How Can Design Thinking Improve B2B Communications
Design Thinking is not a new concept, yet it’s not widely applied to B2B communications. But if you really need to connect with highly technical audiences, you should get to know this flexible approach to innovation.
Why Design Thinking? Because engineers and other technical professionals recognize empty marketing in a heartbeat, and they hate to be marketed to. They will scan right past generic headlines, bland AI-generated copy, over-produced video or splashy graphics. They have questions and need answers, not ambiguity. Design Thinking is a process that helps you explore what your audience cares about and, working collaboratively with your team members, to connect with them.
The best part is you can start to apply Design Thinking principles in your B2B communications process right away. Start with the first step and adopt the process as you go.
So, let’s get started.
What is Design Thinking?
It’s not hard to adopt Design Thinking because it’s based on a straightforward idea: the important thing is not about what you want to communicate, it’s about what your audiences care to learn about and how they learn. Start your strategy with them in mind.
IDEO is a world-leading product design firm that advances this approach. Tim Brown, president and CEO, describes it this way:
“Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”
The five steps in Design Thinking
Typically, a Design Thinking practice will follow a five-stage model commonly associated with the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. The “d.school” defines the five stages of Design Thinking as these:
Empathize: Work to fully understand the experience of the user through observation, interaction, and immersing yourself in their experiences.
Define: Process and synthesize your findings to form a user point of view that you will address with your design.
Ideate: Explore a wide variety of different solutions, so you can step beyond the obvious and consider a range of ideas.
Prototype: Develop your best ideas so that you can experience and interact with them and, in the process, learn and develop more empathy.
Test: Use observations and feedback to evaluate your solutions, learn more about the user, and refine your original point of view.
Don’t be concerned if this seems like more work than your traditional, more linear way of building a communications program. It is, but it is also a more flexible way to get to your best marketing results. And remember the famous quote attributed to John W. Bergman, retired Marine Corps officer and U.S. politician:
“We never have enough time to do it right the first time, but we always have time to do it over.”
Read the rest of this article in its original post on the Publitek website.