Strategic Minds: Nick Cristea (AllofUs) — Strategy Across Design, Advertising, and Consulting
A conversation about the emergence of design strategy, the changing role of advertising, and working with strategists from different disciplines.
Nick Cristea, Founding Partner and Design Consultant, AllofUs
Nick Cristea has worked across multiple industries, from design to advertising to management consulting, all while being part of the same company: AllofUs — a London-based design studio and consultancy he co-founded in 2003.
AllofUs was part of the McCann Group from 2011 and 2015, returned to independent ownership afterward and recently became part of BCG Platinion, Boston Consulting Group’s design and technology offering.
A digital design consultant and a product manager by training, Nick has more than 20 years of experience leading innovation and service design projects for clients including Sky, Microsoft, the British Museum, Google, and IKEA. Nick moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2016.
As part of the interview series Strategic Minds, we talked about the emergence of design strategy, the changing role of advertising, and his experience working with strategists from different disciplines.
Please note that this interview is an edited transcript of a conversation Nick and I had in person. Please excuse any grammatical irregularities.
You are a design strategist and design director. What does that mean?
There are obviously many levels of design. Some designers just wait for a detailed brief and say, “Okay, I’ll just follow that and make it look good.” That’s very different from saying, “you’ve given me a brief that doesn’t really explain what the problem is. You’re trying to tell me what the solution is.” As a designer, I need to understand what all the problems are. Often, I act as a bridge between the design team and the clients to help the client understand that.
Clients might come to you and say, “we need a website redesign”. We need to understand a lot more about that. I’ll take the client through an investigative process where the focus is more uniquely targeted on defining what the right product or service should be. What does it need to do? You need to establish that from a user-first perspective, and it has to be built around the strengths of the company and take advantage of the white spaces where the competitors aren’t playing.
We’re looking for the definition of the problem this new or revamped product is going to solve. That often involves establishing who the main stakeholders are, where all the intelligence and knowledge is within the client organization, and understanding who their core audience is and what they need.
This provides the client with a strategic underpinning for any design work that happens. The worst thing that can happen is you redesign it with no underpinnings and then three years later, you redesign it again and it becomes a superficial exercise. But if I say, well, the way that people interact with a brand is going to be significantly different in the future, maybe we need to think about using voice, for example, instead of just a website. The product we need to create is now actually a service, and that service has these touchpoints. That’s the Design Strategy part of it.
From this, I help bridge it across to the experience. You use role-play tools, you’ve done your research, understand who your personas are. For example, one of them might be a parent with three kids, one of whom always needs to go to the bathroom. This affects their experience when moving around a retail space. So by using these tools, you can empathize and unpick the little things we can do to make the whole experience better. And then you can build experience maps, experience journeys, and from these, design the touchpoints needed on these journeys.
Does all of your work usually lead to a tangible experience — a product or service?
Yes. The difference only depends on the scale of that product or service. I’ve done museums with 14 galleries and 150 exhibits. That’s one product, a huge one. Or an app, that’s a very small one. We’ve done work consulting with cities on how to reintroduce cultural districts. It’s the same process.
We don’t go straight to a solution — everything we do will have to go to a concept. And then this concept is proposition tested with users. We think we understand the insights and what the solution should be. But then we have to validate. And even then you only get it 50% right. You’ve got to roll it through to a proof of concept to really understand.
Of course, that’s a lot easier with digital media. Building a museum, you don’t get many chances to test. So you have to break the museum into very small parts and build and test each one. What is the signage, the graphic identity system, the lighting? You have to test all the different pieces to try to make sure you’re removing as much risk as possible. The worst scenario is to design it in a black box, come through and it fails.
How did design strategy evolve as a discipline?
Back in the early 90s, it was all about industrial design. As a design discipline then, there was quite a large emphasis on things like ergonomics — human-factors engineering. A very tangible, physical understanding of users and behavior, focused on their physical characteristics.
Then, as digital design, interactive media, web design — whatever you want to call it — began to grow, the first people operating this space were mostly product designers or architects — not a typical architect, but a curious architect. People who already had some kind of semblance or interest in creating environments and spaces — be it virtual spaces — for people.
As we thought about digital media, it was “wow, we can create any type of product — of course, it’s a virtual product — but still, it’s limitless.” It’s probably fair to say that for at least 10 years, designing in the digital space was more of a creative pursuit. It wasn’t really a strategic endeavor. We were using our training and our understanding of people, how people interact, how people move, how they use things, to make smarter creative decisions, but we were still doing a lot based on gut feeling.
Then people like Jakob Nielsen started to try and codify the idea of usability and user testing. They started creating some parameters and guidelines. For me, they were too restrictive too early on. Everything must be blue and underlined and that is how the entire world is going to look. But as a creative studio, we were becoming more cognizant and aware of these things. There was a shift within digital media from marketing to product or service design.
The idea of actually shaping things around users doesn’t really exist for marketing-orientated work, in my opinion. The way these projects tend to be commissioned, billed and run, there is much less time or interest in testing or usability. Whereas if you’re creating a product or a service, you’re never going to succeed unless you place the end-user at the center of what you’re trying to do. That’s the design trajectory.
AllofUs was part of the McCann Group for four years. What was your experience with strategy there?
I worked with planners — they didn’t call them strategists, very smart people. They’re doing a fantastic job in trying to build a holistic view centered on the company. What does the company do? What is the company’s specialty? How do you feel about the company? Then, they look at the competition. They look at culture and try to understand where, from a trend perspective, things are changing. And then clearly, the consumer. But it’s a consumer, not a user.
So these four Cs in classic advertising help build a window into the world as we look at it now. And they allow the client to say, if you want to resonate with your target audiences right now, these are the triggers, the things that are going to get people excited.
Planning is always about establishing the right space in a consumer's mind, and a way of positioning your company’s product against the competition that will resonate with the times. It’s not actually about solving a need or problem. The strategic focus is on how to reinvent something so it feels relevant and important without actually reinventing the object itself. Repackaging something that already exists, making it look new and shiny.
Do you think that was always the case or has it changed over time?
In the olden days, the heyday of the advertising industry in the 50s and 60s, the advertising agencies had tremendous power working with brands to actually help create new products. Their strategic skills would allow them to look at a category and the culture and say, “what you need isn’t another paint, it is a completely new way of thinking about changing colors of your walls. What you need is not paint, it’s wallpaper.” They were inventing new products because the existing products weren’t matching a need they observed.
But during the 70s and 80s and 90s, advertising went away from that. It became focused on marketing and obsessed with television as its prime medium. Every creative working in advertising wants to make films and they see their adverts as tiny little short films. It’s how they’re building up their portfolio. Everything is orientated around the story. Over time, the idea of creating new products became much more about inventing persuasive stories.
But then, digital media started to empower consumers. It was no longer this idea of, “You make objects. You sell these objects to me by making them feel persuasive. And I’m just the person who consumes them.” All of a sudden it was much easier for consumers to choose, much easier to complain and provide feedback, which means it’s much easier for other consumers to rely on other people’s experiences rather than just believing in storytelling.
The product became significantly more important than the story about the product. The story is still important. But if the actual experience of using the products didn’t live up to the story, it now became obvious.
What else did you observe from working in advertising?
One of the things I noticed is the tension between planners and creatives. The creatives often think, “When are the planners going to be finished with their stuff? When will I get my brief?” And then they go off and bend the insights to match what they want to do. For them, the planners are just a way of selling their creative into the client. Planners are very good at encapsulating the thought in a sentence. “This is the breakthrough piece. If you can center everything around this, it’s a gravitational pull and it will resonate well.”
Creatives say, “Yeah, I get it. But I’ve been having this idea, I want to do this.” So planners would get frustrated because they feel their clarity of thought has been watered down. The planners loved working with us because we treated it very differently.
How did you work together with strategists or planners?
When we worked with the planners we orientated them not just towards the core thought but identifying the core problems associated with that. For example, if my breakthrough thought is, there is a family food fight — that’s one critical thought that we had on one project. The family food fight, which means every dinner table is stress and drama between the parents who are trying to get their family to eat well, and the kids who don’t want to eat this or that. That’s a great call for making a fantastic advertising campaign, but actually, how do we solve it?
We asked the planners to drill deeper and they worked with an ethnographic team to find truths. They would live in people’s homes for a couple of days, in many countries around the world. They would come back with some very clear insights. Problems that are going on: a lack of time, a lack of understanding, a lack of budget, a lack of family mealtimes. All these things break down the core thought. That’s a better starting point for a designer.
I think designers and creatives are very different. Creatives want to be creative and they want to be seen for this creativity. A designer mainly wants to solve the problem. They want to solve the problem beautifully and they would love to be recognized for it. But they are more concerned with solving the problem.
Now you recently joined forces with BCG. How do you see strategy work in consulting versus advertising?
Advertising or marketing agencies are thinking about the most compelling, trendy, impactful thing that’s going to win awards at next year’s show. Very short focused, very tactical.
Consultancies come from a different angle. They are spending a year working with a client to look at how they can reinvent their business. The scale of transformation, the investment, to then take this through to fruition is significant. It’s not merely a tactical thing. The strategy they are doing brings in much more rigor. Their lens is more business-orientated.
Management consultancies tell a client that there is an opportunity to transform their business in a certain way. For example, through new ways of adopting technology to better serve customers. They create business plans for this and traditionally, would hand clients a huge 500 slide PowerPoint deck. Now, they are positioning themselves as the partner to actually help realize these plans. This is why they are acquiring design agencies.
So now agencies like ourselves are again working with strategists but their strategies are coming from a different perspective. Theirs is about transformation, about ROI — very specific, tangible metrics. It’s built around three, five, ten-year business transformation plans, much longer term. And there’s a huge amount of rigor.
Where the planner [in advertising] would come up with the core message or thought, management consultancies are looking for the opportunity space and a hypothesis to transform the business. What they often don’t have yet is the product or service. What kind of products will help us achieve this? That’s where user research and designers solve to help. That’s where we come in.
AllofUs has this concept of Meaningful Design, which is based on elements of Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile. How do you see these concepts come together?
When companies started to embrace and design technology, they didn’t treat it like a piece of product or industrial design, they treated it almost like a legal contract. They would write out detailed requirements documents. It would take almost a year to write that document and that’s it, “that’s the bible, go and build that”.
Agile was a response to that. We’re building all this stuff that no one uses or wants. It’s doesn’t work properly. So much money was being spent building it— and the time it took. So Agile was a wave of purpose to say, “we can do this better. We can show you something every week you can play with.”
But the problem is, all Agile did was show it to a stakeholder. It didn’t make products any better. In a way, it actually made them worse because they changed every week. Oftentimes, the central vision or strategy for the product was no longer clear. It was just a hodgepodge of ideas constantly being evolved.
Then Lean Design comes along saying, “Okay, well, if you’re going to be prototyping and iterating, let’s at least use the chance to test it.” That was a fight we had to fight until very recently. Even five years ago, I was still working with senior stakeholders to educate them to move from Agile to Lean.
But Lean, in a way, just takes us back to where we were in the old days of product design. This is where these different worlds collapse a little bit. As a product designer, you will never just say “right, let’s build a jet plane and just launch it.” You’re going to test every single part as you go along, it’s a constant cycle of prototyping and iteration. The more you test and prototype, the more reliable and effective things are going to be. So product design is Lean Design.
Meaningful reintroduces the strategic element beforehand. IDEO really helped develop this through Design Thinking. It’s a design process to improve the direction of the project — a more considered process, something you do with various senior stakeholders at the outset of a project. Not just choose where the button goes or what color the handle is.
Far often, many things that businesses do are ignoring the user. So Meaningful Design is essentially creating an overlap between the core of the business and the brand, and the consumer — looking at the two in parallel motion. We will go deep into understanding the core of your business, who you are, what you stand for, what your vision is. And while we’re doing this, we’re looking at the real needs that people have. And usually, you come out of that, and you got some kind of overlap. Not massively sometimes, but enough.
For example, we worked with a large food and beverage company. At their heart, they are research-driven and quite focused on nutrition and wellness, but you wouldn’t know that because you are eating their frozen pizza and candy bars. So we need to look for opportunities where they can express that and deliver new types of products that don’t exist. Something that is so core to the brand that it will be as true now as it will be in 100 years, as it would have been 100 years ago.
So when we found this tension — the family food fight I mentioned — we were thinking, “how can we bring those two worlds together? How can we start to help parents feed their kids more healthfully?” That’s an example of Meaningful Design, exploring both branches at the same time. Looking for the resonant overlap that will essentially create value and be meaningful to the consumer.
You moved to the Bay Area a few years ago. What was your impression, coming here from London?
Coming out here, it’s definitely not an easy market — it’s an interesting market. There is obviously a greater threshold for risk-taking and a greater ambition for innovation. But at the same time, they are stuck in their own box here as well, the way projects are funded. In publicly traded companies, shareholders still dictate so much — the quarterly direction of the business rather than the long term strategic direction. If you’re a startup, your investors are doing the same, driving you towards your next short term funding goal.
Within the innovation space, California can be tough. Large tech companies see agencies as infill resources rather than strategic partners so the jobs are often small, short and tactical.
Back in Europe, we worked with many tech companies, helping them fill their need for user-centered design strategy. Oftentimes, we’ll go in and run workshops and processes. But the type of projects is different here. Often, it is more quick consultancy than long-term projects. Unless you are a superstar designer — then they will bring you in because they want the association with your brand.
What are you looking out for in projects or client relationships?
The preferred projects are with clients where you can work directly with a product owner or business owner. If you are working with the decision-makers, you can run a more strategic process.
Otherwise, you often aren’t close enough to the core to be able to impact meaningful changes to the product. You can come up with a brilliant new concept, and if it doesn’t get seen or sold into the right person at your client team, it will never happen.
The other projects to be wary of are those when you are basically waiting for the client to give you the brief and there is no real capacity to challenge its direction.
I think the commercial reality, no matter how big a company is, is that there are always people that want to see projects realized quickly. That’s OK if there is a clear strategic vision that we are working into and towards, and is of course in line with the idea of the MVP [Minimum Viable Product]. But if there is no clear strategy and you don’t have a remit to think and design long term, then you’re often just applying band-aids to the problem.
With BCG, it is different. BCG has Senior Partners who are embedded with clients, working at the highest level and looking at long term business strategy and transformations. We work with these partners in bringing in this second level of strategy, making sure everybody understands the users and the user needs.
What do you think are currently the best places to work?
I think it’s an impossible question to answer because it depends on what you want out of your role or job. I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of other businesses to know what they are like to work with. What you see on the outside is very rarely what actually goes on inside.
AllofUs was born out of this idea to create a kind of family. We brought in everyone we knew who had studied design, who was good, and we built this family. We’re all still in touch — half of them now run their own agencies. Even though staff changes, we still protect the culture as much as we protect the quality of the work. Whereas some other agencies, they want the work to be in lights winning awards and they want to maximize profit, and if they have to burn through their staff to get there, it doesn’t really matter. They are accustomed to high turnover. People go to work there because they want it on their portfolio. So it really depends.
How deep of a design background do people need in order to work in design agencies?
You have to have an interest and a passion for design, rather than the background. Of the team that you put together on a design project, not everyone’s a graphic designer or a typographer.
I’m a product designer. I can’t do typography. I can tell you what’s wrong but I can’t come up with the perfect font. In the same way, I can’t code very well, I can’t really make videos, can’t really do after-effects. I know what I lack. I’ve obviously got enough experience to be able to bring the team together to deliver it.
You’re looking for specific skills and expertise. And so even just beyond the designers, when you think about the researchers, the ethnographers, the strategists, you’re looking for people who’ve got a passion and appreciation to design. They all want the same thing, to solve problems. You don’t have to be a designer to want to solve problems.
Everyone has to be open to the idea of designing a new product or service. And they have to have a passion for wanting to do that. Everyone is bringing something different to the table. I guess the question is what is the thing you’re bringing to the table? Often, I’ll look for people who’ve got some kind of ethnographic or cognitive behavioral science background. I’m looking for people who can help shortcut us into other people’s minds. So we can really empathize much more quickly.
So I guess the answer is really, no, you don’t need to be a designer or to have design expertise. You need to have expertise and passion, which will then help drive the solution forward.
Thank you for taking the time to provide these insights, Nick!
Learn from Nick: Designing Visitor Experiences — a long-form article on visitor experience design for real-world destinations.
If you enjoyed reading this interview, keep an eye out for other interviews in the series Strategic Minds: Conversations with strategists across different disciplines exploring their view on the nuances of strategy.
