By Laurie Bushe, Marketing Executive, tangerine

Over the last thirty years, tangerine has become one of the world’s leading design consultancies. We’ve created some of the most iconic products and customer experiences for some of the best-known international brands.

Our work has transformed consumer’s lives, companies’ performances and even whole markets:

• the yin-yang lie-flat bed for British Airways’ Club World changed the way we fly
• the iconic Sky+ set-top box introduced time shift technology, changing the way we watch television. The ring of LED lights has since become the hallmark of the brand
• the design spirit and strategy that helped turn Far East manufacturing giants, such as LG, into global brands and changed the way we shop

From the very beginning, we’ve tried to help businesses see beyond the obvious, to offer fresh thinking on what really matters. We’ve enabled CEOs and other seniors to recognise the value of design and the benefits it can bring to their organisation.

We understand that consumers want to buy into an experience. That crowded lives mean people increasingly seek simplicity and clarity rather than variety or complexity, but they also put a high value on style and meaning. They, like our clients, demand the very best design experience.

Our recent work with airline Cathay Pacific is a compelling example of how we built our client’s understanding of the importance of design to deliver the best possible experience for customers and create brand differentiation that added value to the business.

What began as a request for a design team to redesign the trim and finish on their new A350 aircraft interiors became an opportunity to radically improve economy class comfort through a unique seating design.

Using our considerable industry experience and expertise, we approached the chosen seating manufacturer and convinced them to change the design of their headrest to radically improve the passenger experience.

The new, unique invention proposed was to create a proprietary designed six- way headrest that increases lateral support to improve sleep. The result was heralded as the biggest upgrade to long-haul economy in 2017, leading media outlets to hail Cathay Pacific’s new economy class seat is a “tiny revolution”.

Over the years, success for us has been about learning, evolving and adapting to new circumstances, but without ever losing sight of the goal; to create ground-breaking innovation and design that makes businesses profitable and consumers happy.

By Gwen Haberman, Global Brand Manager, HSBC

HSBC is a huge organisation, operating in over 70 countries and territories. My role touches globally across media, businesses, propositions and cultures and I need to stay connected with them all. Over the past year of looking after the brand I’ve found that most people throughout our company are sincere natural problem solvers who want to deliver impactful creative work.

This enthusiasm from colleagues at times spill over into design and the brand. That is usually when my phone rings. Our brand is worth over 20billion dollars and protecting and raising awareness of the brand is a key part of my day-to-day routine. Being an agent for the importance of design is a key part of it. However, I’ve quickly found that what being an agent for design actually means for a global brand is quite different than what it means when managing a smaller one.

Sometimes it actually means letting go a little and just guiding the momentum that others are producing to a positive outcome. With digital becoming more and more important, I was aware that, like many other brands, ours would need to evolve for new spaces. A good example of this are the tiles that represent the App on your mobile. They’re much smaller and need to convey a lot more information. Our existing design approach and use of the logo just didn’t support it.

Like many brands, we’re innovating in the digital space at breakneck speed. I had many teams around the globe developing products and engaging agencies with an entrepreneurial spirit and the best of intentions. However, they had varying degrees of understanding of design and the brand their products were a part of.

So began a project of global collaboration. Working with the products owners, a team that manages our digital customer experience, creative agencies, as well as our internal in-house design resource – we created a design system that was flexible enough to accommodate our many (many) needs, but consistent enough that it looked like it was all coming from one brand, HSBC.

Once the guidelines and templates had been developed, we’d gone from an organic design approach, where some solutions were better than others, to one smart design system for the brand globally.

Two different animals.

Designing a brand and designing within a brand are two different animals. One of the biggest challenges during this project was to arrive at a design system that both celebrated the modern, innovative space we were moving into while still making sure we were taking the HSBC brand along with it.

After working with my colleagues and their agencies, we were finding that the solutions were innovative, but lacked a connection to the brand. The final solution actually came from an in-house designer in our office in Hong Kong. While it was his deep understanding of our goals and the brand that guided him, I don’t think his designs would have reached their final successful system without that injection of fresh thinking the agencies brought to the project.

Maybe it does take a village.

I’m used to hearing (and using) the saying ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’. However as this project evolved, the value that each voice brought was obvious. I had to let go of that old saying and focus on keeping the solutions true to the brand, keep everyone thinking about the integrity of the design and take advantage of the good ideas coming from different places.

I won’t lie, it can be a challenging mix to manage – and I suspect I have a little more grey hair now. However, business and marketers that bring the customers insight alive in the brief, an in-house design team, well steeped in the brand, as well as external creative agencies to challenge the status quo, resulted in a design system that was more considered and creative than if any one of them had done it on their own.

By Brian Mansfield, Managing Partner, Taxi Studio

‘I have to admit – we tend to think all this marketing and design is a bit, you know… waffly’

The opening words of our opening call with the two MD’s of Dolphin, the UK’s leading premium washroom supplier, in the Summer of 2015. They were on the phone, so that meant something – but it was clear that the value of design was something that we were going to have to prove.

Fast forward to 2017, and the picture’s altogether different.

Why? Perhaps most importantly, we reassured the team at Dolphin with the simple truth that our businesses – both owner-operated, and both stuffed to the brim with talented people who care passionately about what they do – shared a simple set of values. We established a partnership between peers.

Real relationships. Fairness. Care. Integrity. These values, enacted by all, quickly aligned us around an exciting and single-minded design challenge – to create a brand world for Dolphin that befits their products and their customer service.

We got to work, surprising and delighting the Dolphin team at every juncture;

Design excellence: The beautiful patterns of the company’s namesake leant themselves elegantly and simply to a new brand identity and architecture, giving differentiation and meaning to the products and services Dolphin offer, transcending everything from product packaging, to brochure ware and on-site signage.

Insight and expertise: A stunning new website – optimised for mobile – gives architects the access to the product range and speccing tools they need, when they need them, making it easier than ever for Dolphin’s most important audience to engage. Its function matches its form too – an easily manageable CMS will make future updates and product launches simple, and a full analytics dashboard means the team can analyse who’s using their site and how. In the first quarter, enquiries through the website rose by 225%, bounce rate decreased by 68% and time on site increased by 117%.

Intuition and empowerment: Finally, we unlocked perhaps one of Dolphin’s most potent forces – their people – to take proud ownership, and serve as energised and powerful ambassadors for their new brand; which was, for the first time, a worthy marque of their passion and integrity. This internal launch included everything from a beautiful illustrated book of values, to a VIP launch event in which the team assembled and signed a collective commitment to their brand, and each other; a celebration of their business today, and an excited toast to the future.

All told, it’s work we’re incredibly proud of – and work that reflects a journey we walked together with our clients. Proudly sat at the centre of our logo is our first business value; fearless creativity. This work and this journey is a wonderful show of it in action.

By Rebecca Peel, Senior Marketing Manager, Elmwood

It’s not uncommon for clients to approach us asking for a logo or packaging design. But being the sticklers that we are, our first step is to ask why. We know our clients will always know more about their business than we do. But we’re there to listen, learn, and work with them to move their business forward.

Developing close relationships, collaborations and partnerships with our clients gets us truly under the skin of a project to understand the business challenge behind it. And it’s only then that we’re able to figure out what’s really required and deliver beyond brief – not only the requested logo or packaging, but a brand that’s rooted in an authentic and distinct point of view – with a compelling brand experience to boot.

These days though, brands not paying any thought to the experience are on a fast track to becoming a commodity. It’s the experiences that drive connections at an emotional level beyond the rationale of price and performance. And in turn, these connections drive behaviour, advocacy, and loyalty – the foundations of any great relationship between a brand and its consumers. Clearly, it goes without saying, that to resonate with an audience, you’ve got to get creative. Therefore to do something worthwhile and genuinely effective, it follows that the best brand experiences are those that are designed.

Over the past 25 years, we’ve uncovered some of the secrets to securing this type of commercial success through design. We’ve learnt how design can influence consumers through Biomotive Triggers® – radical sensory marketing techniques, developed in collaboration with Bradford University School of Management. In effect, we’ve been using the principles of neuroscience to decode effectiveness and how primal responses to external stimuli can be used to trigger positive action in consumers.

Take Andrex for example. We made an emotional connection with consumers in a category that takes three seconds to shop. The year after the rebrand saw an all-time record in revenue, alongside a three-year high of net sales value and operating profit.

Working alongside Saucy Fish, we realised people weren’t confident cooking or serving fish. We needed a ‘tell it like it is’ name and simple graphics to overcome the product challenge and to inject the category with some personality, attitude and innovation. The result? Saucy outperformed the market norm three times over and became a £40m brand in just two years.

In these disruptive times more than ever before it is about learning to live with doubt and insecurity but never shy away from doing what you believe in, even if this means making mistakes. The thing about mistakes, only you can say if you learned anything from making them, some people don’t give it a second thought.

With this in mind, sadly there are still too many smart people in the creative business that are held back from achieving their potential by the fear of failure and not always their own self-fulfilling fears but other people’s.

For me it’s always been about blending naivety and experience so finding a place; that agency to learn, that team of like minded people to succeed, to make those mistakes and to fail is more critical in challenging times when there appears to be no right or wrong answers.

As we enter the new year and even deeper into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or 4IR there is no point in adopting a siege mentality and minimizing risk as the knock on effect will hit your creative bottom line and you will sink into blandness and mediocrity.

The facts are that a lot of agencies and great start-up businesses were born during tough economic times. They didn’t decide to dig in and see it through. They decided to turbo charge their vision and business strategies and hold the creative mindset in spite of nervous colleagues and clients.

They had the confidence to go out and hire the creative talent that might well rock the boat and challenge positions unlike a lot of people who fool themselves that they can handle the star players who have that extra edge about them but soon convince themselves when in a crises real or imaginary that there is no place for them.

Some harsh realities

History teaches us that strategy becomes more critical in the unforgiving times than good times. Experience demonstrates that design can make strategy not only visible but also tangible in many ways. And for busy people living and working in a world of ever more information and ever less time, the quickest and most effective means to manifest business strategy must be of particular interest.

As we confront harsh economic realities, making business strategy tangible is a compelling argument for design investment. And as organisations deal with increased competitiveness, reduced differentiation and increased costs, the role of design now and, more importantly, its potential to contribute to future development should come into sharper focus.

Design is much more than a nice-to-have in the good times. It is a valuable tool that lets a company communicate its strategy effectively by giving it the means to “live its business”. It makes it strategy visible and tangible in a relevant and powerful way at every organisational touchpoint. It is a process by which every aspect of an organisation including, but not just, its products and services, look, feel and become tangible through experience. Often design is narrowly defined as digital or graphic, corporate identity, signage and packaging design. In turn, the job of designers is even more narrowly defined as guardians and implementers of such identities, focusing on the detail of guidelines rather than the reality of the customer’s experience.

Design is much more a way of doing things rather than of just things.

Too rarely does design encompass every visible and experiential aspect of an organisation’s interaction with all its stakeholders. The exceptions to this sweeping generalisation are notable and are the much-cited proponents of ‘good’ design, including Lego, Apple, BT, Heathrow Terminal 5 and Philips. However, design is not just for the big boys. It is encouraging seeing small businesses such as Croots, a specialist leather goods maker, embrace design as a strategic tool and transform its business beyond all expectations. It won a DBA Design Effectiveness Award by presenting stunning results from its investment in design.

Proving its relevance

So, what is involved in delivering strategy and manifesting strategic intent? A key responsibility of business leaders is to understand what their future business could or should be like. Design leaders have an important role to play in this process: one of their core responsibilities is to work with the business to understand what its strategic options are and what these might look and feel like. Encapsulating a company’s vision is a fundamental role of design leadership. Envisioning enables everyone in the company, and all others with whom it deals, to relate to it. And a good way for design to become central to envisioning strategic intent and key to its day-to-day manifestation is to show the senior management team a road map for how it might contribute.

There isn’t one roadmap that fits all situations and businesses. Below is one I have found very effective as a starting point. Senior managers find it easy to understand and relate to. It can be understood whether you are looking at it from the boardroom or the factory floor through a series of clear connections between the two.

If you are looking at the diagram from the top down you can see how the strategic intent is going to be realised through the design projects the company invests in. If, on the other hand, you are involved in working on one of its design projects you can look up the diagram and see where it fits in to the wider picture and reassure yourself why this work is necessary.

If there are any business activities that do not fit into this diagram, the question must be asked: “Do they need them?”

The roadmap has six key milestones

1. Strategic Intent

These take many guises and I’ve heard them expressed in many ways. For instance, at one marketing conference I remember attending they tripped off a presenter’s tongue as soundbites: “A Coke within arm’s reach” or for the manufacturer of small Japanese engines: “Three in every garage”. These weren’t a comprehensive statement of corporate aims, but they make the point that such statements can direct much effort.

2. Vision

Strategic intent is not enough on its own; a vision is needed to capture the potential of that intent. A vision should describe the high ground implicit in the statement of strategic intent. It should also provide the platform for developing design and operational strategies to realise that intent. Eurotunnel’s vision was simple: a service where you could just turn up and go.

Previously booking was needed for a place on the ferry, which may not run anyway because of the vagaries of weather.

GloHealth, a new entrant into the private health insurance business based in Ireland, set its sights on “standing in our customers’ shoes” – something it believed no other health care insurer did well. The new high speed rail system planned for the next 25 years in Britain, HS2, has a far reaching design vision as a catalyst for growth across the country.

It sees the visionary challenge to “enhance the lives of future generations of people in Britain by designing a transformational rail system that is admired around the world”. These visions are ambitious and incredibly difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, without setting an audacious target how can you possibly hope to achieve the high ground that is appropriate to a company that wants to be an industry leader.

3. Values

Before strategies can be developed, the corporate values that steer everything a company does need to be understood, as they condition the development of those strategies and everything that flows from them. These values should be specific to the business. There is nothing more useless than a set of values that are so generic they could be referring to any company – world class, efficient, user friendly and value for money all fit into this category. These fatuous words say nothing of any meaning about differentiation. Values should always be written in a way that shows why each is important. You should be able to complete the sentence ‘one of our values is … because it enables us to …’. Values should inform all aspects of a business – what you say, what you do, how you say it and what you believe.

4. Strategies or drivers for change

It is only when these values are in place that a set of strategies can be developed that will be the key drivers for change. These strategies might be quite different in nature from each other, but all of them would be informed by the vision the business has created for itself. For example you may have a group of strategies that include radical product innovation; increased investment in R&D; a new recruitment programme to attract the latest bright minds; or a new way to raise market interest in the end product or service when it arrives.

5. Customer interactions

A clear understanding of the potential for manifesting these strategies or drivers for change can be found through a detailed analysis of customer interactions with the business. This is where such tools as customer experience mapping and touch-point analysis can be of great help.

6. Design and service responses

Every strategy will have a number of design responses to deliver it, and they all link back through the corporate values to the vision and strategic intent of the organisation. Without such alignment, shareholder value cannot be maximized from design investment, and no one can be sure that every design activity, and every pound spent on it, is contributing to the wider business ambitions.

Tim Selders of Park Advanced Design Management from the Netherlands notes that many leaders believe design is still seen as an operational benefit only and his research shows there is still much to be done before design is accepted as a core competency to help build business strategies. Those in the know – and those organisations that have already benefitted from a more sophisticated use of design – accept that design is a business tool that makes strategy visible.

So, what can we learn from this? Here are a few points:

• Inspirational brief

  The essence of an outstanding design solution and one that aligns perfectly with strategic ambitions, is an inspirational brief that clearly articulates business objectives. An inspirational brief reflects a deep understanding of the strategic context in which the business, product or service operates. Once a brief reflects the strategic intent of the business, clarifies a vision of the project at hand and reflects the values of the organisation commissioning it, an effective design response is likely.
  Clarity and shared understanding at this stage are most likely to produce a response that is at minimum, acceptable and at best, exceptional in realising business need. So, design that makes strategy tangible and brings it to life is vastly more effective in both cost and communications terms than one that merely decorates a business card or the home page on the company’s website. Look at how Innocent has taken account of consumer concerns regarding traceability, ethics and sustainability, and have leveraged them to create very drinkable smoothies, a strong brand and exceptionally popular consumer promotions.

• Design is about what and why

  The idea that design can have a critical role in manifesting corporate strategy is one that is readily accepted by designers, although some still prefer the comfort zone of being involved in the designing of things rather than the directing of what should be designed and why. However, this link between business strategy and design is not yet readily accepted by many business leaders and it is the responsibility of design leaders to make the strategic importance of design clear.

• A key link to design investment

  Show how design can deliver corporate strategy, mission, vision or values and, in doing so, you provide a key link to design investment, briefing, development and implementation. A core responsibility of design leaders is to work with the business to understand what its strategic options are and what these might look and feel like.

• A critical business tool

  Above all else, make it clear that design is a critical business tool that must be owned by the business – design is far too important just to leave to designers, as I hope this article has demonstrated.

Design is not elitist

The issue of elitism is never far away when considering the role of design in business. Elitism is generally used when describing attitudes and activities of a small select group of people. In this case the reverse is true. Far from being elitist, design should be inclusive by involving everyone in the company because it certainly will affect them; design is fundamental to creating and managing customer experience and many people in an organisation are in a position to make design-related decisions that influence this.

For example, designing a building in such a way that it is easy to keep clean is likely to mean that the janitorial staff will have as much effect on the quality of that experience, or the working conditions of staff, as designing for the chief executive’s long-term strategic intentions. Equally, understanding customer experience will enable businesses to exceed expectations and build loyalty.

When I was at BAA, for example, we undertook a comprehensive study of the experience passengers, staff, airlines and other business partners needed to have at every step of their journey to, through, and when using our airports. This then formed one of the cornerstones of the company’s ten-year design and development programme. It was key to ensuring the user was put at the centre of its design thinking and key to the programme’s success.

Equally, design is not an expensive new overhead but something that companies are already engaged in and could almost certainly do more cost effectively. Designing the right solution in the first place costs less than designing the wrong solution and then having to manage the fall out from that bad decision. There is well-documented evidence that design can save money, not only by making things easier and cheaper to produce, but also by having a positive effect on the cost of ownership.

Design is not irrelevant

Far from being irrelevant, design can be used to position a company in line with its strategic intent. It can influence how customers and staff experience the products and services of the company; it can make clear what the company stands for. It can overtly manifest its values through what it says about itself and how staff behave; it is key to defining, creating and maintaining differentiation. A great example of this approach is GloHealth. A new Irish based company in an already crowded marketplace, GloHealth wanted to be a business that provided the alternative way to private health insurance. The desire to differentiate itself from the rest of the industry had been fundamental
 to the creation of this business – how it looked, how 
it felt to work with, its product differentiation and the manner by which it did things. And it used strategic design thinking to do this. As GloHealth’s Chief Executive, Jim Dowdall puts it; “we know what makes us different and what this means to the products and services we offer. This difference is born out of a clear understanding of our strategic intent, vision, values, product design and quality of delivery. Collectively
 these summarise who we are and what we stand for.”

The arguments for design are comprehensive and profound. For example, the DBA’s Design Effectiveness Award competition has many examples of how
 design has had a transforming impact on business, government and society. Look for others within your own business. At BAA, I used the transformative nature of our Terminal 5 project to continually remind senior managers of the significance of design to our long-term strategic aims. There will almost certainly be many examples that resonate with most business situations and most industry sectors.

The truth is that design is not superficial; nor is it about finishing touches. It affects all parts of the business; it is key to making business strategy at least visible and potentially tangible in many other ways. Design is an essential ingredient that can breathe new life into old products and help create innovative new ones. It can be the basis of designing spaces from the inside out for user convenience, improved work dynamics and operational efficiency, rather than from the outside in for the aesthetic value of it. It can be the key to differentiation and growth in the marketplace.

And even when design is superficial, even when 
it is applied only at the very end of a project, it can still have huge impact. Whilst the dictionary definition of the word ‘superficial’ describes it as something to do with the surface of things, this does not always mean it is of no significance. Fashion is an area of design that has much to do with appearance, or things so called ‘superficial’, but it is a huge industry that employs millions of people and brings pleasure to many more. There is no better advocate for design than the converted sceptic. Once you have them fully on side, the next hurdles are much easier to clear.

This article is an extract from Crossing the Rubicon which featured in Design in Business.