Marketing is all about change, and in these unprecedented times, brands have to keep adapting to the spiking expectations of their consumers in order to provide the best products and services.  Here is where Design Thinking for Digital Marketing is helping these brands in chasing ideas and implementing them to emerge as leaders in their domain.

It is interesting how a tool like design can help drive a brand’s name, image, and message. If implemented correctly, this process can help businesses come up with many unique and exciting solutions. It further saves brands from giving out the wrong solution to their consumers and empowers them to perform better. Here are five principles of Design Thinking you must implement to have a consumer-centric outlook, improve brand preference, increase loyalty, and provide impactful user experiences.

Empathise to Realise

To empathise with their users, businesses should be on the same wavelength as their consumers and figure out why they are facing a potential bottleneck. That is how they can step in and navigate their way through a probable solution. For that, businesses need to have a thorough understanding of their consumers’ pain points. Data reveals that around 62% of consumers appreciate content that directly addresses their pain points.

Therefore, it should be ensured that the advertisements that these businesses release have an empathetic approach  to the consumers’ requirements - whether the product is not affordable, whether it has become obsolete, and so on - to drive maximum response out of them. Social media posts and other digital content designed from this approach will enable businesses to engage their consumers better.

Define to Decipher

One of the core fundamentals of Design Thinking is that businesses should always focus on collecting and analysing all the user information they possibly can to figure out what problem they need to address. Defining the problem will enable businesses to be in their consumers’ shoes and look at products from their perspective. This will ensure a good relationship build-up with consumers in the future and also bring in new consumers via word-of-mouth.

It will also help improve their ideation methods and processes when making blueprints while also being able to tackle challenges in a streamlined manner. This will enable businesses to break down their plans/strategies into critical steps/stages to integrate their ideas and data better and create a detailed customer insight for better understanding.

Ideate to Create

This is the part wherein all the teams come together to brainstorm different ideas, pool them together, and start moving towards creating an ideal solution. Businesses should continuously gather feedback and data to trigger the ideation process as this stage enables them to ask the right questions, go beyond the ordinary, and tap into innovative solutions. This often helps in solving more than one problem and creates consumer delight.

Here, businesses can make use of different marketing concepts and gauge plausible outcomes for the near future. This helps them proceed with higher assurance as to how their product/s will perform in the market. Further, ideation enables businesses to tap into areas that are otherwise left untapped or unexplored, leading to better formulations and solutions. 

Prototype to Perform

This is a big time-saver for all businesses as producing a rough draft of the product helps in providing  a snippet of the trajectory it will take once it is officially released into the market. It can help businesses decide whether the product idea should be taken forward, modified, or cancelled. Initially, providing product prototypes at a lower price will help pull in meaningful feedback and enable businesses to create products that increase brand recall and brand resonance for the consumers.

Also, prototyping gives ample time to experiment with user interfaces and include elements that provide value to the customer. It helps businesses in avoiding mistakes that are either irreversible or too time-consuming to change. Massive cost cuttings can be achieved in this stage as unnecessary elements and ideas get eliminated from the process.

Test to Analyse

Once prototyping is cleared, Businesses should release the product into the market for testing purposes and patiently wait while the feedback, data, and market performance can be collated and analysed. The test product should be allowed to speak for itself rather than the businesses giving too much information in the beginning. The raw user experience will help with in-depth understanding and insights about what is missing or what could have been better. 

This allows businesses to pick back up from one of the five stages in the Design Thinking process depending on the conversion rate in the market. Also, this stage can be carried out alongside  the prototyping stage as it gives an open front row seat to consumer experience and enables businesses to better interact with them. This helps in breaking down the results and improvise on the required solution.

It is certainly possible that there might be several blips on the radar when this process is being carried out. There may be changes in the problem statement midway or developments during the process that might change the problem statement altogether. However, since it always boomerangs to empathising with the consumers, the final solutions are real and meaningful - and that is why Design Thinking should definitely be a part of your marketing arsenal.