7 Reasons Why Design Helps You Achieve Better Business Results

1) Consumers go for experiences. Brands need to design compelling experiences that engage and connect with tribes. A sound Design Strategy helps you to achieve this.
2) We live in the age of design. Consumers today appreciate the heart and soul behind intelligent, emotive designs. They are willing to part good money for good designs. Your margins increase.
3) Great design sustains both the brand and business. Good design allows a brand to achieve breakthrough growth and market share. Apple designed the iPhone and reaped in billions. One single model.
4) Design communicates your brand value with high impact.
5) Design thinking allows you to innovate outside your business constraints.
6) It allows you to differentiate and gain greater competitive edge over your competitors.
7) A design-centered culture inspires people to work for you. Talents are attracted to innovation.

Please leave your comments, if any. iPhone image taken from Apple website.

The meanings behind

Saturday was another COPE Saturation visitation to Toa Payoh households and dropping leaflets door-to-door. We are informing the elderly of an up-coming CNY activity. Saturations are labour intensive and time consuming. It involves patience and leg power (not every floor has a lift stop). We want to inform all elderly living across 12 HDB blocks.

Saturations also allow me to observe many gates and doors of HDB households. Yesterday brought me to the doorsteps of about 210 households. From the months of Saturations I have done, a total count of about 1500. None really stood out in their designs but I made some interesting observations.

Each of these gates represent a variety of different design patterns, materials and shapes. What draws me to them are the different modifications that majority of owners made to their doors and gates. For example, one would attach plastic panels at the bottom third of their gate to keep dirt out. Another would use a mesh to keep the pet dog from getting too adventurous. Another plastered the entire gate with clear plastic panels to keep flyer distributors like me out.

What I found was that each of these owners have attached different personal meaning(s) to their gates. The variations are rather astonishing. Their chosen and after sale modifications reflected their own taste, culture, religion and personal messages.

As a consultant, who is advising my clients on their brands and products, this is the exact perspective of attaching meanings to products which I would like my clients to position their offerings. A milk brand should not be just claiming it has high calcium and low fat (like everyone else). Perhaps a graceful way of aging?

The challenge I pose to gates and door manufacturers, does your design brief specifies 'salient' constraints like corrosion-free, stainless steel and 5 years warranty? Or are you looking at meanings that represent culture, family security, comfort and longevity etc? If it is the latter, you will have designed them quite differently. Also, be able to innovate new designs that differentiate yourself from competitors.

Please leave your comments, if any.

Market Research versus Brand Research

Many of my clients are confused over the two, and when to use these services. There are numerous Market Research firms out there that offer market research services that guide and inform clients to make the best decisions. Most of the time, solutions are not provided; recommendations, at most.

Brand Research is more specialised and focused – mainly, qualitative measures to achieve the desired depth, and it is the understanding of how tribes (or potential ones) perceive brands. The Brand Strategist will then use these insights to craft brand-positioning strategies. In this case, the Brand Strategist comes out with a solution for the client. Action-ability is the essence of brand research; it is engineered for a solution.

Be it a Brand Book or even a Design Brief to architect a new brand experience, the brand researcher needs to have an exploratory mindset when designing the research study; and later on for formulating recommendations. As such, a brand researcher needs to engage his exploratory and integrative mindset more than a typical market researcher who analyzes and reports findings. If we argue about who provides more value, it really depends on what a client is really after: to inform or to invent?

Please leave your comments, if any. Thank you Enrico for your editorial inputs. Much appreciated.