C1 - Internal use

6/9/2020 - Coursera: Design Thinking Assignment - Ariana Tsoutsas    Challenge  Describe your challenge, including all relevant information.  At the beginning of each calendar year, our marketing department looks for ways to “kick off” the New Year with customers in an  engaging way, create content, and also thread the campaign throughout the entire year. The challenge here is to create authentic  campaign content that brings to life the voice of our customer, in a limited time with limited resources, and be something that can  be used into the future.  The content that is needed is a campaign consisting of a print ad, store materials, digital assets, editorial  articles and customer videos and photographs.    Selection  In your own words, briefly describe the tool you selected (e.g., what it is and why you selected it for your challenge -- including any appropriate video lecture references).  I chose the Visualization tool to approach this challenge. Generally speaking, our industry is highly creative and highly visual, so this  tool felt like an authentic and natural way to bring to life customer’s deeper thoughts and aspirations in a way they could relate to.  The tool was executed in a focus group-like environment and was low cost, highly interactive and quick to organize. This tool is also  flexible enough to use results in the entire process of design thinking to help lead to further insights.    Application  Describe how you applied the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g., what you did and how the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively).  After the initial campaign creative concept was developed (print ad, posters, etc), we invited two sets of customers to participate in  a Vision Boarding project. This was quite literally a manifestation of their thoughts and desires in an artistic and engaging exercise.

  First, we engaged our industry experts/thought leaders who had expertise in this area to create video content to help guide  the campaign and teach other customers how to create vision boards.

  Second, we brought in actual customers to participate in an in-person workshop and video interview to physically create  their personal vision board for the upcoming year.

For the in-person workshop, we provided all of the supplies, including various industry magazines for them to draw out their career  aspirations. We provided the campaign creative with our internally created messaging and aspirational quotes, and also included  magazines from other areas of interest, such as travel, fashion, music, health & fitness, home & garden, etc., to give the participants  broader options outside of our specific industry. We asked our participants to find representations of what they wanted to achieve  in the year (not necessarily who they are now, which is more of a persona) but where they wanted to be, wanted to achieve and  what they wanted to manifest in their lives and careers. We also had computers and printers available in order to satisfy any other  google-worthy ideas they had in their minds.  Snacks and beverages were provided, music for ambiance and friendly faces to chat  and help facilitate the session. As the Vision Boards were completed, we brought participants into an interview setting where we  asked them to talk us through their Vision Board on camera.     The content developed was released over a 4 week period of time at the beginning of the year. Our participants were further  engaged on smaller projects to foster additional connection. As the year went on, we followed up with our project participants to  see what they had achieved during their year and what they are looking forward to in the coming year. Many of them had attained  at least one of their goals.      Insight   Describe the insight you gained from applying the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g., how an insight affected your thinking about the challenge and about design thinking more  broadly).  By having our customers participate in Visualization, through the process of Vision Boarding, we were able to see very clearly what  resonates with them and what is on their mind. And what does not. We are able to challenge our own marketing “perceptions” and  start driving insight using this as a data collection method. From brands, educators and career programs – we were able to see who  they connect with. From aspirational messages, we were able to see our customers leaning towards desires for financial growth  (whereas we may have thought that was too “pushy” previously.) We saw their outside interests like homeownership, travel,  marriage and health. During follow-up, we saw some of workshop attendees achieving their goals which lead to success stories that  could be used to develop additional authentic content that highlights our customers.     Approach  Describe what you might do differently next time -- applying the same tool you selected or a different one -- and the reason(s) why.  The next iteration of this concept could be started earlier to be able to incorporate learnings directly into in the campaign creative.  While we have common themes within our industry for what our customers want, incorporating discoveries would make the  overarching campaign more relevant and authentic, versus having the authentic content be supplemental. Creating this as a digital  tool to the campaign could also scale this concept to reach more customers and gather more insights. Also applying a more

C1 - Internal use

methodological way of capturing and analyzing the insights to use as data – this can lead to a Mind Mapping exercise. We can also  apply more demographic information to analyze further how different groups of customer are thinking.

