What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking refers to a process from which design concepts emerge. Design thinking encompasses cognitive and practical activities including problem-finding, decision-making, creativity, sketching, prototyping and evaluating. It is a method that designers commonly use in the ideation and product development.
Be it a product company or a service, everybody is interested in ideas, ideas to market the product. Not just good ideas but extraordinary ideas that grasp the customer’s attention and make an impact on people and the world as a whole. Little do they know that the product doesn’t simply thrive on random marketing ideas but a set of ways and creative problem solving that the product delivers. This is when the creative agencies root into design thinking processes to create visual identity and come up with breakthrough marketing strategies.
Design Thinking Process
Five stages of design thinking process are
- Empathize
- Define
- Ideate
- Prototype
- Test
Advertising companies and creative agencies have become quite popular since last decade usually among the younger generation born between 1980s and 2000. They are highly driven by marketing ideas from an entirely different perspective. They have seen the world transforming from the traditional methods of marketing to tech driven ideas since they have seen the rise of digital platforms and tech era. Hence, the agencies that existed before them are struggling to keep up with these millennial to be entirely absorbed into the digital world and practices.
Speaking of creative agencies, they are usually driven by the strategy application, marketing concepts, design principles and technologies to build and create content that meets the client objectives. The basic meaning of marketing and its correlation with advertising is not just putting forth a ‘brand’ butits about addressing and solving a problem which the audience couldn’t notice and letting them know that we as a ‘brand’ have the solution.
So, how design thinking can be integrated with Marketing and Advertising?
Through design thinking, the creative agency can analyze the situation while dealing with their customers by providing more depth into the product offerings and solutions that the product caters to. The entire process begins with finding and collecting various ideas for various existing problems and coming up with new solutions for the same in terms of prototyping and putting them out there to test for better results.
Being a creative agency in Ahmedabad, Brim constantly tries to look past the usual ways of marketing. From the traditional methods to latest marketing gimmicks, we continuously work towards developing ideas that are not only extraordinary but extremely simple yet clever. At Brim we ardently follow the methods of design thinking and we believe that it can certainly make or break a certain brand. Hence, design thinking has been ingrained in our basic approach towards marketing which have helped us improve the quality and outcome of our ideas.
At Brim, we follow three basic design thinking techniques that drive us to constantly deliver better:
Constant reasoning
Be it an ad campaign or a basic advertisement, the project depends on how you actually start with it. Once we get a brief from any of our clients, we find out the basic requirement of the marketing part as to why do we need to design a campaign and what would be the reason behind it? We experiment with the ideas using inspiring and open ended questions about the product or service so that we can come up with broader exploration. We then jot down the questions and group them by categories followed by a thorough review which decides the ultimate approach towards what we are trying to achieve.
By practicing this method, you tend to get unlimited flow of powerful ideas since everybody is on the same page and thinks in the same direction. Questioning hows and whys is just an opportunity to expand our thinking range and broaden the potential for bigger ideas and bigger impact.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming is quite common in all kinds of organizations. Just like the name goes, its kind of an exercise that can lead to stunning ideas. It basically includes thinking of various potential solutions to the problems we earlier addressed and further more putting these solutions to work to find out the outcome. At Brim, we follow this simple technique wherein we gather up and spend some time thinking on ideas silently (individually)and put them all up on the whiteboard and discuss the ideas together and the outcomes of the same. The results are astounding as a result of this old fashioned brainstorming session.
Impact vs. investment
This is smart way to prioritize on which ideas would get resources and attention. You can generate great ideas but you cannot pursue all of them keeping in mind the time and resources as well as the impact it has on the market. At Brim, we plot an impact versus investment graph which has helped us avoid the confusion among too many choices. Anything that comes under low impact and high investment rules out of the final selection and thereby, we end up making optimum choices every single time.
Having said that, there are lot many things that we practice at Brim on our day to day lives with these being the most important ones. There is a lot more to design thinking than simply pointing out what needs to be done and the deliverables but the aforementioned three techniques have worked wonders for us and have really helped us in our collaborative thinking processes.
