---
title: "Color, material and finish research for a consumer technology brand | antedote"
description: "Design research for a consumer technology company: ethnography, semiotics and a sprint with buyers, turning brand attributes into color, material and finish guidance."
url: "https://antedote.com/explore-our-work/setting-color-material-and-finish-principles/"
author: "antedote"
---

# Setting color, material and finish principles for a product range

A consumer technology company’s design team was refreshing a range of accessories, and wanted to know how color, material and finish shape what buyers believe about it. We worked with its designers to turn the brand’s attributes into design guidance.

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**Client**
Consumer technology company

**Industry**
Consumer technology

**Kind of work**
Consumer understanding

**Our role**
Ethnography, semiotics and a design sprint with buyers, alongside the client’s designers

## The question

Words like premium mean different things to the people who buy a product, and the design team needed to know which colors, materials and finishes would make each of the brand’s attributes, sustainability among them, something buyers could see and feel.

The guidance had to be practical enough to design from, and grounded in what buyers notice.

## Our approach

We started with online ethnography and a cultural and semiotic reading of the category, then held a working session after which the client’s designers built a bank of stimulus for each attribute.

A week of face-to-face interviews and small groups put that stimulus in front of buyers, first led by them and then by attribute, with a working session with the design team at the end of each day.

## What the team came away with

Principles that cut across the range, and color, material and finish guidelines for each brand attribute, built with the designers who would use them.

Because the designers had made the stimulus, the guidance came back in their own visual language.

## Related work

[View consumer understanding case studies](https://antedote.com/explore-our-work/?work=Consumer%20understanding#library)

- Consumer technology

    ### [Rebuilding support around what customers need](https://antedote.com/explore-our-work/support-built-around-what-customers-need/)

    The company’s own team built its support plans on the research, then took the work into its global customer experience strategy. It was one of several programs the company commissioned from us.

- Enterprise technology

    ### [Getting to know everyone behind an enterprise technology purchase](https://antedote.com/explore-our-work/researching-enterprise-technology-buyers/)

    The company has commissioned new work from us every year since the program began, and a proposition we explored with it later launched publicly.

**What we do**
[Strategic research](https://antedote.com/what-we-do/strategic-research/)

**The thinking behind this**
- [Your product is only part of what the customer is judging](https://antedote.com/thinking/what-customers-judge-in-product-research/)

## Want to understand your customers better?

Bring the question, and we’ll talk through where to begin.

[Talk to us](https://antedote.com/talk-to-us/) · [hello@antedote.com](mailto:hello@antedote.com)

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