CPG Product Design and Development

Our Unique Advanced Design Thinking Process

Psycho Aesthetics (P/A) is our unique approach to design thinking. Over the decades spent developing and evolving P/A, it has continuously progressed into a highly advanced design-thinking tool and framework that allows designers to create shared objective, pragmatic, and insightful approaches to everything from research, design, and engineering, to UX, branding, name development, mission and vision statements, user interaction, and more. It provides an open design framework under which the key understandings of mapping onto a consistent framework combine with the creation of a “hero’s journey” for all stakeholders, from consumers to members of our own teams. P/A is a universal design tool and framework that is only limited by individuals’ openness to working within frameworks and their own talents. Combined with “design doing,” success is exponentially advanced when created through this framework.

Research Design

In many cases, designers are not the consumers. However, with CPG often our designers have an intuitive understanding of the needs of users. We seek to overcome this potential overconfidence using our psycho-aesthetic framework to research plan and process to qualify and quantify the exact pains of consumers. Using this deeper understanding and insight into consumers’ behavior and psychological patterns, RKS designs create long and lasting benefits to users over many years. The foundation of this success comes from insights into users, their needs, their aspirations, their challenges, how they work, how they live, how they play, and the interior and social architecture of their lives. We use this picture as the basis of our designs. Ultimately, products informed by user research are safer, easier to learn, and simpler to use, and deliver benefits that are the highest value to users over a long period of time and lowest cost to suppliers. In addition to ethnography and observation, we use interviews, benchmarking, and competitive analyses, as well as evaluative research methods such as human factors evaluation, simulated use, and comparative testing.

Ethnographic Research

Ethnographic research is a cornerstone of our advanced design thinking methodology, psycho-aesthetics. Ethnographic research is a qualitative method where our researchers observe and interact with potential consumers in their real-life environment. For CPG our research is focused on where, when, and why consumers choose to use existing and new products. We routinely go into the field to observe users in a broad range of contexts from their homes to their hobbies. In the case of retail, we visit retailers and learn how purchases are made or not made. In many cases, we ask users to make a switch or behavior change. This ethnographic research helps us deliver benefits that achieve the 10x or more that is required for users to make that change. When we can’t meet with consumers physically, we use current and emerging technology to gather and analyze data such as VR/AR, IoT tracking, and digital presence. Our team has years of experience designing, executing, and transferring data from our ethnographies to award-winning designs.

Consumer Product Strategy Design

Determining a strategy for a consumer device requires a holistic approach. We consider everything from our client’s priorities, to financial investment, to regulatory requirements, to market identification. In other words, we are not just looking at the product, but the entire UX within the product and the market context. We identify the essential product features and balance those against both product cost and project schedule to come up with a product that meets the consumer’s requirements at a price that they are willing to pay. Our designers serve as consumer advocates, examining all the elements of the UX including everything from user manuals to product graphics, the UI, and servicing issues. To make the most cost-effective products possible, we consider questions, such as what happens when this product is at the end of its life, to what a consumer does with it, to how they disassemble it.

Regulation Support

Because of their general appeal, CPG often have regulatory and compliance requirements. In the US, edible goods must be approved by the FDA for general sales. Other federal regulations might require certain labels to be added, while individual states may also require the same. Similarly edible goods sold in the EU must comply with Regulation No 1169/2011. Non-edible CPG such as those in the beauty, home, and office, need to have tamper-resistant packing and/or comply with non-toxic guidelines. We consider these regulatory and compliance needs throughout the design process so that our designs are ready to be tested by the relevant agencies and third-party testing centers.

Market Identification

Financial success requires a clearly defined target customer and target market to be successful. Often we receive patents or ideas for CPG that have not yet achieved market fit. We assist in two ways: 1) help identify the right target customer, and 2) help find the right target market. To help find market fit, we use our psycho-aesthetic framework to define the needs and pain points of consumers. We quantify how interactive and self-actualizing our design is compared to competitors and for different customers. We then zero-in on the right combination or these two elements that deliver the right value to the right customers. Our design and engineering of an MVP that can help further hone the right space and improvement multiple for the right customers. It’s easy to overstate this improvement multiple, which makes our qualitative and quantitative approach to market identification even more important to overcome bias. We have helped companies bring hundreds of ideas to life over our forty years, through qualitative and quantitative market identifications.

CPG Design and Formulation

The experience of CPG is a combination of the industrial design, UI, and branding into a compelling human-centered UX. User-centric design employs an emotionally agnostic approach, focused primarily on the tangible, physiological ways users interact with a platform. Human-centric design on the other hand, incorporates their emotional or psychological preferences as well. For CPG we focus on UX, brand, and digital experiences that not only have a user-centric component, but a human-centered component as well. This type of design can encompass the way a product is presented, to the way it feels when opening, to the sound it makes when a user is using it. This type of attention to detail defines our innovative approach. From the color to texture we consider all aspects of the user experience. With a special focus on affirmations, we focus on giving users feedback that they have used a product successfully. In turn, this created positive self images for the user, and a desire to use the item again and again, while recommending it.

Design and Formulation

Our design and formulation teams use our unique P/A design framework, which aims to create emotional connections between the product and consumers. To this end, we ask not how a design makes a consumer feel, but how a design makes them feel about themselves. In the industrial design we consider not only aesthetic aspects, specific shape, color, but also feel, and delivery of “Moments of Truth”. In making choices to fulfill their needs, consumers are seeking acceptance of others, and to convey empowerment. We’re all looking to do more tomorrow than we are today, that is the human condition. Moments of Truth are essential to our needs of self-actualization and acceptance. Using these insights, we aim to create new, distinctive designs.

Sustainable Package Design/b>

CPG packaging is often the nexus of complicated regulatory, UX, and sustainability issues. Most packaging has to be both tamper resistant, and child-friendly. Retail as an industry is requiring more packaging to conform to their operations. Packaging is also usually the first interaction a consumer has with a product, and must not only signal what it is, but what the consumer wants, and why their choice delivers a comparative advantage to competition. As more consumers look for this type of transparency, packaging has to be firmly rooted in the value it provides it the consumer. In addition, it’s also more important than ever to consider packaging sustainability. More consumers check packaging for sustainable materials and more municipalities require them, just as more supply chains are being built to create sustainability packaging. RKS has been chosen as one of a handful of key partners to help companies create Amazon-certified sustainable packaging. Sustainable packaging remains a key aspect of a market-leading design.

Proof of Concept

Our proof of concept method enables our team to share internal knowledge, explore emerging technologies on the product roadmap, and provide a tangible concept. By its nature a proof of concept (POC) is a small exercise to test the design idea, an assumption, or a technology. The main purpose of developing a POC is to demonstrate the basic functionality of our design or formulation and to verify a certain concept or theory that can be achieved in development. Before an actual prototype is made a POC is a way for us to solicit feedback from our team and our clients, so that we can narrow our design for the next stage. While it’s tempting to move through this phase quickly, the proof of concept is a stage where key materials, form, and function are often chosen.

Beta Prototyping

Beta Prototyping is a quick and effective way of bringing a proof of concept to life and allows potential consumers to evaluate, test and share their feedback. Often this means seeing how consumers find, open, and use our designs in the real world, or in focus groups. We can use this feedback to make improvements to design and functionality. These improvements often reduce the cost as features are narrowed and technologies and materials are substituted. Internally, beta prototyping also helps our team create a more accurate estimate of how long it will take to complete a production model, and after that to manufacturing. Because our human-centered design framework focuses on the consumer, prototyping is one of the most useful activities for moving forward into production, while quickly finding any issues.

Future Concept Development

After designing a proof of concept and producing a prototype, we roadmap future features, and technologies. Future concept development engages the dynamic environment of future technologies, global trends, changing markets, and user needs. Future concepts can include simple requirements or additional proof of concepts and prototypes. This part of the process often depends on the needs of the client. Often these future concepts are used for creating upgraded and updated versions, as well as creating multiple versions to meet different market demands. Importantly, these future concepts give our clients an idea of the future area of intellectual property.

Intellectual Property Support

Patenting product formulations or packaging can be critical in creating lasting value to our clients and to end consumers. We consider whether there is technology to patent early on in the design process, and work with our customers to file patents to the USPTO. We routinely assist attorneys and agents with the technical muscle to support the patent applications of our clients. Our experts help patent professionals draft effective and comprehensive claims based on the invention and the characterization data. In addition to data, we provide clear technical support throughout the entire application. In the end, patents allow our customers to own outright the innovations we build together.

Human-Centered Design

The experience of CPG is a combination of the industrial design, UI, and branding into a compelling human-centered UX. User-centric design employs an emotionally agnostic approach, focused primarily on the tangible, physiological ways users interact with a platform. Human-centric design on the other hand, incorporates their emotional or psychological preferences as well. For CPG we focus on UX, brand, and digital experiences that not only have a user-centric component, but a human-centered component as well. This type of design can encompass the way a product is presented, to the way it feels when opening, to the sound it makes when a user is using it. This type of attention to detail defines our innovative approach. From the color to texture we consider all aspects of the user experience. With a special focus on affirmations, we focus on giving users feedback that they have used a product successfully. In turn, this created positive self images for the user, and a desire to use the item again and again, while recommending it.

UX Design

User experience (UX) defines a great consumer product or service. Three ways that this UX can be measured is performance, accuracy, and usability. To perform a design must meet the basic needs of users, while solving pain points and creating a solution that is multiples better than existing solutions. To be accurate a design works around clear specifications that can be used in manufacture to create a consistent UX. To be usable a design is instantly familiar to users. In order for these higher standards to be met, the UX must be considered from research, through design, development, and on to manufacturing. We consider all aspects of the product from its physical dimensions, and its technical limitations.

Brand Strategy and Design

A brand defines the emotional connection between a product and a user through how the design makes the user feel about themself. For new consumer brands, which often compete in crowded competitive environments, it is absolutely essential to have a memorable identity. A memorable brand creates a foundation for products to differentiate themselves from the competition in the market, attract investors and partners, set guardrails for marketing, and charge based on the value the brand provides. Creating a logo and color scheme, typography, and icon set is an important step in brand creation. In particular, successful logos tell the user how they will receive value, while making the user feel good about themselves. Logos also lead to strong brand recognition over time. It’s not only important that the logo fits the design, but that the design fits the logo. In cases where a brand or collection of brands already have strong recognition in the marketplace, it’s important that the overall design is consistent with that brand or collection of brands. In cases where we are tasked with creating a brand or collection of brands, we begin with a multi-phase interaction of business analysis, audience analysis, brand positioning, creative and messaging, implementation, and maintenance and measurement. Together, and across the entire project we work to find the right brand or brands to represent the new design or designs.

Digital Development

Traditionally, CPG have been analog-first, focusing on the materials that people can physically touch or consume. Newer CPG increasingly blend the analog and digital worlds. In many cases, the software and hardware that are used to dispense the product or use it, are key digital experiences. We believe that this trend will continue. In creating new CPG, we consider the need for digital development alongside traditional analog development. RKS is a full-service digital agency that uses the latest tools and technologies. These technologies are augmented reality SDKs, AI based facial tracking and body tracking/scanning, natural language processing with Amazon Lex, blockchain technologies including smart contracts, decentralized security and privacy frameworks, machine machine learning algorithms and deep learning with TensorFlow and sci-kit, video and image processing, on-device hardware integration, IoT and beacon technologies, and 3D imaging using OpenGL.

Other Services

Existing brands often want us to work directly with agencies on the creation and promotion of their new goods. This type of collaboration usually starts from the beginning and includes understanding of the marketing and creative strategy from the beginning. This helps ensure that  the result is an expected success that meets the market demand. In other instances, clients ask us to match them with the right creative agencies that can do their marketing. In these types of collaborations we offer a variety of services to our clients that often replicate the traditional agency role. These traditional agency roles go beyond creative work, and include online advertising buying, ongoing logo design and improvement, and marketing strategy.