Speaking the Buick language: capturing, understanding, and exploring brand identity with-shape grammars

Developing and maintaining a consistent brand statement is an important aspect of developing a successful product. However, maintaining that statement is difficult due in part to the inconsistent and often insufficient understanding of brand by marketing, engineering, and industrial design. This paper presents shape grammars as a method for encoding the key elements of a brand into a repeatable language, which can be used to generate products consistent with the brand. A detailed investigation into the history of Buick styling reveals the brand characteristics of the front view of Buick vehicles, which are then captured in a shape grammar. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights, reserved.