Marrying the best of two brands into one product

The brief

VTech is one of the largest suppliers of phones in America, and so when they got the chance to partner with AT&T for their newest range – the E-Series – they were keen to make the most of it. As VTech’s long-standing product design partner, it was up to us to bring these two distinct brands together.

What we did

We began by profiling VTech customers to establish the traits and differentiators that would influence the design of each phone in the range. In addition to this, we also looked at AT&T’s brand values to find visual cues that would help tie the branding together into a single style. By drawing on AT&T’s visual heritage this way, we were confident the new range would stand up to competitive products without directly competing for market share with VTech’s other phones.

Our understanding of both the competitive space and VTech’s plans for on-going development of the AT&T brand were crucial factors in shaping the overall designs. And this careful approach ensured the designs didn’t work in isolation, but as an extension of both brands. In going into the development stage, the international project involved collaboration between us in the UK, Vtech’s AT&T brand marketing and product management teams in the US and VTech’s mechanical engineering department in Hong Kong. Using these time zones to our advantage, we were able to lead a round the clock rapid development program to drive all twelve concepts through the industrial design process which enabled us to develop the whole E-Series from visual language definition and initial concepts to 3D CAD ID databases in just under four months.

Result

The E-Series was launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in America and was immediately snapped up by leading US retailers, and has been well received by US consumers ever since.

Client's Comments

"We selected PDD for their proven history in the US telephony marketplace, flexibility to work closely with our internal resources and their capability to encompass the large scale of the project....the new designs represent the AT&T brand in an updated way that provide appeal across market segments."

Jane Donnelly, Product Line Director