How do you bring innovation to the most innovative market on the planet?

The brief

When Apple launched the iPhone, the mobile market changed forever. Fujitsu saw this and approached us to help them reappraise the concept of the mobile phone – what will it look like in a few years, what will it do? What can it add? How will it evolve? They wanted fresh thinking from all angles – from the physical to the functional to the overall ‘feel’.

What we did

We needed to understand everything about the mobile market, where it is now and where it’s going tomorrow. So we approached it from three specific angles: insight, semiotics, and trends. Insight allowed us to uncover what people want from their mobile and observe how they engage and interact with their phones. Semiotics was about understanding the mobile phone market as a whole – what do other brands do to set themselves apart? How does their visual language affect how the consumer sees it? Trends helped us understand how the mobile market will evolve in the future – what would the ideal mobile device be? The research we carried out allowed us to highlight what the current development in this most fast moving of markets was, and the opportunities they presented. We then took our findings into a creative workshop to brainstorm with Fujitsu. 

Result

We developed 6 ‘seed’ directions for Fujitsu to incorporate into their future developments strategy, where the functional and interactive aspects of the mobile phone are married seamlessly to the brand languages surrounding them.