By Anne Evenson
Creating value-driven experiences for consumers today can be a challenge. Here are some tips to implement design thinking in your marketing strategy to increase effectiveness.
“Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.”
Clare Muscutt, founder and CEO of Women in CX
Maintaining consumer engagement is an uphill battle for marketers today. Building brand awareness isn’t enough on its own anymore. Companies must create value-driven experiences to differentiate themselves from their competitors. From first impression to awareness to consideration to final purchase and utilization, the product or service life cycle must inform, enlighten, engage and delight. Any break in this cycle and the opportunity to strengthen brand loyalty is lost, and a company’s customers will quickly abandon them.
But how do marketers create these robust value-driven experiences? You can start by taking a cue from designers. Integrating design thinking into your marketing strategy will provide the following:
- A fresh approach to understanding your customers.
- A method to develop and test new tactics.
- A way to create intuitive—and even enjoyable—experiences.
Let’s look at how you can discover and implement innovative design solutions to create a more potent, effective marketing strategy.
Design Thinking Defined
Design thinking is an ideology and a process that uses a human-centric approach to drive innovation. Designers use this ideation method to identify creative solutions based on user-specific experiences rather than focusing solely on the problem.
The essence of design thinking is about the person, or people, behind the problem and the solution. Whether a product or service, this philosophy encourages designers to carefully consider the end user’s needs, desires and behavior. Design thinking helps them to challenge assumptions and implications to create practical solutions to meet user requirements. The continuous experimentation involved in this methodology is especially beneficial for addressing ill-defined or unknown challenges.
People in various design roles use design thinking, including graphic, industrial and product designers. You’ve likely recently heard a lot about UI (user interface) or UX (user experience) design. UI design relates to the touchpoints (screens, buttons, icons, toggles, fonts, colors and animations, to name a few) a person uses to engage with a digital product like a website, app or electronic device. UX design refers to how users feel when interacting with a product or service. UX and UI designers use design thinking across all industries to create original, user-focused products and services, like self-service kiosks, audio touchscreens, appliances, apps and websites. They aim to continually improve the usability and accessibility of the product or service. As marketers, you must understand these design concepts as your management or leadership will likely direct you to work with these designers or even perform some of this work yourself.
Of course, design thinking is for more than just designers. Numerous companies have used it to develop groundbreaking solutions to unique challenges. Netflix is a fantastic example of a brand that’s capitalized on design thinking time after time to become the streaming juggernaut we know today.
When they first launched their website in 1998, Netflix’s primary competition was Blockbuster, which required customers to visit their physical stores to rent and return DVDs which was a significant pain point. So, Netflix looked at ways to remove this inconvenience for their customers. They understood that by delivering DVDs directly to their customers’ homes via a subscription model, they could take over a significant amount of the market share. When Netflix realized that DVDs were becoming obsolete, they adapted their delivery strategy again by creating an on-demand streaming service in 2007. In 2011, Netflix used design thinking to respond to consumer demand for original, compelling content that traditional networks weren’t broadcasting. Then again, in 2016, it enhanced user experience by adding trailers to its interface. Each of Netflix’s principal upgrades successfully responded to consumer needs and desires using a practical and effective design thinking process.
How Design Thinking Improves Your Marketing Strategy
This unique solution-based approach to problem-solving fosters innovative results, creates new opportunities and allows marketers to develop ideas by expanding their perspective and challenging assumptions. Marketers in any sector or industry can use design thinking to enhance marketing tactics like content creation, website user experience, branding and visual communication.
Helps Produce Compelling Content
Robust and compelling content is the cornerstone of successful marketing campaigns, but many brands need help engaging their target audience with meaningful messaging. This can be particularly challenging for startups and small businesses who may need more resources to generate original, appealing emails, newsletters, videos, podcasts, blogs and social media posts.
Marketers and content creators can use design thinking to empathize and understand who their customers are and what’s important to them. They can use this information to tell a story about their product or service that helps customers understand its value and why they should care about it. Design thinking helps marketers align their messaging with customer values and create informative and compelling content that benefits their customers.
Improves Website User Experience
All the best content in the world will only matter if a brand’s website offers a positive user experience. We’ve all encountered bad websites. They’re often cluttered and difficult to navigate, with poorly structured links and hidden navigation. Other hallmarks include non-responsive design, excessive text, inconsistent fonts and a lack of contrasting or complimentary colors. Poor user experiences on a website have high bounce and exit rates, slow loading speed, low functionality and users unable to engage with content.
By offering more user behavior information, design thinking helps marketers understand their website’s user experience more thoroughly than traditional market research. Successful user interaction includes knowing what consumers expect from their online experiences. Rather than simply measuring what users do and how often they do it, marketers must also understand why people make certain choices on a website.
Harnesses Emotional Branding Strategies
Studies show that humans make most decisions based on emotion rather than logic or reason. These behaviors are primarily non-conscious, and savvy marketers know and act on them. Have you ever heard someone say, “Wow, that ASPCA commercial about preventing animal cruelty with the Sarah McLachlan song “Angel” hit me right in the feels! Now I want to donate all my money and adopt all the cats and dogs!” That’s a terrific example of a successful emotional marketing effort.
These emotional branding strategies influence consumers more profoundly because they are meaningful to them. A big part of design thinking relies on empathizing with a particular audience so marketers can identify how customers think, feel and act. Understanding what drives people’s emotions and motivations helps companies create products and services that resonate with their consumers, increasing engagement and fostering brand loyalty.
Creates Better Visual Communication Components
According to Dr. David Williams, Professor of Medical Optics and Director of the Center for Visual Science at the University of Rochester, “More than 50 percent of the cortex, the surface of the brain, is devoted to processing visual information.” Humans are wired to recognize and respond to visual imagery, and a large part of effective visual communication relies heavily on graphic design components like shapes, forms, textures, space, symbols, imagery, colors typography.
Design thinking is essential to creating powerful, visually compelling elements like images, videos, graphics and interactive content for marketing collateral like logos, branding materials, emails, infographics and social media. Using an empathic approach, ideation and iteration, marketers can collaborate creatively with graphic designers to develop a graphic design strategy that makes a strong visual impact, stands out from the competition and appeals to their target audience.
Stay tuned for part two of this blog post, where we’ll discuss how to apply design thinking to your marketing tactics and how it benefits your marketing team!
Anne Evenson is a native Austinite and a proud Veteran’s spouse with over 20 years of marketing, communications and program coordination experience in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. She is also a sculptor, jeweler and all-around dabbler in the arts and loves to help military-connected individuals discover their inner creativity.
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