10월 21. 2026

From Visual to Behavioural: Where Product Differentiation Lives Today

By Jarred Evans, Managing Director, PDR

Inspired by observations from IFA Berlin, this article explores how artificial intelligence, connected experiences and evolving user expectations are reshaping where brands create meaningful differentiation.

A visit to IFA Berlin prompted a question that has been occupying my thinking ever since:

If products are becoming increasingly capable, increasingly connected and increasingly similar, where does meaningful differentiation live now?

Walking the exhibition halls, one of the things that struck me was just how high the baseline standard of product design has become. Across category after category, the general standard of form, detailing, materials and manufacturing was remarkably good.

That is clearly progress. But it also creates an interesting challenge.

A lot of products now look remarkably similar.

Within many categories, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish one brand from another through physical form alone. Similar approaches to proportion, materials, colour and detailing appear repeatedly.

This isn't about making products different simply for the sake of standing out. Good design principles still matter enormously. But when the standard of physical design is already so high, and technology itself is increasingly an equaliser rather than a competitive advantage, where does meaningful differentiation come from?

Traditionally, much of the answer has been found in the physical product itself.

Design teams have spent decades developing visual brand languages that help people recognise and distinguish one organisation from another. Form, proportion, materials, finish, colour and detailing all contribute to creating products that feel distinctive and recognisable.

This remains important.

Physical design continues to play a vital role in communicating quality, building trust and creating emotional connection.

Yet physical design alone can no longer carry the full burden of differentiation.

As products become more connected, more digital and more intelligent, the experience extends well beyond the object itself.

The question is no longer simply what a product looks like.

It is how it behaves.

A Different Way to Think About AI

Artificial intelligence was an unavoidable theme across IFA.

There were plenty of screens, plenty of apps and an enormous amount of AI. But I was less convinced by much of the interaction design and broader product experience on show.

Relatively few examples left me feeling that complexity had genuinely disappeared for the person using the product, or that a seamless, enjoyable experience had been placed front and centre.

Much of the conversation surrounding AI understandably focuses on capability. What can AI do? What functionality can it add? What new features can it unlock?

These are important questions.

But a more interesting question may be emerging:

What can AI allow us to remove?

For many years, increased product capability has tended to result in increased interaction.

More functions mean more menus. More connectivity means more setup. More intelligence can mean another app, another account or another interface.

AI potentially gives us the opportunity to reverse some of this.

Perhaps one measure of successful AI product design should actually be how much interface it makes unnecessary.

A good example for me is PLAUD.

The interesting part of the product is not really that AI can transcribe and analyse a conversation. Lots of systems can increasingly do that. What is more interesting from an interaction perspective is how little the user needs to do.

Press a button to capture something that matters. Continue the conversation. Let the intelligence behind the product deal with much of what happens afterwards.

There is something quite important in that.

We have spent several decades designing increasingly sophisticated interfaces to help people control increasingly sophisticated technology. AI may create the opportunity to remove some of those interfaces altogether.

A product that understands context, intent and behaviour should perhaps require less interaction, rather than more.

In this scenario, the value of AI is not necessarily visible through the presence of new functionality.

Instead, it is experienced through the absence of friction.

Fewer menus. Less configuration. Less navigation. Less need to understand how the system itself works.

The most successful AI products may not be those that demonstrate how intelligent they are, but those that quietly remove complexity from our lives.

From Visual Brand Language to Behavioural Brand Language

This idea becomes particularly interesting when viewed through the lens of brand differentiation.

Historically, organisations have invested heavily in creating consistent visual brand languages across product portfolios.

These visual cues help people identify products at a glance. They create coherence across product families and support recognition in crowded markets.

All of that still matters.

But as products become increasingly connected, digital and intelligent, brand identity has to extend beyond the object itself.

It has to exist in behaviour.

In how a product responds. In how easily it connects. In what it asks people to do — and what it doesn't.

In the character of its interaction, how one product hands over to another, and the quality of the app, service or ecosystem surrounding it.

Ultimately, it exists in whether the whole experience feels as though it was designed by the same organisation, with the same values and the same understanding of its users.

Perhaps we now need to become equally deliberate about developing behavioural brand languages as we have been about developing visual ones.

Rather than asking only what our products should look like, we might also ask:

What should interacting with this brand feel like?
What should always be easy?
What should never happen?
How should intelligence behave?
When should a product speak, suggest or intervene — and when should it simply stay out of the way?

These characteristics can become every bit as recognisable as a particular form, colour or piece of detailing. Perhaps more so.

If physical products continue to converge aesthetically, the strongest brands may increasingly be those that create a recognisable way of behaving, rather than simply a recognisable way of looking.

Designing the Whole Experience

This becomes particularly important when we consider that products increasingly exist as part of connected systems, rather than as individual objects.

These wider ecosystems can include apps, accounts, cloud services, subscriptions, other products and now AI.

Users rarely experience these elements in isolation.

Instead, they experience the complete journey.

A product may be beautifully designed, but if onboarding is confusing, connectivity is unreliable or supporting digital services create frustration, the overall experience suffers.

Conversely, products that deliver seamless, intuitive and coherent experiences can create strong competitive advantage, even when competing technologies are similar.

This is where product design, service design, user experience design and brand strategy increasingly intersect.

The challenge is no longer simply to design an object.

The challenge is to design a cohesive experience.

Looking Beyond Technology

One of the most striking observations from IFA was not simply the presence of new technologies, but the growing maturity of existing ones.

As technology becomes more capable and, in many cases, more invisible, differentiation may depend less on the presence of technology itself and more on how thoughtfully it is expressed through the experience.

For me, the bigger design opportunity lies not simply in making products look better or adding more capability, but in making increasingly complex technology feel coherent, useful and genuinely easy to live with.