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Brand That Actually Sells

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Peopledesign Mar 25, 2026 7 min read

Article archive

Thirty years of thinking about the built environment. Start anywhere.

Fresh thinking, every month.

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Change and Choice

Growth through business strategy, brand identity, and marketing programs.

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Brand Building

Strategic brand choices and effective programs.

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Customer Experience

Delivering value through the customer decision journey.

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Commercial Furniture Insights

Staying relevant in the built environment.

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Education Market Insights

Tracking the changing education landscape.

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Culture Insights

Building agile organizations.

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Sales Insights

Sales insights for commercial furniture and other B2B companies.

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Technology Insights

Technology insights for commercial furniture and other B2B companies.

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Globalization Insights

Globalization insights for commercial furniture and other B2B companies.

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Sustainable Brands

What is a sustainable brand?

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Beyond Optimization

Beyond the age of information is the age of choices.

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New Leadership Priorities

A modern strategy has new requirements.

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Brand Meaning

Brands are about perception, communication, aspiration, and identity.

Brand Psychology

Brands are about what people think.

Brand Evolution

Change is inevitable, but the rate of change for a brand is a strategic choice.

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Design Thinking

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What is Positioning?

Five easy questions. Hard answers.

People

Transformational HR

The war for talent beyond transactions.

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Meaningful Engagement

Our integrated approach helps you connect the dots.

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Insights on Strategic Design

Insights about business, research, strategy, branding, culture, and customer experience.

Creating Brand Standards

Creating actionable brand standards.

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Customer Experience Systems

Balancing the needs of customers and organizations with systems thinking.

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25 Lenses for Experience Design

Creating experience design systems – customers, users, employees.

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The Reach of Design

What are the boundaries and opportunities of design?

Connect with Your Customer

5 steps for creating a sustainable advantage in the connection economy.

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UX of Work

Physical, digital, or hybrid experiences are part of what’s next.

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Brand IP (Intellectual Property) - Protecting Brand Investments

Protecting your Brand Investments - Brand Intellectual Property

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Say What You Mean

Starting with SAY can allow companies to DO different things.

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The Wisdom of Salespeople

Sales are the lifeblood of any organization, but salespeople have even more to offer.

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Top-Line Growth

Three ways to create top-line growth.

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What is a Product?

How value perceived and delivered to customers.

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Sustainably Different

Building brands that outlive market cycles.

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What is Employer Branding?

Internal branding for talent-driven growth.

Peopledesign Jumping the S Curve

Growth Innovation

Unmet customer needs create opportunities for new products, services, and messages.

The Ultimate B2B Digital Marketing Guide

Building a B2B Digital Ecosystem

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Achieving Balance

Balancing internal culture, external customers, and industry shifts is nice. It's also necessary.

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The Future of Work

Opportunities for companies that serve the built environment.

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The Changing Education Landscape

Rethinking outreach to prospective students, parents, and donors.

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Authentic Sustainability

How should we think about sustainability today?

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Productive Progress

What do we mean by productivity?

Scale

Too Many Products

New products can create energy or drag for your business. Create a system to invest wisely.

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Too Many Brands

Don't have too many characters in your brand story.

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Strategy That Fits

Does your scale support all your programs?

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Sales vs Marketing: What's Your Approach?

Does your scale support all your programs?

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Health and Wellness Opportunities

A holistic approach creates paths for innovation.

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Digital Transformation

Leveraging technology for innovation.

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Brands, Beliefs, and Experience

Brands are bigger than they appear.

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Digital Ergonomics

How might the contract furniture industry evolve when work isn't bound to the office?

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Segment Marketing

Targeting Market Segments in Commercial Interiors

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Built Environment Trends

Contract furniture, lighting, textiles, and material trends.

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Absorbing Complexity

In order to create simplicity, organizations have to absorb complexity.

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Engage Specifiers with Product Imagery

A guide for building an image library to drive awareness and sales.

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Tools and Frameworks

Practical resources you can use today — guides, frameworks, and worksheets built around the strategic challenges BE companies face most.

Jumping the S Curve

Growth Cycles

Knowing your position on a growth curve can help focus your strategy.

Making Strategy Actionable

Making Strategy Actionable

Growth-oriented companies align their strategic focus with tactical plans.

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Digital Specification Shapes Marketing

The role of marketing in the evolving specification process.

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Beyond NeoCon

It's time to think beyond NeoCon and the boundaries of the current market.

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No NeoCon. Now What?

A new normal will soon emerge for many industries, including commercial furnishings.

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Adopting an Industry Narrative

The commercial interiors industry should speak with one voice.

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Websites are Infrastructure

Your website isn't a project. It's infrastructure.

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Furniture as Technology

Business model innovation and product innovation go hand-in-hand.

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How Consolidation is Restructuring Contract Furniture

Leaders across the built environment must revisit their positioning, brand strategies, and go-to-market assumptions.

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Products Solve Problems

To stay relevant in a shifting market, manufacturers must refocus product strategy on customer needs.

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Bridging the Sustainability Gap

Practical steps toward a meaningful strategy,

Marketing Budget

Rethinking the Marketing Budget

A strategic approach for built environment brands.

Budgeting for Growth

Budgeting for Growth Video

Learn more about creating more effective budgets.

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The Right Message Video

How sales and marketing leaders move beyond surface-level claims

Office Hours Podcast by Peopledesign

Discussions about strategic growth for built environment brands.

Audience

Who is Your Customer?

Getting in front of the right people.

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A New Century of Innovation

The office furniture industry pioneered modern work. Now it needs to do it again. A case for bold design thinking in a mature industry at a crossroads.

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Who Owns the Specification Journey?

The way products get specified in the built environment has been changing for decades. Here's what's driving it, where the channel is headed, and what manufacturers and dealers need to do differently.

Competing in a Mature Market

Consolidation, commoditization, and compressed margins are reshaping the built environment. These articles are about winning when the easy growth is gone.

Strategy for Stalled Growth

Digital as a Growth Engine

Digital isn't a channel for built environment brands. It's infrastructure. These articles treat it that way.

Winning the Specification Journey

The specification process is the most underleveraged growth lever in the built environment. These articles show how to win it.

Change and Choice

Change can be hard to see. New lenses are needed to chart the course for a new era.

The Brand Bermuda Triangle

Bridging the gap between sales, marketing, and IT.

Challenger Brands

Brands that challenge increase awareness.

Brand and Customer Identity

Six stages to link your brand identity to your customer.

Authentic Brand Engagement

Driving brand engagement by authentic interactions.

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Nonverbal Branding

Backing up your claim with more than words.

Digital Strategies for B2B Brands

Implementing a strong digital strategy can supplement your sales and marketing teams.

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The Creator Lever

Finding space to co-create meaning.

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Alumni are Worth More than Donations

Using alumni in the admissions process.

Your Inner Brand

Was Carl Jung an expert in branding?

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Is Prestige Dead in Higher Ed?

Rising education costs and the value of the degree.

Above the Market Noise

Start integrating your consumers point of view.

Make Research Actionable

Avoiding the gap between insights and application.

Rethinking Product Sampling

What do eyeglasses and textiles have in common?

New Problems

The character of your problem should define your approach.

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Creating the New

Creative processes are predictably unpredictable.

Brand Forward

Brand meaning and customer experience are foundational for brand platforms.

Transformation and Identity

Leaders lead by confidently taking a bold steps.

Customer Experience Planning

Keeping means and ends straight is a way forward.

Brand is Not a Garnish

Lipstick doesn’t go on pigs, and brand is not a garnish.

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Framing Design

Understanding the nature of the problem is the foundation of good problem-solving.

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Is Design Changing?

The future is unwritten, but that shouldn't stop us from thinking about design.

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Regional Branding

Can the branding principles that apply to organizations also apply to place?

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Changing Expectations for B2B

Customers have new expectations for B2B firms.

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Privacy in the Open Office

Privacy in office environments is an ever present issue.

Office Ergonomics, Health, and Wellness

The evolution of office ergonomics.

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Branded Environments

Impressive-looking facilities, from factories to offices, have been points of pride and vehicles for sales assurance for corporate owners and their customers.

Inspiration from Nature

Built environment designers often look to nature for inspiration.

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WWAD - What Would Amazon Do?

Despite the hoopla, the information age is just beginning

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The Need to Get Different

Adapting to a world of change

Collapse and Opportunity in the Built Environments Value Chain

How companies communicate and conduct business continues to change, and competitors need to position themselves to be ready.

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The Landscape of Furniture and Work

Trends shape the industry landscape. Competitors will need to mind the waves.

The Most Important Things (Are Nobody’s Job)

Customers are looking for meaningful experiences. Brands need to connect the dots.

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Tell a Different Story: Meaningful Talent Acquisition

It’s time to build a talent-centric acquisition process.

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Human-Centered Design in HR: Building Agile Organizations

Building agile organizations requires agile employees and a human-centered design approach to HR.

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Next Wave Furniture Innovation

Furniture innovation goes beyond furniture

Second Cities

Start looking at the market from different perspectives.

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Furniture as Technology

Business model innovation and product innovation go hand-in-hand.

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Happy Banana, Sad Banana

Is your team a Happy Banana or a Sad Banana?

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Let’s Make a Deal

Reconsidering the Dealer Value Chain

Brand Love

People love brands—and love to hate brands.

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Crossing the Collaboration Divide

How will our tools and environments support collaboration?

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Mining the Technology Gap

What role do new technologies play in your organization?

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Sparking Growth

Sparking growth and keeping it lit requires a leader to adapt to the changing needs of their organization.

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The New Classroom

Whether educators are utilizing AI, mobile apps, or VR/AR tools, the landscape of learning is being reshaped.

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The Industrial Mindset

Solving today's new problems for people requires a different mindset.

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What Did We Learn from WeWork?

The contract furniture industry will need to adapt to evolving customer needs.

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Accelerated Change

We need a new frame for the challenges we face today. In the middle of a global pandemic, we find ourselves at home, left to consider what comes next.

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Learning and Leadership

Many are starting to think about what comes next, but a new reality was already emerging for education.

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Hard Reset: What’s Next for Office Furniture

Navigating the relationship between furniture and work.

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Experiences, Large and Small

Layers of experience, from macro to micro, are on the same continuum.

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Unbundling Education

For many institutions, it is time to rethink the overall value proposition of education.

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UX Principles at Work

The new reality for work is hard to ignore.

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What's the Problem?

To make a bigger difference, find the right problem.

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Please Rate Your Experience

Human experience, a product of consciousness itself, is hard to define and evaluate.

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Measured Success

Metrics are great, but be careful what you measure.

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The Push

Commercial furniture manufacturers are being pushed toward retail.