Business | love | design
We are product and service designers, brand strategists, business consultants and researchers. We eliminate silos not only in our clients’ businesses, but also between different areas of solving business challenges. We are dealing with promises made by brand perception and delivery based experiences — from a client, employee or any other stakeholder perspective. That’s why we strategy&brand team plus the service design&innovation team at Isobar Budapest have decided to build a joint team together to curate this blog and share experiences, thoughts, failures and successes from a joint branding — service design perspective.
Since a brand is also communicating through interactions and experiences can strengthen, modify or demolish the perception of the brand, we feel that branding and service design are two different angles of the same perspective. Design is an approach that we use to reach business goals and impacts, to make a business more reflective and more conscious.
Since buzzwords are sexy but usually their meaning is not obvious, we are avoiding them when defining our value proposition.
Business loves what?
Innovation? Feasible ideas and out-of-the-box solutions that actually work. A solution works if it’s feasible, if there is life in it and if it delivers expected impacts and business goals. There will be life in it if it’s supported by stakeholders in practice, if there are buy-ins from customers, employers and others who are involved.
Design centered methods or LEAN? Decisions based on data and tests instead of firm beliefs and false confidence. No one has a monopoly on truth, we are all biased by experiences of particular cases and situations. All the perspectives have to be taken into consideration starting with the client/stakeholder, including feasibility and other business dimensions. An iterative process can collect and structure all the relevant information and involve an outsider perspective that can help to refresh the business.
Service design? End-to-end view, journey-based interpretation and iterative development — these are approaches that business loves. It’s not important whether it’s a product or a service, and there are also internal procedures that have inevitable effect on business results. Examining and hunting insights, elaborate hypotheses, building prototypes and testing prototypes — select and improve the solutions through prototype tests. Business loves starting small and let direct feedbacks and knowledge feed the growth and development.
Strategic solutions? Solving complex problems, touching more channels, involving more areas, solving more problems at the same time. Business loves considering implementation as part of solution-finding instead of hit-and-run consultancy — planning outcome and impact instead of input or output.
Participative consultancy? Investing employees’ time and energy in solving complex business challenges — only when it increases effectiveness or helps to build up the big picture. A complex, omnichannel challenge requires multidimensional perspectives channeled into the development — even if the employees cannot give full days for workshopping together. Getting direct feedback and first-hand experience is a much better way of supporting business decisions than reading the knowledge in a research paper that is written by those outsiders who don’t have the specific local knowledge and expertise.
Branding, brand activation? Building a brand on values and purposes and communicate them not only through communication, but also with harmonising experiences (answering for bad experiences caused by pain points). Brand is the accumulated understanding while experience is an individual impulse affecting the accumulation. In case of strong brands there is synergy between product or service experience and brand values or promises.
Feasibility, positive uncertainty, iteration, omnichannel and end-to-end paradigm resulted in self-reflection and consciousness.
Business | love | design
