Corporate identity: using good design to give you competitive advantage
It's been a mantra repeated by many over the years. Yet the evidence to support the link between investment in design and shareholder return has been scarce and largely apocryphal. But now, nearly 30 years after Watson entitled his Wharton School of Business lecture with those five famous words, comes proof that he was right.
A recent in-depth study of the stock market performance of 166 design-led companies in the UK has finally proved the business case for design. The Design Council funded study showed that, from 1994 to 2003, the 63 companies identified as the most effective users of design and winners of the most design awards – grouped together into the 'Design Portfolio' – outperformed the FTSE 100 index by 200 percent.
Whether they were bankers like Barclays, retailers like Tesco or manufacturers like Rolls-Royce, they all did substantially better than their peers over the period of the survey. Even the 103 companies with 'Emerging Portfoliios' also consistently outperformed the FTSE indices over the period of the survey.
The conclusions are clear: not only can design drive growth but it can also be a good indicator of corporate performance and potential.
But why is this? Can the way a company presents itself, in other words its corporate identity, really influence its market share?…
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