Bring on the design! Through cleaver and agile thinking
Experience has come to stay. Brands are starting to wake up and realize their need to control the experience and selling a product is no longer enough. Their need to design the beginning-to-end experience for the consumer. It is no longer about selling the product or the service you provide. You need to deliver a great experience along with your product. This process requires brands to break down the barriers, both organizational and data-wise, and build cross department co-ops. You are no longer competing on having the best product or service, you are competing on having the best agile customer experience created in combination between technology and human interactions.
But how can you do this? To be agile, you need information easy to access, you can no longer hide or stop sharing the information. You need a strong methodology to start the process, I use my framework it creates an empathetic process where there is focus on Engine of the company, the dynamic world and the definition of the brand. It allows decision to be made in context and easy access information and thereby being agile. It allows you to design your consumer experience with respect for what you already have built. Most important it allows you to design in real-time so the experience is authentic, just because you have laid the foundation of information.
- Thinking before acting
The design mindset will change how you are doing things. Whenever you have a decision , you need to think how it fit into the design and overall consumer experience. By design, it will bring brands closer to its own customers and it will create a more agile organization.
Just because it is a new way and the complexity it brings along it can not be done with one department. So you need to include the rest of the company, but you also have to very disciplined in your work. It is always easy to go back to the old ways.
Just to be clear, major brands has already begun this process. It is not singled out to one industry but everywhere from Nike to Nespresso.
- Chaos or order?
If you ever have heard the term MVP (Minimum viable product) then it as properly been connected to software or other development. But now we use it to design the consumer experience. We need to deliver the experience here and now and that somethings mean that the consumer will not experience all of it. It will allow you to adapt and redesign the experience based on the consumers feed. The Grand experience is dead and now the consumer expects micro experience that delivers the overall total experience instead.
Your competitive advantages now come from how you are managing the experience and how fast you can adapt to the next experience.
MVP allows you to deliver an experience based on your insights into consumer behavior and emotions. It will allow you to address what pain points the consumer has in its customer journey. The better you understand the dynamic world the better experience you will create.
In the past, we delivered the hole experience at once with full investment, today we deliver MVP at less investment but in a never-ending process to improve the experience and learn during the design of the experience.
Design thinking is the balance between MVP and full product, but it is also a balance on what cases to build your design. If you focus at the center of your customer group you only get ideal cases, so you need to scale case and design for every point of the scale.
Remember design is not about looking at what you already know and validating what you know. It is about gain new information and validating the state of the dynamic world. I have said it before, stop only using your data as your driver, you need research to separate your brand from others. If you only follow your data, you are properly following your competitor. Data will give you short term sales where research will give you long term loyalty.
- Never stop!
Design thinking is a on going process that never ends. This means you need to create ambassadors in each department to ensure information is shared and kept getting shared. You are no longer alone you are an organization of collaboration and sometimes you need to be stubborn as a mule to get things done.
Experience is at the core of design thinking, but experience and the expectation of experience will keep changing, keep that in mind.
- Organizational issues
Design thinking bring issues. It will be a battle ground because you are changing the power structure of the company and old issue like sales vs marketing will come up again and again.
You are also launching a direct attack on people jobs and habits. When ever change is coming people start to fear for their jobs and position within the company. So, respect the organization and share information, so the organization know what happens.
About Anders:
Anders Holmberg Lange is the Co-Founder of Entername, a company with the core belief that strategy should be simple, understandable and evolving. Designing 360 digital campaigns and leading selected clients from digital transformation to digital excellence in Marketing, business and sales.
Anders has been working with major global brands the last 15 years, taking them from digital transformation to digital strategy to digital excellence and delivering double digits growth rates across the board. He worked in industries like fashion, banking, entertainment and for leisure companies. No matter there were fortune 500 companies or startups, Anders was always building around a gamification approach creating win-win strategies.