Office furniture maker hopes new product will get people talking
For more than 80 years, the Herman Miller name has been synonymous with icons of industrial design. The company changed the concept of furniture and transformed the interior landscape of workplaces worldwide with the 1964 introduction of the open office plan.
Now, one the nation’s top office furniture makers is planning to do it again, introducing a revolutionary sound management system, called Babble, and launching a new brand, Sonare Technologies, to build and market the product.
To succeed, the company must find a way to launch a new brand within an existing brand, establishing Sonare as its own technologically advanced entity, while still gaining value from its link to the established Herman Miller brand.
The man charged with doing that is William DeKruif.
DELIVERING PRIVACY WITHOUT WALLS
DeKruif is ideally suited for the venture. A 20-year veteran of wireless telecommunications and computing technology, he has impressive credentials from a wide-ranging list of technologically savvy corporations.
He was happily managing a leading company providing Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, communications technology in the health care field when he got the Herman Miller call. Seduced by the rich portfolio of technology, the early prototype of Babble and the incredible potential of the business model, DeKruif became president of Sonare on Nov. 1.
Babble, the new division’s first product, is the first-ever device to deliver voice privacy without walls. Uncanny and Über-cool, the technology, in layman’s terms, takes ‘phonemes’ – our smallest units of speech that convey meaning – and rearranges them electronically so that confidential conversations are heard as the subtle buzz of a crowd, indistinguishable as to content yet not at all distracting.
Open to infinite variations inside and outside the workplace, the initial introduction will be in the form of a desktop device that sits next to the phone with speakers positioned where confidentiality is key.
The product grew out of a five-year collaboration between the company’s own internal dream machine, The Herman Miller Creative Office, and the R&D team at a California-based company.
Babble is set to kick off this month at the commercial interior World’s Trade Fair show-of-shows, then roll out later this summer.
SOLVING A BRANDING DILEMMA
While making the point that the new technology, and new division, will have their own identities, DeKruif believes branding Babble under the impeccable Herman Miller imprimatur is a more natural fit than it appears at first glance.
“At the heart of the branding dilemma was how to structure the brand as something with the quality of Herman Miller and a technology all its own.”
“With very cool technologies and real tools a layman can use, we want to make sound a design element.”
His plan is to leverage the corporate integrity, environmental responsibility, great product design and functionality that distinguishes Herman Miller, then spin from it a Sonare Technologies product brand identity that “looks and feels like a tech company should.”
DeKruif’s marketing strategy is an aggressive, multichanneled program, the objective of which is to create a powerful synergy of elements that generates word of mouth.
