Innocent Drinks' Design Culture

The Innocent Drinks Design Culture

Discuss and illustrate the extent to which a �design culture’ in an organisation can give it competitive advantage.

I. Introduction

In 21st century, the organizations are entering a brand new era full of opportuni-ties and innovations, and great changes have taken place in companies’ attitude to-wards some traditional practices. Design has become an essential issue. As the writer in “Designing the 21st century” observed:

Throughout the industrialized world, manufacturers of all types are in-creasingly recognizing and implementing design as an essential means of reaching new international audiences and of gaining competitive ad-vantage.

The term of Design culture can be defined or represented in many ways because different industries and companies have different design culture. The importance is the output or result of each different Design Culture, what is the image on the cus-tomer, and what is the impact on the company performance.

II. Purpose

This essay will look into the “Innocent Drinks”, a company based in United King-dom that produced smoothie (a kind of drink that blend juice and fruit with yogurt or water). The content will focus on the Innocent Drinks’ background, work force, brand identity , decision making, packaging and distribution in order to understand its вЂ?de-sign culture’ and how it influenced the company. Finally, what competitive advantage that design culture can give to Innocent Drinks.

III. Background

Innocent Drinks was start by three young people, Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jon Wright, who graduated from Cambridge. In 1998, they started to make smoothie and sold in a music festival in London. The consumers were ask to throw the empty bottles to two bins, “yes” or “no”, to let the consumers decided whether three of them should keep making smoothie. After the festival the bin of “yes” was full so the next day they resigned to it. Now, the company “Innocent Drinks” has become the biggest smoothies company and has 65% of UK smoothie market share (Russell, 2007).

IV. The Innocent Drinks Design culture вЂ" Stay Simple

The design philosophy in Innocent Drinks is to “stay simple.” It influences the de-sign culture and the ethics of Innocent Drinks. No tricks, just natural, honesty, and engaging work (Germain, 2007), these four points followed by workplace, decision making, brand identity and Innocent ethics will be discussed.

1.Workplace

The headquarters of Innocent Drinks is based in west London named, Fruit Tower. The decoration of the office is based on “natural”. The carpet is green like the grass, and plants everywhere. The garden outside the office is to let the employees can take a rest when they are tired or just want to have some inspiration.

The working place is an open area where no one is isolated but still to be respect as an individual. Their design culture can also be seen in the business card. The company asks the employees to create their own job title to put on the business cards. For example, the marketing manager is “Queen Bee”(Gibson, 2007). Further-more, the Fruit Tower invites every customers walking by to step inside the head-quarters to have a drink of their newest recipe for free.

It is obvious that the company want to create an open and natural working envi-ronment and build up a “stay simple” design culture. Everyone who visit or work in the company is not only an independent individual but also a part of the family- Inno-cent Drinks.

2. The leadership and Decision making вЂ" bottom-up, natural, and honest.

The company structure can be analyze of Power Distance. Power Distance(PD) refers to the extent to which less powerful members expect and accept unequal power distribution within a culture(Marcus and Emilie). In this case, Innocent Drinks leadership use Low PD. That means the organizations have flatter hierarchies and less difference in salaries and status.

The free, green, and open space working environment gives everyone in the company the ability to go directly discussing with his department head, without feel-ing restrictively. The monthly meeting or quarterly forums are also arranged for dis-cussions and sometimes arguments about the hottest issues and the latest news in the company.

By emphasize this kind of decision making style, the company tries to make sure that everyone is involved. The head of the human resources Bronte Blomhoj indi-cates that the key in making sure it keeps the company in tight and simple is to put resource in place to ensure that everybody feels like an individual but also part of the team (Design Council, 2007).

Basically, there are two types of decision making. One is top-down and another is bottom-up. Most of the company use top-down systen because it is easier to achieve. Innocent Drinks have a strong bottom-up system and that make it so distinctieve and success. The design culture made Innocent has recently been voted a top employer by the Guardian.

3. Brand Identity - Logo, website, packaging and distribution

Brand identity is the position that a company want to be, the promise company want to present to its consumers(Temporal, 2002).Innocent Drinks create their brand identity according to their core idea: to be more organic, ethic and natural. The com-pany uses it in many part of their business.

First, a face-like company logo was created like children’s drawing with only simple circles, and apparently by its design, it is hard to understand what Inno-cent Drinks actually do. However, it is surprising that the logo does match the mean-ing of “innocent”--“simple, natural.” it is intentionally made to be “meaning nothing” by the company point of view.

Second, the Innocent Drinks’ website is organized in asymmetric layouts. The pic-ture on the left, the big knit, is Innocent Drinks’ latest charity movement.