Archive for the 'Steal this Idea' Category
The Design Well
When you apply the design process both deeply and broadly, you can create rich brand experiences that turn customers into believers. The trick is to do what Shakespeare did in creating his plays. By designing entertainment products that worked on multiple levels, he was able to increase not only the number of customers but also their satisfaction, so they came back again and again. Here’s a diagram called the design well that will help your visualize how your company is understood by its various audiences.
The top of the design well visualizes your company as a set of concentric rings. It starts with vision at the core of the company and ripples outward through identity, culture, products, and brand – the place where your company touches customers. Each of these rings presents a design challenge, and it’s important to design a clear alignment from the inside to the outside. If there’s a disconnect between vision and brand, for example, your brand will be seen as muddled, inauthentic, or even suspect.
Alignment across the top of the well can be addressed through an organizational understanding of brand, plus the structures and processes needed to enable it. My books The Brand Gap, Zag, and The Designful Company will give you a better grasp of brand alignment.
The side of the design well shows the range of levels at which your audience can encounter your company. The shallowest level, at the top, is perception – the surface of human experience, including what we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste.
The next level down is reason, the logical processes we use to make sense of products, services, companies, and communications.
Going deeper into the well we find emotion, the feelings that drive many of our decisions, including those that are hidden beneath our reason.
Below the level of emotion is resonance, which gives us the intuition that a relationship with a given company, product, or offer is “right” for us.
At the deepest part of the well is ideology, the tribal connection we feel with a brand – the deep knowledge that we “belong” to a company or brand.
When you touch people at more than one level, you not only deepen their experience, but you reach a wider audience, since people vary in their sensitivity to each type of experience.
Designing deeply cannot be achieved through organization mandate. It can only come through the personal mastery of the designers doing the work. While Shakespeare was a great collaborator, it was his personal vision and skill that gave his plays – and his business – the richness and authenticity that created a legend. Download slide set.
6 commentsOrganic Drivetrain
In a survey by Liquid Agency (formerly Neutron) and Stanford University, 1500 business leaders were asked to rank their top ten biggest problems. Their number-one problem? “Balancing long-term goals with short-term demands.” In large corporations, the phrase “short-term demands” is code for “shareholder demands.”
The solution to this conundrum is sustainable earnings. A CEO who can deliver solid shareholder returns quarter after quarter can afford the luxury of pursuing a long-term vision.
When you ask any CEO what keeps him or her up at night, the answer is usually shareholder value. And when you ask what drives shareholder value, the answer is usually earnings growth. But what drives earnings growth? Innovation, of course! Okay, but what drives innovation? Working backwards, the engine for non-stop innovation is company culture. It takes a culture of innovation to turn innovation into a core competency, so that successful new businesses, products, and services, are more than a matter of chance. But what drives culture? The answer here is company vision.
Without a bold, beguiling vision, there’s no rallying point for culture.
These links represent a drivetrain for organic growth. If you want sustainable earnings at the back end, you need to invest in the links at the front end—vision, culture, and innovation. These are the investments that can generate profits year after year, not just quarter after quarter. Download slide set.
Ladder of Design Leverage
Design—and design thinking—are powerful processes that are now getting more traction in management circles. While it’s well understood that design can be used to improve products and communications, it’s less understood that it can be used to craft services, customer experiences, internal processes, organizational structures, strategic decisions, and business models.
If designing is the process of “changing an existing situation into an improved one,” as Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon defined it, then the higher up the ladder design is employed, the greater the return on investment. Using Simon’s definition, anyone in the company can be a designer, even the CEO.
Here’s an elegant slide, excerpted from The Designful Company, that illustrates the hierarchy of design leverage. Download slide.
Knowing. Making. Doing.
As I said in my book The Designful Company, if you want to innovate, you have to design. Yet design is a foreign language to most business managers. This is because the principles of traditional business management principles evolved to serve the needs of the industrial age. They rely on a mechanical two-step process for making decisions: knowing and doing. You “know” something—from a past experience, a case study, or a best practice—and then you “do” something.
The problem with this process is that what you “know” is limited to either “what is” or “what was,” while innovation is all about “what could be.” It’s impossible to know what could be without the process of design. To generate new ideas, the design process inserts a middle step: making.
Through the act of prototyping—using sketches, models, maps, mockups, simulations—the “making” step puts options on the table that weren’t there before. It pushes back on what we think we know, and also changes what we’re likely to do. It shifts the emphasis from “deciding” the future to “designing” the future. In a business climate that requires perpetual innovation, industrial-age thinking is useful, but woefully inadequate. We also need design thinking.Here’s a simple pair of slides you can throw into your presentations when you build a case for a more innovative culture. Download slides.
14 commentsSteal This Idea: Culture Quiz
Culture Quiz
By Marty Neumeier, author of The Designful Company
Transformation is in the air. Business leaders across industries are recognizing that “old school” management isn’t up to the task of nonstop innovation. As a result, companies that were once run from the top down are steadily shifting to a more networked style of management in which employees and customers play a greater role in driving innovation. Networked cultures tend to be more creative, more agile, and better able to anticipate the needs of customers.
How do you create a culture of innovation? By recognizing one simple fact: If you want to innovate, you’ve got to design. Design and design thinking are the tools that create new products, new services, new business models, new markets, and new industries. The best way to leverage innovation—as outlined in my latest book—is to build a “designful company”. (Buy the book.)
To find out where you are on the culture curve, take this simple test: Share a total of 10 points across each of the 10 pairs below. For example, if your company is more siloed than collaborative, you might score it 6 and 4. When you’ve finished, add up the two columns to measure your progress. If your totals come out to 60 and 40, for example, you could say that you’re 40% along the path to an innovative culture.
The Innovation Funnel
The Innovation Funnel
by Marty Neumeier, author of The Designful Company
The biggest hurdle to innovation is the corporate longing for certainty about costs, market size, revenues, profits, and other quantities, all of which can’t be known when an idea is new. Ironically, there seems to be no hurdle to investing in dying businesses, decaying strategies, and shrinking markets, all of which can be seen without a crystal ball. It seems we prefer the devil we know.
The best way to get around the devil—and all his advocates—is to allow the company to crank up its confidence stage by stage. Luckily, there’s already a workable model for this process: stage-gate investing. It was pioneered by oil entrepreneurs who lacked certainty about which wells would produce black gold and which would fizzle. It was further developed by venture capitalists who lacked certainty about how trends, markets, and people would combine to produce profits.
There are four funding stages in this process:
With stage-gate investing, an idea is vetted stage by stage using a kind of natural selection, so that big bets are only made after the idea has been largely de-risked.
Stage-gate investing works best when you have a portfolio of innovations in the pipeline. The vetting process then acts a filtration system that separates the great ideas from those that are underpowered, short-sighted, unstrategic, or off-brand. It creates an innovation funnel that lets you vet new concepts step by step, reducing the fear of failure at each step.
Here’s a simple tool that will help you and your team remove the risk from risky projects.
5 commentsBusiness Resolutions
Business Resolutions
by Marty Neumeier, author of The Designful Company
If you’re just hoping to “get through” this year’s financial crisis, you may be missing the bigger picture. The financial crisis is merely the final score of a game we’ve been playing for over a century—it’s called Free-market Capitalism. The game is officially over, and a new game is beginning.
What’s the new game? There’s no name for it yet, but we’ve been describing the rules in our books and blasts for more than five years. It’s a game that rewards radical differentiation, that requires creative collaboration, and that results in nonstop innovation. Winners will be those who can think and act in new ways to create sustainable value for broad groups of people.
Here are ten New Year’s resolutions, linked to our previous Steal This Idea e-mail blasts.
Business Resolutions for 2009
Brand Thinking
Thinking Is Free
by Marty Neumeier, author of The Designful Company
The stock market is spiraling downwards. Large institutions are looking for handouts. Corporations are cutting head counts. Budgets are slashed to the bone. Time to huddle in the basement?
Not if you want to thrive in the next economy.
If your strategy for surviving the recession is to hunker down and try harder, you don’t have a strategy. You have a bomb shelter. And a bomb shelter won’t save you from the fundamental changes shaking the business world—namely, unprecedented speed and overwhelming choice. When customers have nearly unlimited options and competitors play a perpetual game of leapfrog, the only real barrier to competition is brand strategy.
Brand strategy is really just a way of thinking about business. And since thinking is virtually free, it requires little in the way of special funding. Here are four questions to help you work through the recession, along with a simple chart to start the conversation among your team.
1. What makes you different?
The active ingredient in any brand is differentiation. If it’s not different, it’s not strategic. What can you do to increase your difference? How can you make your difference more meaningful and compelling?
2. How well are you focused?
Without focus, customers will have a hard time seeing your difference. What makes you the “only” in your category? Which of your offerings best support your difference? Which should be cut to make your focus stronger? What new offerings could be added as you pick up momentum?
3. What trend are you riding?
Tomorrow’s economy will create new trends. What wave are you riding? Is it a wave that’s still forming, or one that’s already crashed on the shore? Is it possible to ride more than one trend at a time? What new trends are barely visible yet inevitable?
4. Are you communicating clearly?
Good strategy paired with poor messaging is no better than poor strategy. What messages are your various constituents hearing from you? Do all your brand stories add up to one big story? Is your big story clear enough and bold enough to earn a place in their minds?
If you can respond to these four questions in a compelling manner, you’ll not only survive the recession, but be in a stronger market position when the dust settles. All it takes is the right kind of thinking.
No commentsB2B Branding
B2B Branding
by Marty Neumeier, author of The Designful Company
These days it’s easy to explain branding—just cite Apple or BMW and people get it. But what about companies that don’t sell sexy consumer products—what does good branding look like to them?
Skeptics abound when it comes to the usefulness of brand in B2B and service industries. To help make the case we’ve put together a tool to explain the critical differences between companies when it comes to branding—from the most visible (B2Cs selling products) to the most elusive (B2Bs selling services).
The tool is a chart divided into four quadrants, one for each company type. Regardless of where your company lands, you’ll need to grapple with the answer to these questions: Who do your customers trust, and should your principal branding efforts be visible or invisible?
Let’s start with trust.
The importance of trust in branding is laid out in Marty Neumeier’s first book, The Brand Gap. He explains that the degree to which a customer trusts a product (or company making that product) determines if she buys it or a competitor’s offering. The same principle is true if a company sells services—but here it’s the people offering that service who must earn the customer’s trust.
For example: If I want someone to help me invest money, Charles Schwab might be a good choice. From what I’ve seen and heard, they seem like an investment brokerage that could help me make good decisions. But in order for me to choose them (and not their competitor), I must trust the individuals who will be advising me, not just the company.
Will advertising be the best use of my marketing budget? Not if you’re a B2B. Let’s look at the power of invisible branding.
B2B companies in particular have been slow to join the rest of the business world in appreciating the untapped value of brand. Why? Because branding efforts that are most effective for B2Bs are invisible. Execs don’t see the importance because, well, they can’t see them.
Invisible branding includes items like the CEO’s vision, employee training, pricing strategy, customer relationships, and sales force communications. This list could go on for days and every item—let me be clear—every item is part of a company’s brand.
You can read more in the previous article, Invisible Branding.
Now that you can illustrate the critical differences companies must consider in branding, download the tool and the next time a manager poo-poos branding at your B2B firm, explain the difference between their perception of what branding is, and the reality of why you wouldn’t survive without your customers’ trust and your CEO’s vision.
No commentsIn-house Design, Pt 2
The Power of In-house, part 2: Thought Leadership
by Marty Neumeier, author of ZAG
Most corporations generate a steady stream of designed artifacts—products, print communications, websites, advertising, manuals, financial reports, signage, retail environments, packaging, trade show exhibits—the “posters and toasters” of 20th-century commerce. When you add the growing list of emerging opportunities—customer experience, service planning, decision design, strategy mapping, and culture development—you begin to appreciate the need for strong design management.
In part 1 of “The Power of In-house,” our advice was to re-imagine the internal design department as an independent studio, fostering skills that rival those of external firms. Yet as valuable as design skills can be, the in-house team can make an even higher contribution—that of thought leadership.
In an age of nonstop innovation, winning companies will be those that establish a broad-based culture of innovation. How? By absorbing more about design thinking, aesthetic principles, communication theory, and brand strategy. While the role of the design manager is necessary to win the innovation game, the role of design coach will soon become crucial.
What if the internal design department could jumpstart design thinking in your company by running educational programs on innovation, branding, and the creative process? What if the department’s “clients” better understood the use of design as a business tool?
Here’s a slide that shows some of the courses, classes, and workshops that could help establish a culture of innovation in your company. Share it with your team and see if you start some thoughtful conversations about the role of internal design.
No comments
