Mauro Porcini, Chief Design Officer of PepsiCo, at IE Business School

In the course of the event, which also featured comments by IE Business School Dean Martin Boehm, Porcini examined the potential of design within corporate strategy.

Porcini described how the key to success in a digital world is to be authentic, global and locally relevant. “People share experiences, not just products,” said the Italian expert, explaining that there are three levels of interaction with the product. The first is the functional level, which resolves the needs of the consumer, the second is the emotional level, and then finally there is the need for communication whereby the product helps to transmit a message, by “telling a story about us to the rest of the world”. Porcini underscored the importance of understanding how to design products that people fall in love with, and which express the values that consumers wish to transmit.

During the presentation, Mauro Porcini stressed the increasing importance of design in the business world. “The design function has become an essential complement to the marketing function in many successful organizations. We at IE Business School couldn’t agree more with this assessment as we include for quite some time the concept of design thinking in all our programs”, said Martin Boehm, Dean of IE Business School.

Mauro Porcini, who also took part in the World Business Forum held recently in Madrid, stressed the importance of using brands to generate experiences at different levels. He explained that companies need to forge a ‘visceral relation’ with consumers, and awaken emotions in them using brands and product design. He went on to underline the need to develop the type of ‘interactive relation’ that permits clients to design personalized projects and enables the brand to glean data based from their decision, get to know them better, launch prototypes and analyze their reactions. Porcini rounded off by saying that it is also essential to work on an ‘expressive relation’ achieved by means of experiences with the brand that make it relevant to the consumer.