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 Sessions 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
• Intellectual Property 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

2. Create

IDEATE > REFINE > FINALIZE

During the create phase, RKS works to ideate, refine and finalize successful designs. The ideate phase builds on the strategic intent unveiled during translation; we brainstorm offerings within the identified opportunity spaces, factoring in user criteria and aspirations. Experiences and offerings are then storyboarded, and brand stories created, often producing low fidelity prototypes that can serve as the basis for consumer co-creation.

Refining is characterized by fast fails and rapid iterations, where concepts are further brought to life. Prototypes are developed for physical design and GUI, further establishing foundational architecture, while services are blueprinted and brand positioning statements refined. Alternatives are narrowed so that physical interpretations can be validated with end users.

During finalization, knowledge is incorporated following refinement to ready designs for execution and implementation. Final color, material and texture specifications are produced and full-sized appearance models often built, or digital and physical environments realized and unveiled.

Psycho-Aesthetics® Philosophy

Abraham Maslow understood that as people’s needs are met, their needs evolve, and they become empowered to strive for self-actualization. What does it mean to be “self-actualized”? When all your basic needs are met, you’re able to focus on reaching your full potential as a human being. That is, when you have enough to eat, a place to live, a job you like that pays you well, someone to love, someone who loves you—what’s left to do so that you feel fulfilled, that your life is meaningful?

RKS has translated Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs into thousand of maps charting levels of self actualization against levels of interactivity and overlaying competitive landscapes, brands and personas. This reveals consumer trajectories and target opportunity zones and aligns stake holders into a shared and collaborative sight and vision, leading to dynamic execution. Psycho-Aesthetics®, is a simple yet thoroughly repeatable and scalable methodology and is taught at leading design and business schools beyond being used in practice for companies from start-ups to fortune fifties.

Psycho-Aesthetics® was adapted from Malsow to both anchor and ignite innovation in the design process by adding important people-centered and consumer focus. Built over three decades, and supported through business and social sciences, the P-A® philosophy fosters business success by using design as a dynamic tool to strategically connect consumers’ needs and aspirations with rich and memorable experiences.

Business executives and marketing decision-makers benefit from having rational criteria on which they can base decisions and trade-offs, especially with the murky world of important design decisions. RKS uses Psycho-Aesthetics® to translate target customers ’ needs and aspirations into a visual and actionable direction for management evaluation, while simultaneously informing the design process for products and services.

The Hero’s Journey

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 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 consumers and brand is formed.

The hero's journey is a classic story-telling archetype brought to life by Joseph Campbell that we have adapted and incorporated into our proven methodology, to frame the process by which consumers emotionally bond with products and experiences they seek in the marketplace. The hero’s journey 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 key 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. 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.

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. 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.