The role of design thinking in marketing

As a marketer, many of my successes and achievements have come from my close working relationship with IT teams and Business Analysts and them introducing me to the world of “design thinking”. There are many reasons why I believe that design thinking and marketing should be paired together, some of this is around how it pulls together creativity, data and insight in an intuitive way, but also because it predominantly puts the customer at the heart of it.

We often forget that as marketers we are champions of the customers and sometimes the sexiness and excitement of the data or creativity process takes us away from the customer and their wants and needs. It is worth remembering CIM’s definition of marketing is:

“Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.”

So, what is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a way of solving problems, by using a set of tools, techniques and processes by which customer centric design concepts are developed. It relies on having a strong understanding of the customer needs, thoughts and feelings and observing their behaviour.

Throughout my career I have been fortunate to work closely with IT teams, from sharing the same set of desks with them to doing big digital transformation projects with IT. Typically in design thinking in IT teams, there are different tools available for the different stages of the micro-cycle.

The micro-cycle is:

Understand → observe → define point of view → ideate → prototype → test

But what is important to remember is this is much like marketing. This cycle is circular not linear and you can loop back to the earlier stages at any point. The continuous improvement nature of it, is one of the many reasons I think that it works well alongside strategic marketing teams. Like me, I am sure many of you love the APIC model (analysis, plan, implementation and controls) or SOSTAC (Situational analysis, objectives, strategies, tactics, actions and controls) model when developing your marketing strategies.

I find it easy to incorporate design thinking into the strategies I develop, because the understand/observe part of the cycle is quite simply your situational analysis, it is understanding what your customers currently think, feel or need and how well you're meeting this need. This then helps you to define a point of view that results in your objectives.

Ideate is about coming up with the strategies and tactics you are going to adopt. Leading into your “test and learn” approach, as you embed the strategy. Controls - is about the plan being living and breathing, it is measuring the effectiveness and going back to one of the earlier stages if it is not quite working. But most importantly this is a collaborative way of creating a strategy, which brings your team and internal stakeholders on the journey with you.

Collaboration and diverse teams - at the heart of Design thinking

A part of design thinking is that it puts people in the middle of it and encourages you to recognise that you need diversity in your teams and to recruit people who think, but also approach problem solving in different ways to give you that breadth of understanding, ideas and solutions. In my mind, I have seen design thinking tools help to bridge the gap between creative people and data-driven people by giving them a way of presenting that research in a human-way that both mindsets can identify and connect with. It can really help you to engage with those people that really don’t like data!

Often the tools available give you a way of engaging with introverts and extroverts in a non-confrontational way. Giving you the chance to engage with everyone and be truly collaborative in your approach. I love the different perspectives you can gather and highly recommend having post-it notes or virtual whiteboards available for the quieter members of the team.

Design thinking in practice - marketing examples

I am going to let you into a secret, I was using design thinking tools and techniques at work way before I was even told what design thinking is. There is a chance that if you work in a digital marketing team you are also already using some of the principals that sits behind design thinking.

Customer personas and journeys are my default go to when I start a new job or working with a new client. They are a great way to understand what is already known about the customer and identify assumptions or gaps, but also to really start pulling together what the customer needs are and moments of truth. This also can help a marketer to focus their attention on the part of the marketing journey that is proving problematic. Customer journeys don’t just have to be digital, they can document the whole process a customer goes through and are a great way to drive conversion or improvements to customer satisfaction.

I have also used design thinking tools to develop marketing strategies, running workshops with marketing teams focusing on the different stages to have that in-depth knowledge sharing as we define the point of view (what problems we are trying to solve), but then also prioritise what strategies we are going to use based on effort and expected return - again, helping to bring focus into a team. By running workshops with stakeholders outside of the marketing team, you also get buy-in early on, but start to build that trust that as marketers we really understand our customer needs.

Why do I think design thinking has a bigger role to play in Marketing?

I really do believe that design thinking has a bigger role to play in marketing. I say this because as marketers we want to collaborate and have to adopt a high level of problem solving activities in our teams. But… This isn’t as simple as us saying we want to collaborate, we have to change the dialogue and approach. We need to adopt a listening culture, where we share our knowledge, develop problems solving skills together and have that diversity in ideas.

We need to recognise and not be afraid that not everything we test will work, sometimes ideas are going to fail and that is OK. We just need to learn from them and move forward. It fits nicely alongside the models we already have in marketing and can compliment our existing approach to developing marketing strategies.

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