How Important is 'Design Thinking' in Creating a Positive Brand Perception?

Some clever designer once said “good graphic design is evidence of managerial competency”. Doubtless the person in question was trying to seal a deal when they penned that but is there any truth in it? Can you put any numbers to it? Or is it just bunkum and we should just stick to comic sans from here on in?

Design thinking is the key to positive brand experiences and perception, be it industrial design, service design or graphic design, design thinking at the heart of your brand can propel your brand to the loftiest heights. Take a look at any of the major brands that you own, they are all deign led, all of them. I kid you know. Whether it is the car you drive, the coffee you drink or the shirt on your back, the brands you admire most, desire most, build your identity with and gift to your nearest and dearest are all design led.

Putting design thinking at the heart of your organisation should never be seen as a nice to have or an additional benefit to add later, design thinking should be a corner stones on which your business is built. There is no product where design thinking will not add an immediate benefit, either in product development or in sales. Every step of your value chain will benefit from design thinking and it will always make your brand stand out vs the competition. 

I don’t take my word for it, the S&P was outpaced by design lead companies 12 to one. By design lead, we mean companies such as Apple, BMW or Nike. These companies are leading brands, not only in their sector, but also by weight of their reputation amongst any when you speak to. These brands have become household names and synonymous with high quality and this didn’t happen by chance. 

Their ascendancy into the top tier of global brands is a result of decades of applied design, thinking. So what is design thinking how can we apply in our businesses?  Design thinking is essentially a strategic framework used to explain a fairly simple process of observation, logical deduction application, testing and reiteration. In the design process, one first understands that there is a challenge to overcome, a product to make better, a situation to improve. One observes the current situation as deeply as one can ideally bye, observing user or customer, interaction and experience, or by becoming a customer yourself and thereby experiencing the situations firsthand.

The next step is to build a model of what an idealised outcome would be for such a situation before testing that model and those ideas, and ultimately your assumptions in a situation as close to the real world as possible. Ideally with real users or customers who do not know they are part of your process. By observing again, how users and customers interact with your assumption based models of the preferred solution. You can further test assumptions to see if they work as well as you assumed oh, as is often the case, you learn how far you were removed from reality.

And this is where the iterative phase kicks in and you remodel based on your assumptions and retest with new models and your approaches. Typical approaches by leading brands like Google is to stay in what they call constant beta. The product is never released as a finish product, but as a work in progress to be constantly refined by use of data That is collected by the development team and re-applied to the constant development that is constantly redeployed via updates that are permanently turned on.

The approach try permanent beta works fine for software-based brands, but for anyone based in the real world of things with substance and materiality, the iterative face can be expensive and slow to iterate. Many of the challenges faced in iterative design phases is how to ensure progress versus ensuring voices are listened to. How do you ensure democratic input, which can inherently slow down project progress, but can be preferred to a more dictatorial approach. 

Quite often rapid progress is made by teams led bye visionary project champions who can cut through the endless meeting chatter and ensure the best ideas are pushed forward. This approach is inherently undemocratic and it can lead to some of the best breakthroughs in product delivery. Mavens like Steve Jobs was arguably so successful because they did not have to bow to a crowd or a committee, but could cut through a jibber jabber and insure not any progress happened at the right progress happened.

There are several key steps to creating a design-led outcome. 

1. Get empathetic with your users – understand who they are and what their frustrations are that you think your can solve for them
2. Create a fast, simple model of your project or product – don’t hand around, work fast and cheap until you have something you can test in the real world with your users
3. Test the design with your audience – closely observe how they work with your product, learn what you did right but most importantly, get the bad news about your failures quickly
4. Learn what is required to improve and feed this learning back into a brief for a new, iteration of your model (point 2)
5. Return to point 3 and loop from there to here as often as you need, until you’re happy your model is ready for the market
6. Go to market

So what now?

You now have your go-to-market model and it will get you access to a wider audience. The faster you can get here the better your chances of success. In the market you will really learn some lessons that are essential to developing your product and growing your market share.