When and how to apply design thinking in your marketing

Be more curious, creative, and inject innovation. All things as marketers we’ve constantly been told to do bring to our thinking as we address the challenges of a highly competitive market. Great advice, but how do you actually do it?

We chat to Victoria Hardiment (Marketing Director, Informa Markets) and Neil Preddy (Customer Strategy & Planning Expert) and they reveal how leading marketing teams are using design thinking to inject innovative action into marketing activity.

We want to give you as marketers the power to do great work – check out our Smarter Marketer Event on design thinking; a 40 min panel discussion featuring the savviest marketers in B2B and can help you discover how you can take your marketing to the next level.

Missed the session, watch it on demand!

Access the reframe cards – design thinking edition

Get started with design thinking with our reframe cards – purposely created to help you and your teams utilise design thinking tools and frameworks to better understand your customers, improve team collaboration and optimise marketing effectiveness.

Meet the speakers

Sian Heaphy

Sian uses agile ways of working to help businesses be more creative, curious and use data to transform their marketing and deliver business outcomes.

Lydia Kirby

Lydia is passionate about showing tangible value for marketing and finding creative solutions to business problems. She loves working in partnership with clients and sharing learnings from her work with agile marketing methodology.

Victoria Hardiment

Victoria is an experienced marketer who oversees the marketing strategy and operations of Informa Markets as their marketing director. She has incorporated design thinking into her impressive career, putting the focus on the customer to inform her decisions.

Neil Preddy

Using data to solve problems, find opportunities and make better decisions, Neil is a product leader and marketer with global experience of building analytics and big data platforms for CPG companies and retailers like Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Tesco and Amazon.

Reading List

Watched the panel and interested in hearing more? Check out our extended list of design thinking in marketing resources:

Books:

The Design Thinking Playbook by Michael Lewrick and Patrick Link – This book offers a step-by-step guide to applying design thinking to solve complex problems in marketing and other areas of business.
ROI in Marketing: The Design Thinking Approach to Measure, Prove, and Improve the Value of Marketing by Jack J Phillips, Frank Q Fu, Patricia Pullam Philips, Hong Yi – This book provides a framework for using design thinking to measure and improve the ROI of marketing initiatives.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries – This book is a classic on how to apply the principles of lean startup methodology to create and launch successful products or services.
Value Proposition Design by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith – This book offers a practical guide to creating compelling value propositions using design thinking so they resonate with customers and drive business growth.
The Design Thinking Toolbox by Michael Lewrick, Patrick Link, Larry J. Leifer – This book offers a comprehensive set of design thinking tools and techniques for solving business problems, including marketing challenges.
Alchemy: The Magic of Original Thinking in a World of Mind-Numbing Conformity by Rory Sutherland – a recommendation from panelist Neil Preddy, discover the alchemy behind original thinking, as TED Talk superstar and Ogilvy advertising legend Rory Sutherland reveals why abandoning logic and casting aside rationality is the best way to solve any problem.

Articles, podcasts, and videos:

DOAC: E165: The Marketing Secrets Apple & Tesla Always Use: Rory Sutherland – In this podcast episode, Rory Sutherland shares his insights on how Apple and Tesla apply design thinking principles to create successful marketing campaigns.
Design Thinking 101 hosted by Dawan Stanford – This podcast series features interviews with design thinking experts and practitioners, offering insights and best practices for applying design thinking in various contexts, including marketing.
Design Together hosted by Abby Guido – This podcast series focuses on how design thinking can be applied to solve complex problems in business, including marketing challenges.
Telling More Compelling Stories Through Design Thinking by Tai Tran – In this article, Tai Tran shares his insights on how design thinking can help marketers create more engaging and impactful brand stories.

March 8, 2023 Paul Keegan Agile marketing mindset

Adopting a Growth Mindset: The Key to Meeting Changing Needs

Do your team dwell on failures, focus on what hasn’t worked and repeat the same mistakes? Then this panel discussion is for you!

Many organisations promote a fixed mindset amongst their employees without knowing they do so. This frame of mind makes teams reluctant to change and dwell on ‘failure’ rather than taking learnings and pushing forward in a clear direction.

As markets continue to evolve and change, it’s critical that your employees adopt a growth mindset. This way of thinking encourages your team to find solutions, learn from their marketing activity and enables them to keep pace with the market.

Encouraging employees in your organisation to make this psychological switch can help generate impactful business outcomes and drive greater marketing effectiveness, which is now more important than ever.

All the resources from our Growth Mindset discussion in once place!

Watch the panel discussion
Grab a copy of our Reframe cards
Check out the reading list

How do you cultivate a growth mindset?

We invited marketing leaders to join our panel to share their thoughts on how cultivating a growth mindset can help empower marketing adaptability in a changing market. Our People and Account Director, Alexandra Jeffries spoke with:

Pippa Van Praagh, Product Strategy & Enablement Director at Reward Gateway
Emily Clark, Head of Data Partnerships at Informa
Zoe Merchant, Managing Director at Bright

During the panel, they unpacked how to navigate continually changing markets and how to push forward as a business, they also shared their key strategies for cultivating a growth mindset and fostering curiosity amongst their team.

Meet the speakers

Alex Jefferies

With over a decade of communications, culture, and change experience, Alex is passionate about delivering impactful, timely and considered content and communications that drive positive change.

Zoe Merchant

Zoe is  a passionate believer in staying ahead of the competition with resilience, adaptability, and curiosity. Zoe’s extensive agile marketing knowledge means she can turn every challenge into an opportunity.

Emily Clark

Emily has bridged the divide between marketing and data transformation since 2018, translating and facilitating change management in a multi-national, multi-brand organisation.

Pippa Van Praagh

Pippa’s passion is helping businesses build products and solutions that truly change behaviour and developing a growth mindset is just the start.

February 7, 2023 Bright Studio Agile marketing mindset

It’s not just a buzzword – defining what agile marketing is, what it means for B2B and why it works.

This is the era of Agile. The ascendancy of experimentation and strategic thinking. The reign of data-driven insights. No matter your industry, everyone seems to be ‘going Agile’. Truth is, following the tech and internet revolution and the rise of Silicon Valley, every industry has had to shift to a more tech and data-driven mindset. And marketers are no different, what with our constant need to be customer centric at the forefront of market change.

But what does it actually mean to be agile in the B2B marketing industry? How do you apply an agile approach to your marketing? Most importantly, why would you leave your proven, traditional marketing techniques behind for new ways of working?

Breaking it down

To put it simply, agile marketing is exactly what it sounds like – the application of agile methodology across your marketing. However, that doesn’t give us enough to apply it effectively. In fact, you need to consider your organisational goals and how to drive the change in behaviour that’s needed for embedding a new way of working with your people, process and technology. Agile has a lot of its own lingo, so let’s take a deeper look at the key terms you’ve probably come across, and how they all work together to form an agile marketing approach.

The Basics

Agile Methodology

In 2001, visionary software developers wrote the Agile Manifesto, highlighting the vital importance of discovery and experimentation in software development. To help others build better, more customer-centric products, they detailed the need for “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation and responding to change over following a plan.”

Agile ways of working

Adopting an agile mindset demands redefining your marketing operational model. Where traditional marketing is restrictive, agile emphasises the freedom to be daring in your concept creation and tactics. Rather than spending months planning a solid campaign strategy, an agile marketing team takes a minimum viable approach to take an idea to market as fast as possible in order to test it with the target audience. This of course requires greater collaboration and more effective communication across teams. Don’t worry though, the hard work pays off in the end – with a noticeable boost in efficiency and productivity.

Data vs. insights

We could write an entire book on the importance of being data driven. In short, there’s a clear difference between simply gathering data about your target audience and using that data to your advantage. The most important aspect of an agile marketing approach is to turn your data into actionable insights – really dig deep into who your audience is and what solution they need, to help you build marketing strategies that make an impact.

Sprints

Having adopted agile ways of working, your marketing team will start running campaigns in short bursts – usually within two or three-week intervals called ‘Sprints’. In Sprint 0, you’ll set up data tools to continually gather insights, and create content needed for the campaign. In Sprint 1, you’ll send it all out and test it with a specific section of your audience – say, your followers on LinkedIn. Then, in Sprint 2, you’ll take what you learnt in Sprint 1, iterate, and test again. And so on and so forth.

The Process

Test

So, how do you test, learn and iterate the agile way? By taking your concept to market as fast as possible, you’ll gain valuable time for measuring its effectiveness with your target audience. Did anyone click on your ad? How many responded to your emails? Did you receive any negative feedback about your content or design?

Retrospective

At the end of each sprint, you’ll take a hard look at those actionable insights. Taking note of what worked best with your audience and what failed to impress will help you gain a better understanding of your customers’ needs and what you need to do to reach them in the next Sprint.

Iterate

If you’ve learnt that your concept is working – great! Keep going and expand it to a wider audience. If it isn’t, change it up with a new image, subject line, USP, etc. In this iteration phase, you’ll make all improvements needed to get the results you want in the next Sprint.

This is an infinite cycle of continual testing, learning and improving that you can use throughout your campaigns and projects.

The Benefits

Agility

It’s clear that an agile marketing team is more efficient, effective and empowered. With an agile mindset, your marketing team will work more collaboratively to produce and experiment with new ideas that are more daring and innovative. What’s more, they’ll gain the skills to spring into action when needed, ready to adapt their campaigns and strategies accordingly.

Keeping Pace

Injecting agility into your marketing, is the key to keeping pace – or keeping up- with constant change in the market and the ever-changing demands of your customers. Without a doubt, this is one of the best benefits to adopting an agile marketing approach – the ability to accurately identify and take advantage of opportunities in the market for business growth and brand development.

Fit for purpose

With an agile marketing approach, you’ll see better results and improved performance. What’s more, it’ll become fit for purpose – perfectly aligned with your business goals.

The Future is Agile

There you have it, a clear breakdown of what it means for B2B marketing to be agile. As our world continues to become more digital and tech-focused, the agile approach will continue to evolve with the market, steadily gaining momentum in its influence. Adopting agile marketing and data-driven ways of working will become essential to success in B2B marketing.

Want to learn more? Check back next week for detailed look on Getting Started with Agile Marketing!

What is Agile Marketing?

This is the era of agile marketing. The ascendancy of experimentation and strategic thinking. The reign of data-driven insights. But what does that mean for B2B marketing?

February 6, 2020 Lydia Kirby Agile Marketing In Practice