Defining ‘Design Thinking’ and Why It’s Important to Your Brand

Explore this essential marketing tool and how it can help you capture your audience’s attention and increase sales.

How well do you know your customer–I mean really know your customer? Have you ever considered that you could be wrong in those assumptions?

That’s the premise of “design thinking,” a method used by the world’s most innovative brands to understand what customers want, often before the customer is even aware of that desire.

Design thinking helps you to strip away any ego associated with your product or service’s intentions and fully empathize with the end-user. This process is accomplished by first questioning the customer’s problem, questioning any assumptions, and then questioning those implications. Ideally, key insights about core functions are revealed along the way.

For example: you are a mid-career director of widgets. You know everything there is to know about widgets and you could talk for hours about being a certified widget expert. You decide to start a consulting firm for managing widgets, selling your services to other businesses in need of widgets. 

The unseen problem is that your ideal customer is an expert in his field, but has zero interest in widgets. Just like you, he is accustomed to being informed and correct and bristles at the suggestion that he needs widgets. Rather than convey the risk in layman’s terms and propose an easy solution, you start from the assumption that your customer should understand technical widget jargon. Feeling foolish and overwhelmed, the target customer goes elsewhere for his widgets.

A design thinking process would reveal that there is a large gap of understanding about widgets, which needs to be bridged before converting a sale. It would have revealed deeper insights about the customer’s background and how to lead with empathy. An approach informed by the design thinking process could have produced a fruitful widget partnership.

How can you prevent this from happening?

Hire a Marketing Agency That Can Find (and Research) Your Target Audience

At KLR Agency, we’re ready to embark on a design thinking journey with you and your team. Our team of messaging experts can facilitate an honest discussion that combines the best aspects of intuition and data, grounding any assumption in the humanity of your customers. We’ll help you audit your process, re-frame the problem and value proposition, brainstorm solutions, prototype and test.

The best part of design thinking is that it changes not just the way you approach marketing and sales, but your entire company culture. That’s why it has been used by Apple, Google, Samsung and others, and is considered core curriculum at Ivy League business schools.

KLR is more than just a Connecticut marketing agency. We can help businesses small and large with brand strategy, provide SEO services, consult on social media marketing, video production, creative services and more. Contact our team to discuss your business goals and explore how we can help you better understand your customers and how to reach them.