By Anne Evenson
Design thinking can help strengthen marketing strategies and create valuable experiences for customers. Learn how to apply this into your own strategy and drive business success.
“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.”
Tim Brown, executive chair of IDEO
In part one of this blog post, we defined design thinking. Then we discussed how it could help marketers produce compelling content, improve user experience, harness emotional branding tactics and create powerful visual communication components. Now let’s look at how design thinking benefits your marketing team and how you can apply it to your marketing tactics.
The Benefits of Design Thinking
Promotes Innovation
Design thinking encourages marketers to develop and evaluate new messaging strategies to meet customers’ unmet or unspoken needs that they can apply to any product or service.
Increases Customer Engagement & Brand Recognition
By empathizing with users, marketers can develop campaigns that resonate with their audience leading to higher engagement rates and increased brand recognition and loyalty.
Helps Marketers Make More Informed Decisions
Marketers who use design thinking rely on customer insights from real-world consumer tests, not just market research or historical data.
Improves Internal Processes
Design thinking inspires a culture of collaboration, exploration and experimentation which allows marketing teams to stay flexible and prepare for any changes in the priorities or direction of their marketing campaign.
Increases Productivity
Marketers can use design thinking to identify problems early on and innovate creative solutions, which increases their team’s efficiency and elevates the customer experience.
How to Apply Design Thinking to Your Marketing Tactics
Design thinking is instrumental to marketing and branding because it helps marketers thoroughly understand their customers and what they need and want from a company’s products and services. This iterative and non-linear process comprises five stages. The primary goal is to enable you to work dynamically to develop and initiate innovative ideas.
Empathize
When you empathize with your consumer, you gain insights into the people you designed your products and services for. Rather than throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, try carefully observing your target audience to understand what resonates with them and motivates them to action. This tactic is vital to developing more relevant and effective marketing strategies. There are three stages of empathy you can use to relate to your customers:
- Cognitive Empathy: You become aware of your customer’s emotional state by conducting audience research and listening intently. Use consumer surveys to collect information about how your customers feel about your brand. Dig deep into your metrics and analytics to build a detailed picture of their behavior resulting from your marketing tactics.
- Emotional Empathy: You engage with your customers to share their emotions. Remember the emotional branding strategies we talked about in part one of this blog? This is the stage where you can put those messages into practice to meet your audience on their level. You don’t need them to act just yet but instead notice your messaging, hopefully, because it’s meaningful to them.
- Compassionate Empathy: You or your audience take action to offer support. In this stage, you’re acting or encouraging your customers to act in a specific way. For example, perhaps you’ve created a career planning workbook to help your audience plot their professional future, or you’re asking them to watch a video on your Instagram feed that details your product or service.
Walking in your customer’s shoes will help you gain a new perspective on their challenges. You can use empathy to craft targeted messages that speak directly to your customer’s needs and desires and more accurately predict and guide their behaviors.
Design
Your marketing efforts will succeed more if aligned with your customer’s experience. Clarifying the problems your customers face helps you understand their anxieties, frustrations, hopes and feelings, which allows you to form better solutions. Try addressing any pain points they come up against either in their daily lives or with your product or service. Check out comments on your social media pages, Google reviews or threads on Reddit complaining about your product or service. Try to listen without prejudice and understand their perspective. Why are they upset? What problems are they facing that your brand can help with? If your brand is the problem, how can you fix it and improve things?
For example, many people dislike the entire clothes shopping experience, from visiting multiple stores, checking out the latest styles, trying them on, and waiting in line to purchase them. Stitch Fix understands precisely what this target market is looking for—a hassle-free way to acquire apparel that fits looks cohesive, and is trending. They begin by getting to know their customers via a survey where they discover style and color preferences, favorite brands and budget. Their stylists curate ensembles for each customer to try, and they can easily buy or return the items without a subscription.
Ideate
Collaborate with a diverse group of marketing and branding experts with various experiences, perspectives and skills to develop solutions for the problems you defined. Remember to adopt the unique views of your customers to truly innovate rather than simply making modest changes to your current marketing strategy. Brainstorming is all about creativity and innovation, so remove the boundaries and allow your team the creative leeway to think way outside the box. Consider every idea, no matter how outlandish, then assess each suggestion for viability within your marketing strategy.
Consider the satirical commercials offering advice to young homeowners on how not to become their parents by Progressive Insurance. In 2015, Progressive’s chief marketing officer, Jeff Charney, was searching for a new marketing campaign idea related to the stages of human life. He came across the theory of parental introjection—the internalization of the traits of our parents, the people we’re around the earliest and most often. After meeting with behavioral scientists and psychology researchers, “We found that there was a ‘grown-up switch’ that everybody has, and nobody had really mined when that switch turned on,” Charney said. The self-awareness of one’s adulthood seemed to be when people started becoming their parents. “We [initially] thought it was when people had kids,” he said. “But we found out it was when they buy homes.” Progressive began the “parentamorphosis” campaign, which first debuted in 2016. Eventually, the commercials would evolve to focus on the character of Dr. Rick, a tough-love Dr. Phil-type therapist helping Millennials and Gen-Xers to “unbecome their parents.”
Prototype
Design thinking decreases the uncertainty and risk of innovation by inviting users to test prototypes to iterate and refine marketing tactics. You can prototype marketing tactics like slogans, landing pages, marketing emails, social media ads and even print pieces. Roll out your marketing collateral in a limited release so you can test and iterate to polish your ideas and improve and enhance the customer experience. Prototyping is essential to helping you understand what works and doesn’t work with various marketing tactics.
Test
Testing is critically important to the design thinking process because it allows you to develop your ideas further using customer feedback. Test your prototype with your target audience using surveys, focus groups, audience viewing and other quantitative and qualitative analysis. McKinsey reports, “the best results come from constantly blending user research –quantitative (such as conjoint analysis) and qualitative (such as ethnographic interviews)” with market analytics. You can use this feedback to refine your marketing efforts before you launch them into the public sphere.
Iterate
Each time you empathize, define, prototype and test, you gather fresh observations, ask new questions and test innovative ideas. Rinse and repeat each phase to refine and improve your marketing and branding strategies. This iterative part of the design thinking process will help you continually create excellent customer experiences.
Consumers are becoming more knowledgeable and savvy every day. Marketers who think like designers have the tools to optimize their marketing strategies accordingly and provide customers with innovative, user-centric experiences that will keep them coming back time after time!
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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