You’re going to need a smart way to research and innovate when you’re working with other people. And design thinking is by far, your best shot. It has allegedly disrupted traditional markets, sparking off a domino of path-breaking ideas in multiple industries. But the two most important questions we’d like to explore are:
- What exactly does design thinking do for market research firms?
- And what do we want from it?
At the core of design thinking is the human propensity to create phenomenal things for other people. That’s right, anyone can innovate. It can do wonders for your research and your research can, in turn, bring brilliant products, services, and experiences into the market.
So, what is design thinking?
Design thinking combines analytical and intuitive thinking processes to navigate a world that’s complex, interconnected, and competition-driven. This allows companies to view challenges from the customer’s specs and make that a priority. Foundational thinkers like the polymath, Herberth Simon, and engineer Robert McKim first described design as a way of thinking in their book Experiences In Visual Thinking. And in 1987 architect, urban designer, and dean at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Peter Rowe popularized it in his book Design Thinking, and the term caught on like wildfire.
More recently, it was David Kelly, CEO at IDEO who popularized it for businesses. Design as a way of thinking helps save a lot of time during the initial creative process and ironically helps consider the effects of your actions well and be prepared for surprises. On the S&P 500 market index, design-led companies outperform their competitors by as much as 211 percent. Ever since Stanford linearly formalized the design thinking process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test, there’s been almost no counter-argument to the theory. So, what makes design thinking so foolproof?
Why does design thinking work?
Interestingly, the Japanese don’t have a word for creativity or creative thinking. The closest word is ‘natural.’ Business designer Nikolaos Fininis compares design thinking to natural thinking and points out that design thinking is a lot like the natural selection process. The intelligent research, methodical approach, and sophisticated planning in design thinking are similar to the testing and trying of traits in the process of natural selection. Ideas that don’t work are quickly eliminated. Just as traits that don’t adapt to the habitat are. Perhaps that’s why design thinking beats other creative processes like lean and agile thinking. It’s like the adapted version of nature’s guidebook for survival.
This said design thinking can tap into the massive creative potential, win over people’s commitment, and radically improve processes. Starting to sound a lot like survival of the fittest?
Who is design thinking for?
For everyone. But more specifically for market researchers who are always on the move to bring better product, service, and experience solutions to the marketplace.
The wonderful thing about it is that it takes specimens from the designer’s toolkit so everyone can use them. It removes the abstractness from the process and contrives it with a simple structure that drives creativity. The stages are user-empathy, human-centered questioning, unbridled brainstorming, rapid prototyping, and hands-on testing. Exactly the kind of thing market solutions need.
Design thinking crusaders are cultivating a new generation of designers who can blend technology and business solutions that are more agile. Instead of having siloed conversations, integrated conversations with multidisciplinary teams helps create more human solutions in an increasingly complex modern world. And that is why it is more central to both strategy and execution business, marketing, operations, and product design.
Design thinking for market research
Simply put, design thinking for market research meets customers where they want to be and creating products that improve the process of them getting there. At the core of the process are three principles.
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User-centric reframing
A user-centric approach can do wonders for any problem. It helps remove cognitive biases and simply approach a problem with curiosity and purpose. A user-centric leadership could have even saved many lives on the Titanic on that night of April 15, 1912. They didn’t have lifeboats but they had enough furniture to keep them all afloat until Carpathia showed up. Design thinking puts the user first and allows room for unlikely solutions. Getting into a stranger’s car is probably not a good idea but Uber pulled it off just fine.
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Generative interactions
When market research experts from different disciplines come together, it takes a while to form, storm, norm, and perform. But the pandemic and digital technology have accelerated Tuckman’s developmental sequence in small groups today. Teams form overnight and solutions come into existence in days. Grand global experiments show that we have the gig economy and remote working models to thank. An Upwork report says that before the pandemic, remote workers were more expensive to hire in these metro areas, and more difficult to find due to the significantly tighter labor market. There’s greater access to talent, more meaningful interactions on Slack, and video conferencing. No, not every job can be done remotely. But market research experts can be hired from across the globe. And joint learning methods like ideating, prototyping, and testing can happen without glitches.
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Iterative experimentation
If experimentation is not iterative, it isn’t necessarily going to work. Put the other way around, just because an experiment worked the first time it isn’t necessarily the right recipe for success. For example, when Walmart attempted to shift its brand to appeal to high-end customers during the mid-2000s, it was a disaster. They launched a high-fashion campaign in Vogue and went on to target fashion shows in New York and picked Manhattan’s Fashion District to open an office. The “one-shot operation” was unscientific, unmanageable, and difficult to measure the effectiveness of. By 2008, when the recession hit, there were massive furloughs and two major shutdowns. Parallelly, when P&G was experimenting with skin-care products for women below 50 years of age, there were a lot of iterative experiments which gave them a good shot.
The secret sauce
American business magnate Henry Ford believed that the secret of success “lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from [your] angle as well.” This is precisely the key component in design thinking as well: empathy. It avoids embarrassing fiascos. Empathy helps find a better product-market fit and helps avoid costly innovations. It plays a pivotal role in unlocking innovation that inspires and solves those wicked problems that Richard Buchanan talks about in his seminal article. It is the first step in the right direction for every good market research.
