Design Thinking and the New Strategy
How is Strategy like a Reservation
Is your strategy working for you? Every agency out there claims they’re not simply a creative boutique shop, but a solutions company. Strategy has become a commodity and there is no shortage of dialog on this topic online.
“Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.”
Through the years, we’ve been around countless executives and creatives in the ad world that were also tagged as strategists. But the strategy has become just a checkbox on a list of to-do’s. It helps justify the work you already know you want to do. It is an obstacle that stands between the creative idea the execution of the work.
What the strategy bought were some interesting ideas without any accountability. They would live in a document somewhere at the onset of a project or campaign. But new ideas were accepted or rejected without any consideration to the strategy.
A true strategic plan, from a creative point of view, is a filter. It helps to judge ideas and shape them in a way that provides consistency across all creative channels and executions. It is like a Reservation in Seinfeld. For a creative strategy to have any real value, you need someone that can “HOLD” the strategy throughout the process. You need a champion that will use the initial insights and continue to link them to the ideas and the execution that follows.
Ask Better Questions
Effective strategy begins with INSIGHT. The answers we obtain are only as good as the questions we ask. “It is the question that drives us.”
For a more detailed look into methods for gaining insight, read here.
Designing a Strategy
Design thinking is not an uncommon term any longer either – it’s design concepts and principals applied to business practices. It brings innovation into an organization from many different perspectives. To get those answers, we not only engage the crowd to help provide innovative ideas, we bring proven collaboration methods that allow you to engage your internal staff in continued innovative solutions. A designed strategy is engaging. It provides guideposts that inspire ideas to come from expected and unexpected places.
Developing Tactics (Filtering Ideas)
When design thinking is applied early on, it not only leads to good creative. It leads to good ideas. The one question we always strive to ensure when we execute our process and search for an organizations beliefs is: “Is it true?” Interestingly, the answer does not necessarily need to be “Yes!” However, if the things you stand for aren’t true, it requires one important follow-up: “Do you want it to be true?”
Aspirational truth can still have a lot of value in developing a solid brand strategy. In these cases, the strategy design becomes a mirror. If you’re willing to be honest, we can come up with a variety of creative concepts that help make the organizational beliefs “more true.”
Engaging Your Staff / Engaging Your Customer
Getting others involved in your creative product can lead to unprecedented success. Our goal is to create an incubator that helps continually drive innovative solutions. Those solutions come when you allow your audience to engage in your truth, when you allow them to contribute to their own marketing. Applying tactical processes that continually pull in new data and new insights and applying a posture of agility will uncover an ongoing well of fresh ideas.
Discovering You
This process can begin to give you a new freedom to grow in ways that weren’t apparent earlier. Day-to-day operations can blind us from the bigger picture of what makes us tick. When you know what you truly believe, then others have something they can get behind and support – whether those are your customers, your staff, or anyone else that believes in the same things.
