Brand Engagement via Open Source
Porsche decided to publish its design system as an Open Source project and found a new form of brand engagement as a splendid side effect.
Faced with the challenges of upholding high-quality design standards across a large group of subsidiaries and a vast partner network, Porsche turned to the power of a component-based design system.
In a case study published at opensource.porsche.com, Marcel Bertram, Specialist Digital Marketing UI/UX at Porsche described the design system:
The Porsche Design System is comparable to a Lego set that offers ready-to-use building blocks (coded and designed components) and a clear manual on how and where to use them. This set allows us to build high-qualitative frontends, ranging from marketing pages to digital applications. By supporting multiple popular frameworks such as React, Angular and Vue, continuously testing for compatibility with a wide range of browsers and creating a growing set of re-usable components, we made a huge step ahead in the industry, which I am still proud of.
Design systems help large organizations such as universities, state governments and corporations like Porsche maintain standards and governance over the sprawl of digital products across their networks.
Our design system unlocks capacities among all Porsche design and development teams that otherwise would have to reinvent the wheel by adapting, implementing, and verifying the design guide on their own – multiplied by all our available teams. We have an extremely high standard regarding quality, performance, and aesthetics for our products. The PDS standardizes our digital products and creates one single system we can collectively optimize.
But Porsche took things one step further, deciding to publish the design system as an Open Source project on GitHub. Porsche wanted to lower the barrier to access of the design system and encourage its use.
Instead of hiding our repositories on an on-premises platform, we made it publicly available, allowing every single team, partner, and supplier to access and use the PDS without any hassle.
The result of the decision to release the project to Open Source? The design system is thriving, with an unexpected side benefit.
We are already receiving the first code changes from individual contributors outside of the Porsche Group. Bringing the Porsche brand to a developer portal such as GitHub is a brilliant side-effect of this move. Our fans and customers can directly connect with us, join a growing community, and experience the Porsche brand in a totally new way.
Open Source as a new form of brand engagement. Interesting.
Is this the next evolution in building brand communities? It's a powerful thing when done well. This 2009 Harvard Business Review article describes the success of Harley-Davidson in the space. It also uses Porsche as an example of once getting it wrong. Porsche enthusiasts rejected the rollout of the Cayenne SUV in 2002 as not a "real Porsche".
The company attempted to mend the rift through a television campaign, complete with roaring engines at a metaphorical starting gate, aimed at demonstrating that the Cayenne was a genuine member of the Porsche family. The entrenched community was not convinced. Positioning the Cayenne as a race car was “a stretch that only delusional Porsche marketers could possibly attempt—and a flat-out insult to every great Porsche sports car that has come before it,” one person wrote on autoextremist.com. Smart managers know that singing around the campfire will not force warring tribes to unite. Communities become stronger by highlighting, not erasing, the boundaries that define them.
It seems Porsche has learned a thing or two a couple decades later.
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Open Source Atlanta's mission is to help support and build the Open Source Software communities in the Atlanta area. We will start with a weekly newsletter focused on Open Source, and we plan to organize regular events including meetups and camps. If you remember the good old days of the Atlanta Drupal Users Group, this place is for you.