Incorporating cultural value into a service brand- Strategic branding for ALV

摘要

This thesis presents a strategic branding project of Active Life Village OY (ALV), a Finnish elderly-care service start-up. In Finland, waves of retirees, known as the post-WWII baby boomers, burst the once-solid public elderly care sector, which reveals opportunities for the private elderly-care service providers like ALV. Finnish baby boomers, as a crossroads and bridging generation (Karisto, 2007), differ from previous generations. Hence, their distinctive value requires ALV outlining tailored strate-gies to accommodate this emerging target group. This brand research attempts a new approach, Service Driven Cultural Innovation (SDCI), adapted from Cultural branding approach (Holt, 2004) in Service brand logic ((Merz et al., 2009). A literature review is presented to link the Cultural approach to service-dominant logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2004a, 2004b, 2008), which provides an initial methodology of SDCI that encourage cultural innovations through collective identity project of consumers in a co-created cultural context of the service system of a brand. The strategic branding research of ALV is then structured in according to the Design Research methodology (Blessing & Chakrabarti, 2009) to further demonstrate and validate this SDCI approach in terms of the procedures, corresponding methods and key insights gained from each stage. Firstly, a phenomenological inquiry, through identity project interview (Holt & Thompson, 2004) assisted by image probing technique, brings out Finnish boomers’ distinct cultural in-sights about their impending elderly life. Then, a co-design workshop, in the fashion of a World café, was organized to transmute these insights into service-based brand strategies in a collaborative manner. Finally, the design process and outcomes were evaluated, with data collected according to Kirkpatick model (Kirkpatick,1959) , which provides an initial validation of the SDCI approach. Overall, the results and findings of this design research suggest that ALV should propose new service system that incorporates the cultural context in which boomers, by practicing collective identity project, actively adapt to the bodily and mental changes while aging. More specifically, this service system should feed boomers’ cultural aspiration by reinventing elder life from three aspects- ‘aging in balance’, ‘relationship and home’, and ‘passion to serve’. The ALV service-branding project resulted in achievable and comprehensive service concepts, which are highly appreciated by the client and has been adopted for their future business development plan. Consequentially, SDCI approach proves to be applicable to service companies, especially small ones with limited resources like ALV. In addition, this thesis provides brand practitioners, especially service designers, instruments to elicit holistic cultural insights from a particular cultural group and translate the insights into service opportunities that co-create brand value with target consumers. Moreover, this thesis stressed the important role of service designer in the brand development and innovation, which may also suggest new career paths for service designer to follow.