The marketing landscape is no longer a straight line. In an information-overloaded world, the principles of traditional advertising have become white noise. Marketers of today are desperate to do something radically different to get noticed. Enter Design Thinking – a user-centric approach which silently revolutionized industries and is now causing ripples in the marketing arena.
Can Design Thinking really help marketers create a buzz? And more importantly, how do businesses bank on it to stand out amidst the cacophony of the marketplace? This blog looks at how Design Thinking might be re-shaping marketing as we know it. Spoiler alert: it’s all about empathy, experimentation, and flexibility.
Design Thinking started from the area of product design, but nowadays it has spread to other disciplines, one of which is marketing. Like with traditional design thinking applied to products, you’ll need to begin with the needs, pain points, and desires of the customer.
Take a step back and think of the classic marketing funnel—a top-down, linear chain without much space for spontaneity. Design Thinking breaks this up by introducing a flow that does not go in one direction and is constantly feeding into itself. With consumers having attention spans as fleeting as a summer breeze, such adaptability is pure gold.
Design Thinking helps customize content marketing by focusing on customer needs and challenges. The result: customers feel compelled to focus on brand communication because they believe they will get help in solving their problems.
As McKinsey identifies in its 2023 report, 71% of consumers today expect personalization from brands. A design-led marketing approach is the easiest way that businesses can fulfil such a need. It is easier to create experiences uniquely designed for an individual when the product, the marketing strategy as well as the communication are all centred around the customer
Empathy isn’t just a fancy buzzword – it forms the basis for design-led marketing. Understanding, beyond all the demographic information, is critical to actually creating campaigns that are going to resonate on a personal level.
Brands like Nike have leveraged empathy and made it the core of their marketing communications. Almost every campaign coming out of the brand focuses on the challenges and insecurities ordinary humans overcome in their quest for fitness. Nike doesn’t sell shoes; they sell empowerment. That’s how Design Thinking shifted the brand’s focus from product features to the kinds of experiences that build a bond beyond just a transaction.
Once you understand who and what you are talking about, It’s time to move on to strategy ideation. This is where the marketers brainstorm every conceivable solution to marketing problems. In comparison to how traditional marketing processes may have followed a well-tested recipe, Design Thinking encourages rule-breaking.
Strategies based on Design Thinking start with the brand’s macro-level marketing goals and then go on to create micro-level action plans for each goal. The ideation stage often takes inspiration from strategies followed by other industries, strategies that might have failed for another product but which might become a hit with the product at hand, or even big data that might throw up surprising insights on consumer behaviour based on the human psyche.
Human-Centred Design is finally an industry buzzword, as of 2024. More than ever, it makes brands question how they build experiences around customers instead of products. Companies such as Airbnb and Apple are perfecting what’s done with the designing of entire experiences around what users care about, not just what they sell. But whatever experiences marketing teams might design, the real test is in the market
Unlike in traditional marketing, where strategies feel like they’re cast in stone and it’s very difficult to course-correct if it fails to hit the target, you get to try strategic ideas out in the Design Thinking based approach. All you need to do is create a “prototype”- something like a basic working version of the strategy – that people can react to in real time. This translates to less waste and greater potential for hitting on something that resonates well with target audiences.
There’s no better example of prototyping than the success of Spotify’s Discover Weekly. Instead of introducing its new algorithmic format big-bang style, Spotify took it as an opportunity to make it a small-scale test and then iterated based on how well it was received by users. Today, this has become one of Spotify’s best loved features ever, world-wide.
Thanks to the digital age, marketing is no longer the one-way static version that it once was. The roles of experimentation and iteration in marketing ensure that campaigns are always in flux, just as products have become iterative
Imagine launching a campaign, getting some response from a small part of your audience, re-crafting it, and then relaunching, all within weeks. That is how powerful design-driven marketing is -it lets brands change course on the fly and meet their customers wherever they are at the right time.
If you’ve ever heard of Agile Marketing, that’s directly tied to the principles of Design Thinking. Essentially, you are creating strategies and campaigns in short sprints, collecting feedback, and continuously improving. Today, in 2024, most brands are embracing Agile methodologies to keep pace with drastic changes in how their consumers behave.
Another crucial tenet of Design Thinking is collaboration. Most traditional marketing teams use a siloed model – a team of designers on one side, and a team of marketers on the other. Design Thinking advocates cross-functional teams comprising strategists, designers, marketing & branding experts, and data analytics professionals. The take-home here is to use diversity to create holistic, aesthetic, functional and effective strategies.
Patagonia, for example, reflects this spirit of collaboration. Its marketing, product design, and sustainability teams work well together, allowing them to tell authentic stories that reflect their brand values.
Innovation in marketing is happening at light speed, and marketers understand that they have to keep thinking on their feet time and time again to ensure that their strategies are “designed” well keeping the customer in mind. Design Thinking is not a silver bullet, but a mindset and a tool to help marketers navigate changing customer expectations from brands. For example, every touch point in the Tesla customer journey – from product design to customer service – is user-centric and intended to delight users.
Marketing, in 2024 and beyond will not be about “who can shout the loudest,” but “who can listen best.” A structure as provided by Design Thinking, will help to listen to customers, understand them and respond in a way that feels personal and authentic to them.
In today’s extremely competitive marketing world, it is the brand that adapts, iterates, and innovates that will catch their audience’s attention. It is those brands that put Design Thinking at the very heart of strategy, where there is continuous evolution and improvement based on real customer insights, that will shape the future of marketing.
Isn’t that what it all boils down to within marketing?
