Ushio

Ushio is a tech company and specialized in everything that comes with light and lamps. Since 1964, the company delivers light sources, from ultraviolet to infrared, for industrial applications. They even offer tailor-made solutions and the organization is well known because of its high level of knowledge and advice. Their applications are found in cinemas, automotive, food industry and spacecraft.

GRRR has been asked to support Ushio’s European branch in strategy, branding and corporate communication. As you might know now: everything we do at Grrr starts with content and the end user. We applied Service Design principles as a way of working and philosophy in order to truly understand the core values of Ushio. We focus on improving and creating services with outcomes adding the highest possible value to the end user. From a practical perspective, it is an integral approach combining communication with interactions and transactions. Design is not a cosmetic layer, being considered in the last phase, but the starting point of a strategic process.

We let the Ushio team participate in multiple sessions. By making personas, competition mapping and visual notetaking, we visualized the customer journey. These sessions were followed by a basic strategy that we practically applied, both digitally and physically. To summarize: a shift from products to light.

Rolf Coppens, GRRR: “A customer wants a solution for light and not a lamp”. For example, we thought about the way Ushio could stress its presence at European fairs and, therefore, created various expressions in print and presented different proposals to address the digital channels. The lessons learned during the substantive process, are applied to all the expressions. We now offer light solutions as services and support Ushio to transform a product and product philosophy into a service philosophy.

Grrr often helps large corporates and (semi-) public institutions to create and implement solutions for strategic issues. To provide the best possible service in these trajectories, we often cooperate with experts out of our network. For this project we cooperated with SILO Agency.  Would you like to know more? Check out our Kandoor case, an innovation programme we created for a major retirement institution or take a look at the platform we created for the municipality of Amsterdam to help parents deciding which school to chose for their children.