable future direction for client and design teams. We ensure a holistic analysis by utilizing four strategic lenses for all programs – people, business, brand and offering. By developing strategies and solutions that emotionally resonate with consumers, we empower clients to better capture markets and build their brands globally.

Strategy Services:

• Actionable Insight Translation
• Strategy Formulation and Opportunity Definition
• Competitive Analysis
• Innovation Workshops
• Opportunity and Creative Emergence Sessions
• Trend Forecasting
• Product Definition and Positioning
• Venture Road Maps

Designing for Intended Consumers and Developing New IP

While building on the strategic intent unveiled from research and analysis, we ideate offerings identified within the opportunity spaces, factoring in user criteria and aspirations. Designers work to integrate user needs, market needs and technology into compelling and innovative solutions; products, services and experiences.

We address brand, user, and business needs during our design of products, services, and experiences. Deep consumer insight allows our teams to design from the first-person perspective—developing each design through the eyes of the intended consumer. When a design enrichens the user at every stage of interaction, emotional bonds are built that create loyalty and build brand relationships. Though our work has won numerous awards, our designs are targeted foremost to win the hearts and minds of users.

RKS has successfully innovated for clients for more than three decades—from Fortune 500 companies to small startups, across a range of competitive industries—from developing innovative new ways to do business, to creating patentable intellectual property (IP) that cements market leadership.

Design Services:

• Industrial Design
• Service Design
• UI/UX Design
• IP Navigation, Strategy and Creation
• Design Language
• Color Material and Texture Studies
• Functional Concepting

Turning Design Ideas into Reality

Our accomplished engineering team helps integrate envisioned concepts with practical realities to deliver consumer focused solutions. We can swiftly create feasibility models and prototypes in-house in our CNC development lab. Fast fails and rapid iterations help bring successful concepts to life, establish the underlying design architecture, and test consumers for their feedback and reactions. This, combined with RKS’ extended network of affiliates (rapid prototypers, tool makers, mold vendors, etc.) dramatically reduces the timeframe for executing effective product design. Working with production facilities around the world, we optimize the manufacturing process to ensure design is successfully implemented.

Engineering and Innovation Services:

• Electronic Integration
• Mechanical Engineering
• Materials Specification
• Prototyping and Testing
• Process Design and COGS Analysis
• Functional Patent Search and Protection
• Technology Development and Implementation
• Tooling and Production Consulting
• Manufacturing Optimization
• Vendor Sourcing

Creating Compelling Visual and Verbal Communication

We catalyze and optimize the dialogue between brands and people to establish long-lasting brand equity.

Our communication programs drive global attention, build viral excitement and facilitate consumer adoption of our clients’ products and services. Our branding and communications design team creates winning packaging, corporate identity materials, websites, marketing strategy/assets, and PR/media campaigns while best leveraging the viral power of social media in our experience economy.

Brand and Communication Services:

• Channel Marketing Strategy
• Branding and Visual Identity
• Packaging
• Print and Web Design
• Trade and Consumer Media Relations
• Public Relations/ Marketing
• Viral Campaign Development

Helping Executives, Design Managers and Students Realize Design’s Value

Business is changing, consumers are evolving and the design profession is changing too. Profitability, consumer desirability and leveraging strategic impacts through design are all more important than ever. As RKS works to incorporate these aspects into each client project, we also help educate leaders, businesses, design practitioners and future creators on how to best realize more meaningful and successful market offerings.

We instruct corporations how to better build a culture of innovation within their organizations, leveraging design tools and techniques learned over the past 30 years, and work with clients to help spearhead innovation projects. Our executive team also lectures globally at design, innovation and business conferences, sharing though leadership on a variety of topics. We further contribute to the conversation editorially through popular design and business publications/blogs.

Finally, RKS supports leading design and business education programs, helping MBAs and emerging design talent develop more consumer-centric solutions and insighting processes to boost ultimate market performance. Our Psycho-Aesthetics™ design approach is now globally recognized and taught by leading academic practitioners, as well as a central subject of Predictable Magic, released by Wharton School Publishing in 2010.

Coaching Services:

• Team Innovation Workshops
• Global Keynote Speeches
• Design and Business Academic Lectures
• Editorial Thought Leadership
• Mentoring Innovation Champions

The RKS Approach

The RKS team leverages a holistic perspective on innovation challenges and a flexible, guiding process, alongside powerful tools, to consistently develop people-focused solutions with global impact.

Our approach is characterized by a holistic perspective on each innovation or design challenge, achieved by retaining focus on four “lenses:” People, Offerings, Brand, and Business. This holistic perspective enables us to inform the design process with relevant insights.

The Psycho-Aesthetics® driven process is guided by three distinct phases – Discovery, Creation and Execution – which provide the flexibility and scalability to properly tackle any design or innovation challenge. Discovery encompasses analytic assessment of stakeholder requirements, end-user needs and industry dynamics, to translate these insights into strategies for the creation and evaluation of compelling concepts. Execution focuses on bringing ideas to life, while providing the vision for engaging audiences and compelling their advocacy.

The Psycho-Aesthetics® mantra and mapping are utilized throughout each stage to communicate the eco-system opportunities, and guide the development of strategic and attractive solutions that resonate with target audiences throughout distribution channels, while facilitating collaboration amongst the innovation teams.

The Hero’s Journey objective helps clients better introduce offerings to enthusiastic consumers whose needs and aspirations are fulfilled, and who in turn, help propel their discovered solutions within their communities. Creating people-focused solutions with impact is aided by understanding how offerings attract and engage, are adopted, and advocated in the real world. Developing appropriate tactics only results from a combination of insights derived from the strategic lenses and rigorous process, which are guided by our fundamental philosophy at all times:

The Power and Value of Psycho-Aesthetics®

Psycho-Aesthetics® maps are visually immersive tools that provide a window into the hearts and minds of ever-evolving markets, and a pathway to establishing powerful and profitable emotional connections. This proven mapping process exposes gaps in the market where consumers' needs aren't being met sufficiently, while unearthing opportunities for product and service solutions.

Psycho-Aesthetics® Maps are flexible and scalable and can be leveraged for insights in virtually any industry or category. They utilize two novel dimensions in a commonly understood X/Y mapping scheme. The maps incorporate consumers’ need states into the vertical Y-axis and levels of interactivity into the horizontal X-axis creating four quadrants. Opportunities for business success can be found in each of the four quadrants, and depend on an evaluation of the industry dynamics and consumer needs.

RKS has applied this methodology to produce thousands of maps across industries, charting levels of self actualization against levels of interactivity. Mapping in this way regularly identifies opportunity zones, reveals consumer need-based market direction, and helps align stakeholders into a shared and collaborative vision leading to dynamic and successful execution. By aligning internal stakeholders around a single design manifest, while facilitating genuine team collaboration, Psycho-Aesthetics helps teams better harness design’s strategic opportunities.

You can learn more about Psycho-Aesthetics® and its application in Predictable Magic, released by Wharton School Publishing in August 2010.

In our experience economy and this digital age of social media and the internet, 'heroic evangelists' are often the most meaningful catalyst for propelling brand adoption because of their authenticity, speed and global reach.

Compelling Experiences, Engagement, and Advocacy

Consumers themselves increasingly hold the power to fuel the viral demand that creates market leadership; therefore, learning how to create, enrich and empower meaningful consumer experiences has risen to vital importance regardless of the product or service sector. Features alone do not create emotional connection. It’s only when the consumer experience creates real benefits that the bond between people and brand is formed.

The hero's journey is a classic story-telling archetype brought to life by Joseph Campbell that we have also adapted and incorporated into our proven methodology, to frame the process by which consumers emotionally bond with products and experiences they encounter in the marketplace. The hero’s journey is common across global cultures, and mirrors the consumer engagement process. We use it as a framework for understanding consumer engagement, adoption and advocacy because it is flexible enough to examine purchase decisions of varying complexity.

By paralleling this universal truth, we systematically break down product and service offerings into a series of key attractors for consumer groups, each of which can be benchmarked against competitive offerings and mapped. Insight and innovations are blended to create a tailored journey for each of their unique perspectives - facilitating engagement, resonance and reward. The "moment of truth" happens after the purchase, when the consumer interacts with the design. When the design makes them feel empowered, when they feel that magic of emotional connection, they feel compelled to share news of their marketplace victory with others. At every stage it is critical that the offering affirms the qualities and emotions that initially attracted each consumer persona to truly activate adoption and advocacy.

P-A Applications: Neuma

Cohesive brand experience across multiple touch-points

Ensuring a brand retains a consistent personality and experience across product, packaging, web, media and online community is critical to create and maintain an emotional connection with consumer segments. Psycho-Aesthetics® mapping has been instrumental at communicating the direction for continuity across multiple experience touch points for a more aligned and engaging brand experience.

Psycho-Aesthetics® mapping helped communicate the need for a consistent brand image and presence across all consumer interactions, which helped our entrepreneurial client Neuma truly make their mark with tattoo artists and collectors. The mapping helped reveal a brand compass and positioning grounded in high-tech design sophistication that underscored Neuma’s power, credibility, confidence and relevance to the genre. It guided efforts to help the brand stay authentic and ensure relevance and resonance with creative audiences in whichever physical or digital medium they encountered it.

The cohesiveness of experiences was delivered through various touch points that embodied the attitude and energy of tattoo culture while complementing and showcasing the device’s cutting-edge technology.

Defining the direction on the Psycho-Aesthetics® map complimented RKS’ process throughout in design, engineering, packaging and brand communications. This helped deliver an aligned and compelling brand around a device that delivered a huge leap forward in safety, comfort and convenience for the tattoo community.

P-A Applications: JBL Professional

Product Line Reinvigoration

Psycho-Aesthetics® mapping has also been applied successfully to provide guidance to product line reinvigoration- as was the case with the EON line of speakers for JBL Professional. This was a classic case of an innovation whose value eroded over time and had to be refreshed among professional musicians. The original EON was far ahead of its competitors, but the gap between offerings had narrowed.

To re-capture segment leadership, RKS first needed to understand where the market was moving and the current position of JBL amid the competition. Then, designers would be able to develop an exciting and engaging design that simultaneously conveyed JBL’s superior quality and light weight technology.

As part of the Psycho-Aesthetics® framework, RKS started by defining the key attractors in the specific category – the main criteria on which the consumers base their decision about a product in the initial physical discovery of the product. The initial perception is often but not solely based on the outside design factors, and creates the initial connection between the brand, product experience, and the user. After assessment of the Key Attractors, this map was generated. The current Eon as well as the competitors were placed based on predefined parameters to communicate market dynamics through an unfamiliar lens that lends clarity to consumer perceptions and attraction. This mapping helped define where the Opportunity Zone for EON’s next generation resided.

P-A Applications: GizmoLive

Emotional & Sensorial Resonance within Interactive Spaces

When shopping at a mall, people are exposed to an overwhelming number of ads and signs that attempt to attract their attention with the latest product, fashion, and technology. Many of these ads are seen but quickly dismissed by consumers without making a lasting impression. GizmoLive wanted a better way to educate and simultaneously entertain consumers on the newest product that would provide an engaging and memorable experience.

Because we make decisions rapidly and the conscious bandwidth of all our senses is much smaller than the actual total stimuli, the study of sensory engagement lends clarity to strategically designing the critical elements behind attraction, engagement, retention and reward.

Psycho-Aesthetics® mapping was employed to understand how display ads at retail settings engage the human senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. By positioning these on the Psycho-Aesthetics® map, we were able to define the opportunity zone for GizmoLive. The majority of ads in shopping malls are static and simply something for consumers to look at. Some displays require more interaction allowing people to both see and hear them. This mapping revealed an opportunity for a new type of interactive, multi-platform kiosk that delivers an immersive experience by engaging all of the human senses.