DBA Members’ Forum | October Summary

Here’s a short summary of what we covered, prepared under Chatham House Rule — we explored much more during the session.

• Creativity is becoming more important to businesses who have fewer levers to pull to create competitive advantage.
• With significant economic pressures – high inflation, low consumer confidence and buying power, volatility and uncertainty from political changes – growth and returning a profit, and crucially cash, is becoming harder for businesses to achieve.
• There are therefore significant pressures on organisations to control costs, which puts pressure on creative fees.
• And businesses have less ability to find the growth they need from simply doing what they have always done.
• However, this creates an opportunity for creativity and innovation, with many design leaders understanding that companies that pursue doing something different and pursue breakthrough innovation in difficult economic times do really well.
• Design leaders are also trying to find ways to work more efficiently as they develop creative ideas – less iterations, less visualisations, more reliance on an experienced eye and being a bit more scrappy and dirty in the journey to the finished creative outcome.
• AI is seen as best used at the start and end of the creative process – for initial research, and then for final implementation to help remove some of the grunt work – but the middle part, the creativity, is best kept with humans. Both so that IP ownership is clear, and because market research shows that the human consumer wants something that is created by a human.
• There is of course a tension between driving technical innovation whilst balancing social and environmental responsibility, which is incredibly important to consumers, particularly Gen Z.
• But, consumers are not willing to pay more for sustainable solutions. Consumers feel that business created the problem, profited from the problem, and therefore they won’t pay more for a company to fix the problem.
• Therefore business is after solutions that take costs down whilst being sustainable.
• So innovation becomes important here too. Particularly if that innovation can change the paradigm – for example by changing the face of luxury from heavyweight to light.
• Design leaders are looking for design agencies who can work with their inhouse teams to challenge what they are doing and bring in disruptive thinking.

The next DBA Members’ Forum is on Monday 3 November, from 4-5pm GMT, when we’ll be joined by Esther Carder, Partner at Moore Kingston Smith. Following the launch of this year’s In Focus Report, Esther will provide expert commentary and analysis, breaking down the data and delving into the key trends.