What It Means To Be A Design-Led Business
As organizations revamp their strategies from product-first to customer-first, they are quickly learning that some of the tried-and-true principles of design are now critical components of the overall customer experience strategy.
This article is part of CMO.com’s October series about creativity and design-led thinking. Click here for more.
As organizations revamp their strategies from product-first to customer-first, they are quickly learning that some of the tried-and-true principles of design are now critical components of the overall customer experience strategy.
But what does it truly mean, and entail, to be a design-led company? We sifted through our Design & Creativity-themed content from this month to bring you definitions of design thinking from the experts.
Jim Hertzfeld, Principal for Strategy and Innovation, Perficient Digital:
Not limited to design and more inclined to doing rather than thinking, design thinking is a loose federation of methods and tools to help us think differently with our clients about the complex, non-linear, human-centered problems that blanket their customer-driven world.
Andrew Swinand, North American CEO, Leo Burnett:
The idea of design thinking is really about cross-functional expertise. It’s about bringing in people with different backgrounds and different experiences, with the notion that it will lead to more innovative solutions. Bringing cross-disciplined teams together allows an organization to look at problems in unique ways and literally design and craft different solutions.
You can’t be a design-led company and not have your customer front and center. I mean down to interviewing your customers–really spending time with them in their environments–to understand how they use your products and services and understand both where the gaps are and where the friction points exist.
[Design-led companies require] a culture that celebrates iteration and failure and fighting your way to success, rather than demanding that every effort produces immediate results. Design-led cultures understand that finding the right solutions for customers always takes repeated trial and error, and persistence.
Esmee Williams, Vice President, Consumer and Brand Strategy, Allrecipes.com:
Design thinking is really about delivering on that consumer experience, and it really takes in so many different factors. So we, of course, are thinking about kind of the use case and how and why consumers are looking to engage with our brand at any given time.
