5 Reasons Why Your Products Best Define Your Brand Identity
How the design of a smart thermostat shaped brand principles, that continue to be relevant a decade later
I remember my collaboration with ecobee well, when back in 2013 CEO and founder Stuart Lombard and his team reached out to LUNAR to design their new smart thermostat experience.
An insightful article about the collaboration between ecobee and LUNAR (my former employer, a San Francisco design consultancy in 2015 acquired by McKinsey & Company) was written and published on Forbes in 2016.
This post isn’t about the ins and outs of the collaboration nor is it about the role I played as a Design Lead on our projects together to launch ecobee3 and ecobee3 lite. It is about the impact that the design and design process back in 2013–2014 had on ecobee’s brand identity throughout the course of roughly a decade. Of course the credit for ecobee’s success goes far beyond the contributions of the LUNAR team, yet it is a clear example of why in my belief a company’s brand and identity are best established through the design of its products.
1. Every day, the product experience will bring your brand to life
Every design and brand project should start with conversations. To understand what drives a company, to learn about its purpose and what it and its people aim to contribute to the world we live in today. Ecobee has always held a special place in my heart as a company driven to contribute to a more sustainable world with a humble approach that is in service of people. The company in its essence and truth is human.
From the start, our shared belief was to make ecobee’s product experiences as human as possible without losing the magic and perception of being a ‘smart device’. Human in a way that made these devices approachable for those that are not tech savvy and simply want to improve the comfort of their home, Simply Smarter. And human in every moment of the user experience from learning about ecobee, their products and benefits, to unboxing, install and the joy of every day use as well as new experiences introduced months or even years later.
Being human and approachable remain essential for ecobee’s brand and design ethos today and this ethos is brought to life through each experience, from the daily interactions with ecobee’s products to its customer service and communications.
2. Your products define foundational principles that work across all touch-points, senses and emotions
“We’ve all been aligned on the core visual identity — traits characterized as ‘intuitive, clever, and imaginative.’ This vision was key in enabling the team to make the right design decisions from start to finish. It also served as a guiding light to collaborate on inspiration and mood boards to share imagery for UI, UX, and Industrial Design.” — Rahul Raj, former VP of marketing at ecobee in Forbes
Your identity should always be built on foundational design principles that make your ethos tangible. It is essential for designers to communicate these principles in such a way that everyone can rally behind them, regardless of their creative discipline, leadership level or whether they are in design, product management, engineering or product marketing. Remember it’s not merely principles for a visual language that you are defining, but more importantly the tone and means of interaction that ultimately defines how your audience will feel about you.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou
These design principles enable a seamless and coherent look, voice, and behavior across all experiences, which in turn provides a unique opportunity for your audience to forge an emotional connection with your brand each and every day.
3. The experience, look & feel of your products instantly make your brand stand out from the crowd
“Thermostats — even modern ones — have perpetuated the same design flaw: They only measure temperature in one location, which makes it hard to deliver comfort in other rooms that matter to people. Ecobee worked with the design firm Lunar to solve this problem. The team conducted qualitative research with professional installers and homeowners to understand the ecosystem of selection, purchase, installation, and use. We identified Ecobee’s ownable differences and unearthed crucial expectations that would set the ecobee3 apart. This upfront framing work led to the development of the innovative room sensors, which are wireless devices that measure both temperature and motion that help ecobee to deliver comfort in the rooms that matter, and not just the hallway where most thermostats live.” — Rahul Raj, former VP of marketing at ecobee in Forbes
Since ecobee launched the ecobee3 in 2014 and not too long after the ecobee3 lite in 2016, the squircle swiftly manifested itself in people’s homes. The winning combination of an amazing user experience across devices, the unique value of a smart sensor that brings you comfort where you are and a highly recognizable design all contributed to ecobee becoming a well-known name and competitive player in the thermostat market today.
“[Shortly after launching ecobee3] ecobee gained 15x in sales, and captured 30% market share.” — Rahul Raj, former VP of marketing at ecobee.
A success that has enabled ecobee to not only improve people’s lives and help them save on expensive energy costs, but also deliver on ecobee’s impactful mission to create a more sustainable world.
“Ecobee helped users in 2022 alone to save 5.28TWh of energy, which is equivalent to taking 800,000 gas-powered cars off the road for a year.” — ecobee
4. A strong physical identity is more likely to stand the test of time
To this day the physical characteristics that our team shaped for ecobee continue to be applied. Below are ecobee’s own words on how the squircle influenced the design of their new logo and typeface by renowned brand consultant Pentagram, as well as other key elements of their updated brand identity.
“Squircle; In our reflection, we reconnected with one of our core elements, the squircle. The circle and square hybrid is the shape of our primary products and has been a source of inspiration. We like that this shape is unique, ownable, and adaptable.
The connection between the SmartThermostat and the letterform within the wordmark is clear. This helps us create a consistent visual identity that’s easily recognizable. The proprietary typeface was designed with the award-winning design consultancy Pentagram. Each letterform is built from the squircle shape. It’s used for the logo, sub-brands, and product names.” — ecobee brand
5. Product design principles can inspire innovations and evolutions as a platform rather than a uniform
Ecobee’s latest products with which they entered the home security space continue to visually build on the basic simplicity of the squircle without being directive.
The principles for simplicity, human, intuitive, imaginative and clever equally allowed for the brand to evolve its identity and more importantly the user experience into new ways to bring comfort in people’s homes.
Your brand is never just a logo or a visual identity, it’s an experience. It’s the emotional and physical journey that people take when interacting with your products. If you want to create a lasting impression and meaning for your brand, you need to focus on defining and amplifying those experiences and the foundational principles they are built on.
Rethink your products and create a dialogue with your audience through everyday interactions. Make every touchpoint count, and your brand will leave a lasting impact on your audience. So, take the time to (re-)define your brand through experiences and see the long-lasting memories that it can create.
Marcelle van Beusekom is a design creative located in the Bay Area, where she creates meaningful products and multi-sensory user experiences and occasionally writes about design www.marcellevanbeusekom.com The views shared in her writing are her own.
