Achieving your business goals through design.

Is your company relocating? Are you expanding or remodeling your facility?

Utilize this opportunity to boost your company's identity and accomplish marketing and business development goals. Thoughtful, successful, corporate interior design can go further than change your facility's working environment. Given the proper vision, communication and conviction, you can maximize your investment in your facility to serve alternate goals of identity development and solidify the message that your company wants to convey to your clients.

Identify Your Goals:

The first step in employing design to accomplish your goals is to identify and establish what those goals are clearly before engaging in the design process. While these objectives may not be clearly defined within your organization, the initial step is to gain consensus in order to proceed forward. The challenges at hand may differ and design may not seem as a relevant solution to accomplishing them, however you will find that the design of your facility has more impact in your operation than you may have given it credit. For example, some companies may be in a transitional stage to enter a new level of business capacity and their goal may be to solidify their new company image, in which case the look and feel of their facility would reinforce that new image. Or in some other instances a company may identify that they have too much turnover within their staff and want to retain and recruit talent, so the new environment itself may serve as a tool for recruitment and maintaining longevity within your team. The design of your new facility, drawn from realistic needs can propel your existing organization to new levels, the key element to this is to define those objectives and proceed forward with conviction in employing design to accomplish them.

Let Your Goals Drive the Process:

With your objectives established, tackle the design process so that the design solutions can be a derived from your needs and goals, this is your measure of success in the project.

At this point this may either sound really appealing to you, or it may be getting a little bit too touchy-feely. So let me share some examples of some recent design solutions where the clients marketing became the focus of the space:

In the design of an office and working showroom for a furniture dealer who wanted to showcase their extensive portfolio of completed projects, and not a lot of room to display it, the design solution became a projection wall in their reception area, which linked to their network, continually displays images of their completed work. The types of examples of their visuals displayed can be customized depending on the types of clients they may have coming through their office on any given day. This design displays a wide range of images that represent their product, their portfolio and their versatility of services. The projections themselves give their reception area a very dynamic and ever changing appearance. The tactic accomplishes a multitude of things; within their organization, their team is given the opportunity to choreograph what is viewed and "shape" the look and feel of the reception area, externally, their clientele, their audience, gets to see their product without realizing that they are actually experiencing a subliminal sales presentation.

In another instance, a real estate company wanting to change their image to reflect their involvement in more luxury real estate, utilized the design of a "hotel" office to host their agents across the country, as an example of the new company image. Instead of the medium range residential look that they were accustomed to, this office was designed as a modern high end VIP lounge type of environment. By default, this design communicated to the traffic of agents coming through the office what direction the company was taking, it established without the need for a lot explanation, where they were going and how this was supported by the change in marketing tools and paraphernalia.

Creating an Experience:

Both of the examples that I have listed above have the following in common, they use clients' product to create an experience. Great interior design should always give to us, the viewer, a great experience. Great corporate interior design should bring an experience that is interdependent on the culture of the company that it is representing. Furthermore, if during the design process, the marketing goals are incorporated into the mix, the result will be a design where those objectives are the focal point of the space. If I were to extract the client's product and/or goals out of the two examples that I listed above, we would be left with a space without any experience or meaning, which makes evident that in those projects the connection was made between the interior design strategies and the client's goals. If you work with a good designer, the design process in it of itself will be fun and educational to you, it will reveal to you the possibilities that design can offer to your company and your goals. You will see a connection between your company identity and your space, not to mention that your environment will give your clients a great experience, enticing them to keep coming back!

Rey III Viquez is Director of Interior Design at architectural firm, Santa Monica-based WWCOT (Widom Wein Cohen O'Leary Terasawa).