Elsevier

Design Studies

Volume 25, Issue 1, January 2004, Pages 1-29
Design Studies

Speaking the Buick language: capturing, understanding, and exploring brand identity with shape grammars

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0142-694X(03)00023-1Get rights and content

Abstract

Developing and maintaining a consistent brand statement is an important aspect of developing a successful product. However, maintaining that statement is difficult due in part to the inconsistent and often insufficient understanding of brand by marketing, engineering, and industrial design. This paper presents shape grammars as a method for encoding the key elements of a brand into a repeatable language, which can be used to generate products consistent with the brand. A detailed investigation into the history of Buick styling reveals the brand characteristics of the front view of Buick vehicles, which are then captured in a shape grammar.

Section snippets

Background

A shape grammar3 is a set of rules, based on shape that is used to generate designs through a series of rule applications beginning with an initial shape. Rules take the form of ab, where a and b are both shapes. A rule is applicable if the left-hand side shape, a, can be found in the design shape c by applying a set of transformations to shape a. One such rule and design shape is shown in Figure 1. If the rule is applied, the left-hand side shape is subtracted from the design and the

Buick brand research

The Buick auto company was founded by bathtub maker David Buick in 1903. Six years later, a merger with Olds, gave birth to General Motors, the second largest auto company in the United States. By identifying the public’s demand for styled, comfortable, and luxurious vehicles over sterile, homogeneous ones, General Motors cut Ford’s market share by two-thirds in the 1920s. This styling push led to the creation of the Art and Color Section, the first auto styling division in the United States.

The Buick shape grammar

Once the key elements of the brand were extracted and characterized with representative shapes, the Buick DNA was encoded by a shape grammar. Rules of the Buick grammar fall into two general categories: feature creation and feature modification. The creation rules of the Buick shape grammar take on the structure of the chart in Figure 7, where each box corresponds to a rule and each connecting line represents the pairing of historically accurate features, while modification rules act upon the

Generating Buicks

As a first check of the Buick grammar an existing vehicle was selected and recreated. This by itself does not prove completeness of the grammar but provides insight into possible grammatical errors. A representation of the 2002 Buick Regal was created by following the grammar, choosing the rules that generated features of the proper year, and selecting parameters that instantiate the shapes generated by the rules in the style of the Regal specifically. The vehicle was created through 14 rule

Additional uses of the brand grammar

There are additional applications of the grammar for studio, engineering, and marketing in addition to exploring within the brand by generating vehicles with the grammar (as in Section 4). Through additional vehicle generation, the bounds of the Buick brand can be stretched and tested, examining the limits of a feature in the context of a Buick vehicle. The current popularity of cross-over vehicles presents an interesting challenge in evolving and testing the brand on a platform that is just

Concluding remarks

Brand identity is composed of several factors, but it is the product itself that carries the essence of the brand to the customer, particularly through its form. Success is achieved when brand is developed with care and purpose to connect to the user and is maintained through the evolution of the product. Developing a shape grammar that captures this brand essence requires in-depth research and understanding of the decisions made that shape the product. A shape grammar tool can help to build or

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to recognize and thank Dave Aliberti and Jon Mayer for their efforts in helping explore the Buick brand, creating the grammar, and all of the sketches. The authors would also like to thank Randy Smith, Rich Pawlicki, and Brian Baker of GM for their support and feedback on this project, and GM for supporting this work. The photo in Figure 3(b) is credited to Larry Ripple.

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