Design Thinking: Essentials of brand building

During the 60s and until much 90s, brand was everything. Advertisement cowboys locked themselves up in corner offices on the 30th floor, brainstorming about slogans, taglines, campaigns and other marketing-driven messages. Those ads often were ‘pushed’ onto customers, bombarding people in the streets in all ways possible (“Drink Coca-Cola”, Lucky Strike: “It’s toasted”, etc.). Hardly was there any room for investigating and researching how products would fit in the context of people lives, let alone organize things like co-creation sessions or participatory design (giving people a platform to design themselves, something we see increasingly happening.

Image courtesy: Attic Paper

In today’ era, the power balance seems to have shifted the other way: ‘if you’re not putting your customer first in absolutely everything you do, you’re not doing it right’. All around the world, Design departments are filling up, UX research is the hottest buzz word in new product and service development. Bootcamps, hackathons and prototyping sessions are the de facto way of doing innovation, eulogizing the ‘voice of the customer’ to new heights, making the customer journey to the holy grail in any corporate office.

Conventional marketing wisdom says a brand must engage, an average of 8-11 times, with their target market before they will make a purchasing decision

So the marketing assumptions are –

  • Consumers need to hear about a brand at least 8-11 times before making a purchase decision.
  • The brand must be authentic.
  • The brand must appeal to different experiences.

Design Thinking

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” as correctly highlighted by Tim Brown. Design thinking is a mindset that teams take towards problem-solving. It requires a company’s leadership to make a bold commitment and set up the right conditions for creativity to thrive. It must become your corporate culture. For most businesses, their products or services are about providing a solution to a problem. The end goal is to catapult their brand by creating products, and services that enhance and offer meaningful human experience.

A well-known design thinking model

Most often used model of Design thinking is a circular Venn-diagram with desirability, feasibility and viability as its main pillars.

  • Desirability: what do customers want?
  • Feasibility: how can the experience be realized (technical and process-wise) and
  • Viability: how are we going to make money (or cut costs)

This is a very useful model and I end up using it a lot myself. It serves its purpose and provides three excellent ‘lenses’ to see if your innovation will become successful.

Design thinking “the opportunity”

When breaking into new markets, Good design has proven to be a critical factor. A traditional value proposition is a promise of utility: If you buy a BMW, the automaker promises that you will receive safe and comfortable transportation in a well-designed high-performance vehicle. An emotional value proposition is a promise of feeling: If you buy a BMW, the automaker promises that you will feel pampered, luxurious, and affluent. In design-centric organizations, the focus on great experiences isn’t limited to product designers, marketers, and strategists—it infuses every customer-facing function. In design-centric proposition blends the traditional and emotional promise: of a safe, comfortable, and luxurious ride, with the enhanced customer experience from financing to roadside maintenance to door to door delivery of a dealer car while yours is being serviced.

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