www.branddriveninnovation.com

Executive summary In design management literature and business practice, both branding and product innovation are widely discussed. Both are assigned the role of differentiator: they can create sustainable competitive advantage for the company by differentiating the product offering from that of the competition. Recently, the concepts of branding and product innovation have been converging. This development is beneficial both for the brand and the product. On the one hand, the brand can benefit from the product because the product has a more direct impact on the consumer than other brand touchpoints, and over a much longer period of time. In its turn, the product can benefit from the brand because it offers a way to differentiate it emotionally. Combining the two bodies of knowledge presents a problem because there is no framework available for translating brand propositions into new products. Many authors describe the expected benefits of the combination. However, no attempts have been made so far to provide a step by step method for translating brands into products. This method will be valuable to those people involved in designing and managing brands and new products. This research project sets out to develop such a method. It aims to solve the following problem