DIDACTIC CONTAMINATIONS BETWEEN VISUAL DESIGN, BRANDING AND RELATIONAL VALUE. AN INTERNATIONAL AND EXPERIMENTAL TRAINING APPROACH FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS OF BRANDING EXPERTS

The need to constantly increase the brand reputation has freed itself from purely economic logic, to meet new dynamics designed to measure the interests of customers, where the relational value of the brand plays a primary role and often determines the success of a brand. In the academic field, the teaching methods of visual design and marketing often suffer from a disciplinary separation that needs to be overcome, or at least reconfigured. This essay opens a critical reflection on the relational focus of a branding project, based on some didactic experiments conducted through the application of the Jean-Noel Kapferer’s theoretical and descriptive model, the Identity Prism, at a national, European and international level. In particular, the experimentation in two different disciplinary areas as marketing and visual design has produced a possible extension of Kapferer's analytical model, thanks to the strategic intersection with the design practice and the visual designer methodological approach. This training model has been experimented in several international universities, as the Business School of the Paris EDC, the International University of Monaco IUM and the School of Fashion and Design of the New Delhi GD Goenka University, Master courses of the of Politecnico di Milano School of Design, and its inter-university consortia as Poli.Design, Ard&nt and Milano Fashion Institute. Not least, the model was also tested within a professional context, in a start-up project for a design incubator in Yucatan, Mexico. In this context of double disciplinary vision, the construction of the relationship between brand and consumer has provided a progression of the didactic approach, towards a scenario more adherent to the profession, where the two disciplines converge continuously, but suffer from the difficulty of understanding the specific languages and the lack of a common vocabulary. Through the application of this method, two previously separated areas were able to share a common language and deepen their understanding of the identity roots that spin around the brand. The methodology here presented is a disciplinary bridge that can provide models of continuous verification of brand identity, to deal more closely with the binding problems of contemporary society, with a more open and meta-disciplinary vision. The didactic experimentation carried out at national and international academic sites involved design and marketing students and professionals. By crossing the knowledge of both disciplines, it was possible to foster the birth of an analytical practice with a broader methodological focus and therefore more in keeping with the need to dissect the complexity of a brand in a more exhaustive way. This approach has allowed a necessary adaptation to the visual project, aimed at a necessary plurality of thematic orientations in the context of the practice of the culture of the project, which must today represent the contamination between pure theory and sectors of practice. The contamination of languages and operational focuses of the two disciplines has allowed students to experience, already in the academic field, a less sectoral vision on their future profession, but more open to external disciplinary stimuli, in a more experimental, participatory and inclusive logic than contemporaneity requires to the professionals.