At our Raising your Game event this March 2018 at Silverstone, we interviewed some leading industry experts around their business challenges, objectives and how important it is for customers to remain relevant. Semcon is an exciting global product development company who work within the automotive, energy, telecommunication and life science industries. They are inspirational in the way they use and consider human behaviour through their product development process to deliver an end product, for the end user.
They are a customer that we all enjoy working with; they conduct levels of research that really can inspire and cause change within our industries. I was keen to understand more from Christian Krapichler, Managing Director at Semcon Engineering UK, about their brand journey; their award-winning brand journey! And how they work towards understanding human behaviour and what the end user truly demands.
Key quotes from Christian:
About Semcon:
“Our philosophy is centred around the human; product development with the human in mind.”
“It is more and more important to keep the end user in mind, which is a trend that we observed in the market,
“Our strapline is ‘Product development based on human behaviour’ because we see that technology has always been driving progress and innovation, but usability and user experience is key to defining quality.”
Brand Journey:
“Our brand journey was centured around putting the human and human behaviour into the focus area.”
“We are very proud of our technology and engineering progress, we have brilliant engineers working for us, and we’re driving technology foward in all different areas, but our branding is following what we see as more and more important, which is putting the human and user-experience in the centre.”
2018 trends:
“Green technology, will impact our buisness in renewable energies. It also impacts automotive, with electrification, hybrid technology, which are a key trend for most of our automotive clients. And we are very exicted to work with alot of the incumbents but also the new entrants into the market.”
“In the automotive industry we are really at a cross roads at the moment, where we are seeing alot of entrants coming into the market with new technologies. The imcumbents sometimes sit back because they know they’ve got a strong foothold and the capability that a new entrant won’t be able to put in place that quickly.”
“We’re seeing new ideas and new buisness models, so everything is really changing at the moment, from the players in the market to the technolioges; it’s more about software, middleware, firmware, it’s computers on wheels!”
“With the the millenials coming onboard, they don’t talk about ownership that much. We saw it in music, I used to buy casette tapes but that ownership has changed now; everything is online streaming – on demand, the same is happening with cars. A car isn’t something that people aspire to own, it’s a mode of transport and you want to have it at your fingertips.”
“10 years ago we used to have a phone to make calls, but that shifted to now having a phone with millions of apps, and calling is just one of the apps. I think the car industry has to think along the same lines, that the transportantion of a car is just one ‘app’.”
Remaining relevant:
“Keep on top of all the technology developments, but also try to drive it, try to be innovative – think outside the box.”
“Push the boundaries, but you have to also keep the end-user in mind.”
Thank you so much to Christian for his time at our event and sharing his insights with us.