Vilmar Pellisson – Branding and UX, the new world we're living in

With a remarkable track record of work for agencies part of the WPP, Publicis, Havas, Dentsu, and Accenture groups, and organizations as The Economist, Trivago, and Google, Vilmar Pellisson has recently joined Total Design as a Creative Director, focused on brand experience, human-centered design and lean UX. 

Born and bred in São Paolo, Brazil, he has spent the past two decades working abroad in cities such as Turin, Prague, and London in the last sixteen years. Then he crossed the Channel in 2019 and made Amsterdam his new home. 

“I joined Total Design to strengthen the design strategy team by bridging branding and UX disciplines within the company, introducing a lean methodology into brand development including agile ways of working, workshop facilitation, and collaboration among distributed teams, with particular attention paid to user-centricity in the brand experience domain.”

“There are a few projects over the years that I have worked on which I am proud of. From high-level branding and activation for the likes of Adidas, McDonald’s at the 2012 Olympics, and design systems for the BBC and The Economist, to some personal tech-for-good projects like, NoraCare, a voice user interface for caregivers of dementia patients.  

Other interesting projects include the mobile-web MVPs that I, along with the engineering team in the Trivago Lab, launched in the last two years. Our goal was to combine Trivago’s anonymized user data with third-party geo-located data-points to identify and inspire people to take short vacations. We targeted users at the top of the marketing funnel using social posts and directed them to our mobile applications to find unique, off-the-beaten-track, destinations and points of interest that could easily be reached by car, train, or even bus. In the end, they could book the accommodation with online travel agents via Trivago’s core platform. We aimed for a sustained audience acquisition mechanism to improve the brand experience with new, engaging digital tools. 

Curiously, those ideas turned out to be ahead of the curve in the pandemic context, when local travel has become the most viable holiday option because of the current restrictions.”

UX Design meets Branding

“I see brand experience and user experience as two sides of the same coin. They don’t always see eye-to-eye unless one finger-flicks it. If they are to collaborate, they need to be deliberately brought together because there are differences indeed in method and approach. 

Among several things, UX Design is based on human-centred design and human-computer interaction principles. It has at its core an unrelenting focus on understanding the user needs, ‘jobs-to-get-done’, and pain points, and defining the problem space around these unmet needs, which, in turn, are translated into business opportunities.

Moreover, UX has been intimately connected with digital development. As such, it often uses agile methods, validated learning, and quick feedback loops, necessary to keep up with the speed of technological acceleration. Look at tech incumbents such as Amazon, Booking.com, Facebook, or Google, for example. Each conducts tens of thousands of experiments with users every year. Amazon, which is notorious for its customer obsession, pushes code every 11.6 seconds. That’s the speed of things at the present moment. 

Therefore, as the basis of competition for our clients change, branding needs to change in that direction, too. And I believe that the principles underpinning user experience offer an incredibly potent way to deliver successful outcomes, faster. That’s why, at Total Design, we are giving our creative process a boost by becoming more cross-functional, collaborative, evidence-based, and data-informed.”

The new gold standard

“The future of design depends on the new perspectives of product and brand experience that the new generation of business leaders are bringingTake Airbnb, for example. Its co-founder and CEO, Brian Chesky, who, by the way, has a degree in design, has an interesting, unified view on brand experience. According to him, one of the key attributes for his company’s success is that they combine scientific method with creative process, which enables them to craft and deliver memorable experiences to users at every step of the journey.

Therefore, to best respond to today’s challenges that our clients face, the balance between output (i.e., actual design work) and outcomes (i.e., measurable behavior change) needs to be redressed. I would argue that brand designers can expand their ability to surprise and delight even further by integrating Lean UX and human-centered design principles into their practice and think a bit more like scientists. In practice, that means keeping an open mind and accept that the ideas and solutions we come up with should be framed as assumptions to be tested in the real world and constantly improved. That’s the fundamental attribute of a human-centric approach.

As the Nobel Prize physicist Dr. Richard Feynman once said, “if it disagrees with the experiment, it’s wrong.”