TT: Why should marketers care about design thinking?

PP: Marketing is less about money and more about connecting to humans  on the receiving end. Successful marketing campaigns touch the hearts and  souls of the audience. Instead of purely going by quantitative market  research numbers, imagine if you get qualitative data from design research  that lets you empathize with potential customers. Imagine if you can  understand not only how much they would pay for something,  but why they buy something.

Another big component of design thinking is storytelling. Being able to craft  your message around human needs on top of product features allows you to  connect to your audiences at a more personal level. Ads that make the  audience laugh or cry are much more powerful compared to ones that only  talk about product features and cost savings.

How Marketers Can Apply Design Thinking To Their Work

TT: How can marketers, especially CMOs, apply design thinking  to their work?

PP: Here are a few strategies you can employ in your work. Again, these are  more like mindsets to be in, rather than prescriptive steps to follow:

1. Human First: Think of your customers beyond just numbers.

Be curious about their feelings, hopes, fears, and the unique  stories they have to share with you. Once you get to know and  empathize with them, you may think of your product and how  you market it in a completely different light. Combine  qualitative design research with quantitative market research,  and your intuition for marketing decisions will be much better  informed.

2. Flare-Before-Focus: In design thinking, we use divergent

thinking, or “flaring,” methods to discover opportunities and  explore ideas. This includes gathering a wide range of user  stories to better understand the opportunity space, as well as  going for quantity and deferring judgement when  brainstorming. Once you have a myriad of themes or concepts  in front of you, use convergent thinking or “focusing,” methods  to narrow down choices and make informed decisions.  Knowing when to flare and focus will certainly get your creative  juices flowing while getting the project done within time and  resource constraints.

3. Make-To-Think: Imagine investing in a big campaign push,

only to discover that it didn’t resonate with your customers  after having spent so much time and resources on it. In product

design, we have a similar problem, where the cost of failure  significantly increases further along the process. One of the  ways to lower these risks is by constantly testing our  hypotheses, by making our concepts tangible and testable with  users from the early stages until the very end. Knowing how to  give and receive feedback, using “I like…” and “I wish…”  statements together, leads to a culture of openness and  constant improvement.

How Coca-Cola and Volkswagen Incorporated Design Thinking  Into Their Storytelling

TT: Can you name a few brands that have successfully  incorporated design thinking into their creative and marketing  efforts?

PP: One campaign that sticks out in my mind is Coca-Cola’s Happiness  Machine campaign. There’s something very human and authentic about it.  The Coke machine is something very familiar to most people, and to use it  in a candid, unexpected, yet scrappy way is quite ingenious. The candid  camera angles capture the joy and happiness of those in the video, which in  turn, connect to my emotions as an audience watching the video.

YouTube: Coco-Cola Happiness Machine Campaign

Another campaign that resonates with me is Volkswagen's Fun Theory,  specifically their Piano Stairs one. Again, it feels very human and candid.  But I particularly like the question they pose in the beginning: “Can we get  more people to choose the stairs by making it fun to do?” The piano  staircase is a very tangible prototype, and throughout the video, you can see  how the passers-by prefer it over the escalator. And while the campaign  itself has little to do with VW’s cars, the “Fun Theory” does give the brand a  boost for human-ness and wit

