Importance of Design Thinking in Business and Consumer insights

Design thinking is the way to solve the entire problem for your consumers, for this the designers are capable of developing any kind of solutions, and ideas to provide people benefits that can use in their daily basis. It is an art itself because it combines the designers’ technique with their sensibility to listen and take care of the problem that their customers can suffer.

If you search what design thinking in business is, you will get a lot of information because it is of the main topics today for businesses and corporations, which try to make their customers happy and the center of the products they are promoting.

However, few companies have implemented this marketing way, and the fact is that many of them should. They could establish customer feedback by having them informed about all your product innovation.

Many companies try to follow their own innovation pipeline without paying too much attention to the needs that their consumers really need. This is why they have to find a way to influence their customer by adopting a customer-centric or customer-led way of designing.

You can also see that there are many gaps between all the departments of the company. The product design, sales, and marketing teams every each of them count with a unique vision, which can lead to an error in the customer insights and design thinking that they are looking for.

With all the mentioned above, you should know that there many key areas to focus so on to apply design thinking to enhance your products and overall the customer experience to offer them a quality service.

If you wonder, what is design thinking?

This is a new methodology where the company will create products, services, and experiences overall to put their target consumer in a unique center position of their product manufacturing process. Companies use this to create a new solution for every problem, or situation that the main customers can experience in time.

In theory, all of this sounds amazing, and it should be what every business should do to improve their brand and make their customer happy. One of the greatest products on the market that counts with great design thinking in business are those like Google search, iPhone, and Netflix. These products do what they were meant to do since the very beginning, offer an amazing experience to the consumer giving them functionality that can blow their minds.

This kind of products achieved that because they pay attention to the consumer insights, putting them at the heart of the process and generating great ideas that can lead to a fantastic new product or service that can solve their issues.

Why design thinking has helped the rise of huge brands

Many huge brands in the market like Google, Coca-Cola, Nike, Adidas, Pepsi, among others are enjoying a global acceptance with a huge success rate because they have been listening to their consumers for years, being in the vanguard of everything that happens in the world. Design thinking has a lot to see with this and is now that organizations and the experience from designers to work for them, trying to get a bit of this success.

Presenting real solutions to everyone with their products through many tools like theatrics, movies, models, and things that could make people feel, now is the moment where the insights gained a huge value. Another thing that design thinking can do is understand the advantages that their products can provide to consumers profoundly, and see if there is something they can get better before launching any kind of final product.

This is how business can increase their success and improve the way they deliver their products with a design thinking approach.

Design thinking has many practical uses

Design thinking can be used for any kind of project, it does not matter the size or scale of the product that can solve the problem of the consumers. When businesses use design thinking it allows them to think like a customer would do and help them to identify what are the necessities.

If you want an example of this, nowadays reviews are a huge part of the shopping process, many people tend to buy products only based on their rates in the market shops, this is why if you want to give them this service you can edit your website and give this to your customers. It is an amazing way to improve the website because the shopping process can connect with the customers instead of being just another lackluster transactional experience.

To know exactly what people like, you can do many things; some of them are ethnography, co-creation groups with the costumers, focus groups to talk about the process and necessities, and in-depth interviews where designers take all the information they need to create the perfect products. This is why design thinking is a beautiful tool because through research you can forward-thinking to create a better world finding solutions to daily issues.

Design thinking has become an important part of every business

As a process, there are things that every design thinking needs to be successful, so if you are doing this there are five things that you cannot skip. First, you need to empathize with the consumers, which means that you have to understand what they are trying to tell you and put you in their shoes to know what you need to satisfy them.

You gave to define the needs of the customers not only their problems if nor what are the insights that they have to solve them quickly and effectively.Then you may ideate the solution coming up with hugely creative and innovative ideas that can solve their problems in a unique way. Make a model or prototype of the product that you want to create and make a real-life design; it means a workable solution for the consumer

When this entire process finishes the last thing to do is test the solution and see if it can really solve the problem, or the things that you can do to make it even better. This is the process and why design thinking is now a part of the majority of businesses, you can find the perfect solution for a population, developing innovative ideas, and then model and test them to ensure the customers’ satisfaction.

Helping people to live better experiences

If you are looking which are the places where design thinking can help you the most, you should know there are two that outstand overall. 

How design thinking can reinvigorate your brand

When you put your customers’ necessities over everything you will find the brand’s understanding of the customer needs, which are the actions that will drive everything to satisfy them. So, the main thing to do is to hyper-focus on the needs of the customers to accomplish all their desires with the best results.

Lately, there are many companies working with this model because it is innovative, strategic, and has helped businesses and customers get amazing results. Another important aspect of this is that you can make more directed marketing to your clients by focusing on the job to be done category.

The connection between designers and consumers

The second one is that design thinking can connect the product designers with the consumer in a direct way, which leads to improved and faster results. In this sense, the designers will hear directly from their clients what they want and what their aspirations are, and this is a huge advance because the consumers will also provide them with the best experience in the area, so they can integrate it into the process of their products.

This has as a consequence that now the designers have no to wait for marketing research or insights teams to approve what they are doing because they form a part of the process of product development, listening to customers, observing, and doing what they like the most.

As you can see there are many things involved in design thinking, taking the consumer insights about what they want and they would like to make their life easier has become a main part of everything invented lately.

The times have changed and so have the communication styles, making that consumers and businesses behavior change with it, this is why both of them need to stay current, to express the things that both of them want and the design thinking works for both parts. It also offers a more profound understanding of what people really want as individuals to solve their lives, because in this customer-centered model the consumer always will have what they really want and letting designers make innovative products and services feel real.

For this, the brands need the creativity of the designers to give solutions to everyone who needs them because they can provide amazing products or quality services that can change the world by just trying to help a group of people.