Over the last few years we have been working in branding and branding strategy and have followed the thinkers of the day as to how to approach this. People such as Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin have been hugely influential in our thinking. Indeed Seth's notion of permission marketing is a great concept and one we have used to great success on a company level. More recently with the depth of our branding project's becoming more and more about the strategy and how people interact with the brand. It has become interesting to see the marriage between permission marketing and service design. While they are indeed different there are a number of elements that are the same. It will be interesting to see how this develops in the future. Particularly in terms of developments such as apple's app store.

These new platforms are allow for companies such as MUJI to develop new offerings. But what I question is this NPD? is it permission marketing? is it service design? is it branding strategy? in a way it is a bit of all of these. It seems that more and more people/brands will be extending their offer through things such as these apps to give better service that transpires into permission marketing that then transpire into branding values being represented.