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The RKS Innovation Glossary of Terms

RKS is an award-winning strategic design and innovation consultancy. Consistently ranked in BusinessWeek's Top 10 Industrial Design firms, RKS has a 29-year legacy of transforming client inspirations and aspirations into powerful business results.

Adjacencies

The process by which we transfer learnings about consumers and products from one category to fuel innovation in a new category. The creation of 3M’s Post-It Notes – a failure from an adjacent category, created a robust new category owned by 3M.

Advocacy

The connection with a cause or meaning that resonates with consumers and is central to the unique value of the product or service.

Authenticity

A product's communication of a genuine sense of personality, core values, and unique emotional attributes in a way that resonates with consumers. The power of authenticity is its ability to create communities of heroic evangelists.

Consumer’s Hierarchy of Needs, Desires, and Aspirations

This hierarchy, translated from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, outlines levels of desires in the consumer’s decision making-process. In short, the extent to which the product or service tends to the well-being of their consumers in each category will play a significant role in the rate of brand adoption which can be achieved.

Day/Week-in-the-Life

This involves understanding the constraints, activities and usage scenarios that are likely to take place in the typical day or week of a persona. The understanding of these patterns reveals opportunities for the engagement of a new product or service during that average day or week in a way that fuels the innovation process.

Design

The harmonization of aesthetics, function and emotion to result in a form factor and functionality that generates unique emotional appeal within a known target audience.

Empowerment

The powerful emotional connection a consumer makes with a product, service, or brand because it enables them to do the things they couldn’t do without them. To reflect on a product's level of empowerment, RKS weighs the emotional mantra, “Is it like me, does it like me, can it make me more?”

Evolutionary vs. Revolutionary

This describes the difference between modification and reinvention. The decision to evolve or create a revolution in a category is central to the direction of the innovation process.

Experience / Interactivity

This term runs a spectrum – from the one-click functionality needed to open garage doors, to more complex and specific actions for the application of cosmetic products. RKS determines the appropriate level of activity desirable for various consumer segments for each given product or service.

First Connector vs. First Mover Advantage

As defined in the upcoming book, Predictable Magic by Deepa Prahalad and Ravi Sawhney, the first connector advantage means that you don't have to be the first mover if you connect with the consumer. The iPod was not the first MP3 player, but it was the first to transcend features and functionality to resonate on an emotional level with the consumer and capture a leadership position in the market. The first connector enjoys higher volumes, reduced price sensitivity, and greater mindshare.

Haptics

The opening of a Zippo lighter, the whistling of a tea kettle, the keys on a keyboard – each of these sensory experiences provides a tactile and/or audible feedback loop, indicating that a task has been engaged or completed.

Hero’s Journey

A classic storytelling narrative used in stories ranging from Homer’s Odyssey to Star Wars. RKS has adapted the Hero’s Journey to construct the process by which consumers bond with the products and experiences they seek in the marketplace. The Hero’s Journey enables us to craft a unique, category specific experience to build segment ownership.

Heroic Evangelist

When an experience provides sufficient transformative value, it makes the consumer feel rewarded and empowered. This is when they become compelled to share their story with others. Such sharing is at the core of the creation of viral demand for a product or service.

It’s Not How You Feel About the Design, It’s How it Makes You Feel About Yourself

This mantra is at the core of our unique Psycho-Aesthetics® process and is the strategy that fuels RKS’s ability to deliver new products that predictably and reliably resonate with the emotional needs of a variety of target consumers. This is how we turn consumers into the Heroic Evangelists that generate essential viral demand for our clients' products.

Key Attractors

These are the specific design features that will engage a particular target group of consumers. For example, a new mother may be attracted to baby products whose features can be operated with one hand.

Moment of Truth

The moment of truth is not the point of purchase. It is the experience that happens after the consumer interacts with design in front of those people whose decisions matter most. The feedback received during that exchange creates a sense of validation and inspiration that results in an emotional evangelist.

Opportunity Zone

In the Psycho-Aesthetics mapping process, the Opportunity Zone is the point of convergence of persona needs, core brand offerings, and the competitive product landscape. This can reveal new target consumer groups and the need for the features, functions, and emotional attributes of a new business model or new products and services.

Persona

A persona is a composite representation that provides a human face to all demographic data, consumer analytics, market research, ethnography and other insights. When converted to this visual format, data can be equally embraced by creatives, executives, marketing, and engineering teams alike.

Product Civilization

When an iconic product is created, a synergistic civilization of products designed to enhance the use of, or connect with the popularity of the iconic product, emerges. As an example, modern airports, jetways, food systems and the other support products that followed the introduction of the 707, the world’s first passenger jet, enabled better air travel, made the world smaller, and sold more 707’s.

Psycho-Aesthetics

The RKS process of creating emotional connections with consumers. It spans the spectrum from strategy to implementation to consumer experience to reveal the triggers that attract buyers, generates the purchase impulse, and builds the viral demand that leads to segment leadership.

Ritual

The maintenance of one’s existing lifestyle or product usage patterns. The extent to which a new innovation, product, or service feels natural or intuitive to those existing patterns will be a determiner of the new product’s rate of adoption.