Design in Business magazine

turning design thinking into design doing

Make your mark in branding (hint: sometimes you have to turn your phone off)

Saving lives: How design is transforming breast cancer outcomes in Norway

Design at board level: How to make friends and influence people

Sean Carney, chief design officer at Philips

Issue 01 Spring 2015 £7.50

Some gifts justkeep on giving.Charisma by Design™

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EDITORIALEditor: Gemma Townley Editor at Large: Hannah Paterson Contributing Editor: Raymond Turner Communications Manager: Sarah Dutton Commercial Director: Sally Lukins

ART DIRECTION & DESIGNCreative Director: Ben Parer Art Director: Yunus Shaikh Design: Andy Fleetwood, Stuart Meades, Matt Hardy, Rachel Long-Smith

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The DBA is the trade association for design in the UK, building the bridge between designers and business, and championing effective design. DBA members range from large multinational businesses and international networked agencies, to independent niche agencies. DBA members work in all design disciplines and are spread throughout the UK.

Welcome to Design in Business, the new magazine from the Design Business Association. In these pages we are going to do several things. We are going to champion design and the huge, positive impact it can have on systems, products, brands, profits and experience. We are going to open design up, enabling non-design readers to understand what design can do and how best they can work with designers. We are going to support those who already know the power of design but feel like lone voices in the world of business where design is all too often dismissed as a ‘nice to have’. And we are going to engage and excite those who work slap-bang in the middle of the design industry, creating, innovating and turning insight into fantastic outcomes.

That’s the aim, anyway. And if you can’t think big at the point of launch then, essentially, what’s the point?

So why a magazine, when the world appears to be going digital? Why not an e-newsletter, a PDF, an interactive web page? Well, frankly, because we want impact, and there is nothing like a physical product to engage heart and mind, to stimulate curiosity. Our days are spent in front of a screen; print has become a luxury, a moment of calm, an opportunity for reflection. Just as pressing a wonderful book into someone’s hands and urging them to read it is so much more powerful than an email that includes a link, so we hope that discovering this magazine on a coffee table somewhere will lead the reader on a personal journey as they’re let into the best kept secret of successful projects and organisations.

So please, kick back, make a cup of tea (or pour yourself a drink – we won’t judge), and enjoy.

We know that effective design (that’s design that solves the problems it’s asked to) can transform the way you work, the way your business operates. We know that design can take organisations where they want to be – whether that’s retail positioning, customer loyalty, improved revenues or simply a better awareness of who you are and what you do. And we want you to know, too.

Because design is ready to take centre stage.

Over the past few years, the DBA has slowly, steadily and quietly been building capacity and capability in the design world; we have nurtured and supported fledgling design businesses; we have delivered world class training; and we have ensured, through our awards, that design is no longer enough – that effective design is what matters, design that makes a difference, design that changes things for the better. Our membership numbers are increasing, with leading lights in the corporate world also joining us, and our impact is being felt.

Membership of the DBA represents something important: a commitment to effective design, a belief in quality, of good working practices, of sharing of best practice. Our members sit in design agencies and huge FTSE 100 businesses; what they have in common is a commitment to great, effective design. Through this commitment, we have built a community of professionals who believe in design as a force for good, who will help us show the world that design should be at the heart of everything.

Welcome to our world.

CEO’S NOTE #001

DEBORAH DAWTON

SPRING 2015 DESIGN IN BUSINESS 3

Whilst The Design Business Association endeavour to ensure that all published material is correct, from a reputable source and accurate we accept no liability for any errors and omissions in the content and no warranty or guarantee is given in this respect. All content is accepted subject to our terms and conditions. The opinions expressed by contributors are not necessarily the opinions of DBA nor do DBA endorse any of the advertisers or contributors (or where appropriate their products and services). Any advice given or recommendations made should be considered of general application only and appropriate professional advice should always be taken. © Design Business Association April 2015







Design is something that divides people. There are those (generally designers) who see design as the answer to complex problems; as an ever changing mix of process, functionality, experience and beauty that can capture minds, engage hearts and provide solutions. And there are those (generally not designers) who see it as an elitist, intimidating, possibly even terrifying world full of people talking in a strange language and judging people, things, interiors and everything else to boot against exacting standards.

But there is a growing audience of people who are somewhere in the middle – not designers, but open to the possibilities of design; able to see what design can deliver for them. These people work in businesses that have seen design thinking transform their brands, engage their customers, save them money and boost their sales. With this magazine, we hope to move a few more people into this middle ground; hope to encourage a few more businesses to explore what design might do for them. Because the truth about design is that whilst it can produce revolutionary solutions it can also be slightly nerve-wracking to engage with.

Which is why Design in Business focuses on the kind of design that makes non-designers stop, reflect, and wonder if they aren’t maybe missing a trick. This is a magazine for designers and non designers alike; it is a business magazine that showcases what design can do. So whether you are a designer trying to get your board to take design more seriously, or are a sceptic, yet to be convinced of the transformative powers of design, we hope you’ll read, enjoy, learn a bit, and let us know what you think.

Design in Business may not provide the answer to all your complex questions, but we hope it will help you view the world just a little differently…

GEMMA TOWNLEY

This magazine is printed on Cocktail White Lady 290gsm cover and UPM Fine Offset 150gsm text. Cocktail is a range of luxurious pearlescents, available in twelve tints, while UPM Fine is a white uncoated sheet – available from 60 to 350gsm. Both are made from elemental chlorine free pulps. www.denmaur.com

Cover finishes include CFS Diffuser Silver, CFS Clear Diffuser and CF Black foils. www.celloglas.com

Cover Photo: Royal Philips

06THE INTERVIEWSean Carney on how he is transforming customer experience at Philips.

10CROSSING THE RUBICONConvert the cynic to the power of design and you’ll have a worthy advocate.

16WHEN DESIGN SAVES LIVESBreast cancer outcomes have improved in a hospital in Norway because designers thought ‘patient’ instead of ‘process’.

20BACK IN TIMERemember when ‘Dave’ was UKTVG2, a TV channel that no one watched?

23HOW TO GET AHEAD IN BRANDINGSuccess means working hard, playing hard and keeping your promises.

26AT YOUR SERVICEWhy service design demands the attention of the higher education world.

28TIME TO MOVE PENSIONS TO YOUR TO DO LISTNew legislation means retirement savings are now a priority.

30RELEVANCE IS EVERYTHINGWhy zombie brands are threatening to make the high street a dead zone.

32THE DBA DESIGN EFFECTIVENESS AWARDSThe transformative power of design.

38DBA NEWS

CONTENTSEDITOR’SNOTE


THE INTERVIEW

6 DESIGN IN BUSINESS SPRING 2015

Whether it’s their cutting edge lighting or covetable electric toothbrushes, Philips leads the way in effective and beautiful design. In the first of our one-to-one interviews with international

design leaders, Raymond Turner talks with Sean Carney, Chief Design Officer, about the challenges and ambitions of leading design in one of the world’s most famous businesses.

Philips has a well-documented design heritage with many well known design leaders bringing their own contributions to the development of the company, from Louis Kalff who, more than 80 years ago was identifying local preferences worldwide, through Rein Veersema and Knut Yran who, in the 60s, set up the Industrial Design Bureau and introduced pre-design research respectively. By 1991, Stefano Marzano had introduced ‘High Design’, a multi-disciplinary, research-based human-focused approach to design which incorporated disciplines such as anthropology and psychology. Sean Carney, head of design, is continuing this philosophy. By understanding individuals and how they live their lives, Philips responds to the complexities of evolving markets with solutions that create value for people and business.

What was it like to join a company with such a legacy of design leadership?“Like most businesses, change is always a constant factor and Philips is no exception.

We recently announced the creation of two market-leading companies focused on the HealthTech and Lighting solutions opportunities. In parallel with this re-organisation we have been reviewing how best to serve the business through strategically focused design leadership.

I found that, although Philips had a huge external reputation for design, this was not reflected equally well inside the company. There lacked a fully effective relationship between design and the business. Also, the design function was essentially a large consultancy of about 500 people, required to make a profit from internal charges. The problem with internal charging was that its contribution to ROI was very difficult to see, measure or appreciate.

We set about changing this situation. First, by making Design a cost-centre where our target is to break-even. Second, we have set about building a bridge back to the business. This has involved re-organising the historic central design resource into dedicated teams, one for each part of our business. As a result the designers have developed deep and intimate knowledge of the business they are in and extensive expertise relevant to their business category. We have continued to keep a central Group resource, which concentrates on leading edge innovation capability and new competence development, along with overall brand experience and governance.

We have strived to create a new cultural relationship between design and the rest of the business.”

What evidence do you have that this change of relationship between design and the business is working?“Consider oral healthcare as an example. Here the dedicated team of designers worked for about a year on product road-mapping based on understanding the competitive set, insights from the market and building an intimate knowledge of both the users and dental health professional needs. This resulted in the design team becoming experts in oral healthcare. The same continues to happen in all our other business areas such as mother and child care or clinical and patient monitoring.

This way of design engagement has led to a demand for design going up year-on-year quite significantly. We now understand the business areas better and come with solutions based on real detailed knowledge of the sector and not just advice from corporate head office.”

Can you tell us something about the role of design leadership in envisioning the future of Philips?“As we become more respected business partners, and bring our customer-centricity into the product life cycles,

Sean CarneyChief Design Officer for Royal Philips

PHOTOS MARCO BAI-LIO

Design is helping envision the future through a deep understanding of what the ‘best in class’ patient, user and clinician experience should be like to deliver the best clinical outcomes.

Effectiveness Snapshot

THE INTERVIEW


Helping our customers use design as an integral part of the way they deliver their services, particularly by getting them to engage in the co-creation process and turning ‘design-thinking’ into ‘design-doing’.

we are being seen as adding to the value propositions that the business can create.

My predecessor, Stefano Marzano, developed the idea of Design Probes. These looked ten to twenty years ahead to see how technology and society would change the world of Philips. This work resulted in many publications and presentations about the future and were excellent external PR for Philips design. Internally, however, the relevance of this work was not recognised by the businesses. They could not see how these visions would fit into today’s business reality.

Since then things have changed. We are now using this idea of envisioning in a different way - as a constructive business tool. A good example of this working in practice is the development of a new neonatal intensive care unit. We re-envisioned how this might look in 10 years time. This extended timeframe meant we were uninhibited in how we would think about technology and products. We were not constrained by the process of incremental development - we could take big leaps ahead. To do this we pulled in key opinion leaders, medical experts, doctors, clinicians and neonatal intensive care specialists from the world’s leading hospitals. We sketched out future scenarios, made prototype environments and then sought their contribution. We then started to build a more robust concept based on the insights from those leading specialists. As we did that we also had our partners from the different businesses join us in the dialogue so they could hear the voice of that future customer first hand.

As a result of this intensive and comprehensive collaboration we built, what we called, an ‘experience lab’ for the intensive care unit which brought the ideas to life and could be critiqued and developed further. This gave us the basis for a very constructive dialogue about what we could do today based on that vision of the future. This has begun to inform the product road maps that are being developed today.”

How have you brought the Board and Executive along with you?“I joined Philips at the same time as Frans van Houten, our new CEO. He is a real visionary. He wanted to understand the potential for Philips if it could connect to the Cloud and leverage all the data collected from the

350 million patients connected to and using our products every day. A lot of the business did not understand the future potential of harnessing this data so we created a digital deep-dive. We looked at the emerging trends in technology, in society and business to create a digital road map showing how these trends were evolving. We then developed scenarios showing how these trends might impact on Philips at a sector and individual business level.

Next, we ran four hour sessions with the Executive Committee, taking them through, for example, what start-ups in California were doing and what big industry was doing, in areas that you might not expect, like John Deere – a digitally integrated business where tractors take soil samples, beam the data to satellites and then back to seed and horticultural suppliers for analysis and subsequent development. We argued that if a tractor company can do this and find it worthwhile then so could we. It meant we could completely rethink what a company in healthcare and consumer care would be like. The Executive Committee became fully supportive of the potential for exploring the future in this way.

We have now created a digital health suite in the Cloud where all our devices are streaming data in real time from across the complete continuum of users - patients, surgeons in theatre, cancer diagnostics, psychologists and remote diagnostics for patients living at home. Design is helping envision the future through a deep understanding of what the ‘best in class’ patient, user and clinician experience should be like to deliver the best clinical outcomes, whilst equally making sure there is a sound business case and return on investment for the hospital’s Chief Financial Officer.”

What do you see as your future challenges?“Training more people in the co-creation processes (our own version of Design Thinking).

We have recently introduced an education programme for 120,000 people called our co-create programme. We train them in the fundamental principles of design thinking, discovering, framing, ideating, building around solutions. This has been successful across the business for dealing with a multitude of issues from supply chain to product development. The more people within Philips that we can engage in this programme the better business we will have, delivering improved experiences and outcomes for our customers and other stakeholders.

Engaging with potential customers.

The CEO now sees our co-create programme as being an ideal way of engaging top-level executives from potential customers in doing business with Philips. Together we can explore a customer’s potential in ways that will help give us a competitive edge.

Turning ‘design-thinking’ into ‘design-doing’.

By this I mean by being proactive in testing potential solutions with stakeholders, mixing design thinking with Lean and Agile principles to build concepts, testing those

THE INTERVIEW


01

PHILIPS TOOTHBRUSHPhilips Sonicare Diamond Clean Black Edition toothbrush.

02

PHILIPS DESIGN EINDHOVEN The center for technology enabled innovation in The Netherlands.

03

LIRIO TABLE LAMP The Lirio La Lente table lamp is inspired by a magnifying glass.

04

THE RELAXATION SPACEPhilips has co-created an adaptive relaxation space aimed at healing workplace stress

05

AMBIENT EXPERIENCE FOR PET/CTA patient-friendly environment for those who must endure difficult imaging procedures.

04

05

0301 02

concepts first with 10 people, learn from that and take it to 100 people, then scale to 1000 and then 20,000 people before a big release.

These are some of the most exciting challenges for the future.”

What do you want to be remembered for from your time with Philips?“A few things.

Creating long lasting connections between design and business and a deep understanding of the value it can bring.

Ensuring that we always drive best-in-class design solutions and never compromise the integrity of our designs.

Becoming completely people-centric and using design to deliver better solutions as a result. Thinking all the time about every interaction with those who are touched by what we do. For example, in healthcare it is always our objective to create better outcomes for patients: faster healing, more people cured quickly with less problems, the rapid development of excellent products at lower cost.

Helping our customers use design as an integral part of the way they deliver their services, particularly by getting them to engage in the co-creation process and turning ‘design-thinking’ into ‘design-doing’.”

Sean Carney is Chief Design Officer for Royal Philips. As head of the design competence across the company, he is leading global teams delivering insight-driven, meaningful innovations that bring value to people and business.

Sean joined Philips in March 2011. He has more than 25 years of experience as an international creative thought leader in design and management, focused on brand and user insight. He has a proven track record in building, leading and inspiring multi-disciplinary, award winning design teams across the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Sean pioneered a user-centered approach to brand design while working with Electrolux and subsequently applied his approach consulting with brands such as iittala, Assa Abloy and more recently Hewlett Packard. He has a Masters in Industrial Design (Engineering) from Birmingham City University.


CROSSING THE RUBICON


Getting design understood and valued at board level is the holy grail – but that means talking in business terms and converting the sceptics, argues Raymond Turner in the first of a series.

According to Eryl Smith, then Managing Director of the Terminal 5 project for Heathrow, the biggest challenge for everyone concerned in delivering the new terminal was to “consider its creation in a truly open-minded manner”. Only that way, he believed, would T5 remain both a relevant and refreshing experience for travellers for decades beyond its launch. To achieve this, he argued, everyone involved in its creation needed to employ not only their intellectual capacity, logical reasoned thought, but also their imagination. The envisioning, planning and design of T5 tested every aspect of this challenge.

This was design in action, and the success of the project speaks for itself. But many businesses don’t have the foresight of Eryl Smith, and they certainly don’t have the same confidence in design and design leadership.

So how can we get company boards to take design seriously? How can we convince them to take an enlightened approach to design, to see how using design strategically can transform their businesses and secure competitive advantage for the short and long terms? It’s a question I get asked a great deal, and one which I have spent a lot of time considering. But the short answer to this complex question is

CROSSINGTHE RUBICON


actually pretty simple: talk the board’s language and make the arguments in terms that are meaningful to those boards.

The fact of the matter is that all products and services are dependent on design for their very being – without it they cannot exist, and getting the most from the investment is a challenge, and responsibility, for client and designer alike. But it’s how design is viewed that matters: is it a cost, or is it an investment?

On the one hand, the challenge facing the design client, irrespective of company size or sector, is ‘How do I increase my return on design investment while at the same time reducing the cost of that investment?’ On the other hand, the challenge facing the design consultant or staff designer is ‘How do I ensure that my client sees their commitment to design as an investment not a cost?’

Within this challenging environment every successful client/designer relationship has, at its core, the overriding objective of using design as a means of adding value, and thereby a return on design investment. If ‘added value’ is not at the core of this relationship, then the inevitable consequence is that the design work will be seen as a commodity where the cheapest wins the day – and, by definition, only one supplier can be the cheapest!

In many spheres the term design has become reduced to being part of a sales slogan used to promote anything and everything - designer sunglasses, designer chocolates, designer jeans or designer alcoholic pop drinks. This highly inflated and superficial use of the word design, so common in everyday experience, hides its profound potential contribution to making business more successful and society more enjoyable.

Once all this clap-trap about ‘designerly things’ in sales promotion has been stripped away, there is one inescapable conclusion: design is a key contributor to making organisations successful in what they set out to do, and so ranks as a commercial imperative.

This is not a one person job however. Getting all other relevant people aligned with this proposition is the main task in front of any design leader.

To achieve this means addressing two critical challenges. First, to create a comprehensive understanding of what is possible with design, and second, to demonstrate the value that design can bring.

My first day as Design Director of London Transport was an education when meeting the chairman and managing director of one of its main operating businesses. He was a very warm and welcoming person by nature who, at this first meeting, told me clearly that he had not supported my appointment when it came to the Executive Committee for approval. We had never met before this so his position was not based on a clash of personalities. It was based on an assumption, or a prejudice. He believed I would get in the way of his reinvestment programme by trying to exercise some superficial design judgment or personal taste opinions about what his line managers were doing with design.

I remember being shaken by his comment and reacted by saying the first thing that came into my mind – ‘You have my reassurance I will not interfere with any design work your managers are engaged in, unless, or course, I don’t believe they are getting value for money from it’. Subsequently, of course, I had to prove my point and, fortunately, was able to do so. We became close colleagues and he was one of my most supportive allies – all because of being able to show how investment in design could be maximized, could be focused on the challenges his business was facing and would improve the quality of service to his customers.

However, it is by no means easy work to translate design thinking into business outcomes. For many design-trained people it involves stepping outside their comfort zone. For business people it may mean overcoming some basic prejudices if design is to be taken seriously. Get over these hurdles, however, and design will contribute to the transformation agenda facing businesses today and deliver lasting strategic value.

To earn support for design from within a business, it must be seen to have a positive impact on the key business measures that the business uses to judge its own success. Design leaders can always get business executives’ attention if they use the language executives use themselves. Let them see that design can contribute to gross and net margin, return on investment or capital employed, operating costs or the value of less tangible assets like brands. It is hard to find a resource in business that has a more comprehensive impact on these measures than design.

CROSSING THE RUBICON CROSSING THE RUBICON

Left: Design is rarely understood by the sceptic, who sees the surface value but not the creative insight and work behind the scenes

‘How can we get company boards to take design seriously? How can we convince them that using design strategically can transform their

businesses and secure competitive advantage?’


Yet, despite the ease with which it can be demonstrated, this opportunity is often ignored in the battle to put design onto the transformation agenda and consequently it so often fails to register.

There are five key stages in getting buy-in: converting the sceptics and creating new advocates for design; delivering strategy and demonstrating how design manifests strategic intent; adding value by measuring design’s impact on business; building reputation; and analysing design spend to demonstrate the value created.

In future articles I’ll consider all these stages, but for now let’s focus on the first stage one: identifying and nurturing the true design advocates within your business, whilst ‘managing’ the sceptics: those who mean well but do design’s reputation no favours: the people – sometimes clients of design consultants, sometimes line managers in a company employing staff designers – who think they understand the role and potential of design, but only see its most superficial qualities. They see design as a commodity, a service that can be bought on an

Sceptics also believe design is elitist and expensive. After all, designers charge big fees which business people find hard to accept because they cannot quantify the return for the money they spend on it. They believe, erroneously, only big businesses have the opportunity, and the money, to do something with design (forgetting the fact that most design agencies are SMEs). Design, they argue, belongs in another world; it is intimidating, overwhelming, and, ultimately, a ‘nice to have’.

Sceptics see design as irrelevant because they can’t see that it adds any real value. They believe there are far more important things to think about like market share, turnover and profit margin. The fact that these views are held by so many is not surprising considering that we are bombarded with the word design wherever we look and this, inevitably, conditions our expectations of it.

So how can we convince the sceptics of the true value of design? How can we demonstrate that design is one of a company’s most strategically potent assets which can have a direct bearing on

CROSSING THE RUBICON

ad-hoc basis whenever they think it appropriate. They do not see it as something that can contribute to the long-term wealth of the business. If this is the case then these sceptics need to be re-educated so that their enthusiasm helps, rather than hinders, the cause.

The issue of how to deal with design sceptics has been around for a long time; it never has been (and is unlikely to ever be) something that can be solved with subtlety and guile. My mantra on this prejudice is straightforward: ‘persuade by the authority of your argument, not the argument of your authority’.

But first we must identify our targets. Sceptics are easily recognized because they tend to share the general view of many others that design is superficial, something that gets added after the real work has been completed. Like the icing on the cake, it’s the finishing touch.

its wealth creating capability? Well, finding good examples of

where design has led to competitive advantage is always a good

start; the next step is dismantling their prejudices one by one.

Sceptics will always remain so unless they are brought to a

position of understanding the potential breadth and depth of the

influence design can have in their organisation. If you are lucky

to either find a company that has successfully used design

before, or a manager that has done so, then the task should

be easier. Although it should not be assumed, even then, that

‘design will speak for itself’. It must be given a persuasive voice

and it is the responsibility of design managers and design leaders

to do this. If they don’t, nothing will change because there is

rarely anyone else within an organisation that could, or would,

do it instead.


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.

Raymond Turner FCSD, formerly Group Design Director at BAA, is now an independent strategic design consultant and author of ‘Design Leadership – securing the strategic value of design’ available from: gowerpublishing.com

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By getting all the different processes under the microscope, and looking at them from the perspective of the patient experience, the designers were able to pinpoint the key issues that were causing problems.


WHEN DESIGN SAVES LIVES


ABOVEMarie Hartmann Design Director and Partner at DesignIT

DESIGNSAVES LIVES

WHEN

“As I stretched my arms I noticed a depression in my breast. I immediately thought it was cancer. And then I felt the tumour. We were in shock for one day and then I called the doctor.”

Like many women, Berit Bunkan Heir, a breast cancer patient in Oslo, Norway, was dreading the wait between finding a lump in her breast to being seen at hospital for diagnosis of breast cancer. Delays of weeks often stretched into months at the hospital, heightening stress and uncertainty and, most importantly, adversely affecting outcomes: early diagnosis can be the difference between life and death.

But it was only when Skule Storheill, Director of Innovation at The Norwegian Centre of Design and Architecture and Andreas Moan, Project Director at Oslo University Hospital respectively, began to look at the systemic and experiential issues affecting breast cancer outcomes that new possibilities began to be considered.

The story started when Andreas began to look at why it took the hospital so long to get patients through the diagnostic process. “It was clear how important early diagnosis was to both patient outcomes and patient experience, but whereas work had been done to analyse processes in the hospital, no one had ever thought to research patients and their experience,” he explains.

Convinced that a new approach was required, Andreas applied for a grant from the Design Innovation Programme to fund research to map the patient experience from when a tumour is detected in a woman’s breast for the first time by a general practitioner

Design thinking has transformed the experience and outcomes for breast cancer patients in a Norwegian hospital. Hannah Paterson and Gemma Townley report.


to a diagnosis at the hospital in order to decide if the tumour is malignant or benign. The project went to public tender, and the agency DesignIt was appointed.

The research revealed a process that was categorically failing patients: intolerable delays were experienced between lump detection and hospital appointment, and there were further delays between consultation and diagnosis. With each delay, the likelihood of a successful outcome was diminished.

It was clear that something had to change, so DesignIt, who describe themselves as ‘management consultants with warm hands’, started to apply design processes to understand what was going wrong. “We applied a fairly standard design process, where we gathered insight about the patients, hospital staff and GPs/private clinics and mapped out the existing patient journey,” explains Marie Hartmann, Design Director and Partner at the agency.

And this focus on ‘customer experience’ revealed some very interesting findings. “What was immediately evident was that all the patients we talked to had experienced a ‘turning-point’ in terms of their experience with the hospital at the exact moment they got their cancer diagnosis,” Marie explains. “Everyone’s experience got better AFTER they had been diagnosed. It’s obviously a terrible diagnosis to receive, so this was very surprising to us. However, it made sense when we realised that a woman considers herself a patient the moment she discovers a lump in her breast, whereas for the hospital, a woman is only considered a patient when she is diagnosed


with cancer. Realising this was a turning-point for us too, because our task became much clearer: we had to create a new service where the patient feels confident that they are in the care of the hospital the moment they leave their doctor’s office. The task was to create a straight path from the doctor, and focus on getting people diagnosed as soon as possible.”

This was going to be no quick fix, however. “Oslo University Hospital is the largest hospital

in Scandinavia, a massive public organisation,” Marie concedes, “and it’s not easy to make any sort of change within such a system. But the collaborative, visual, and iterative nature of the design work made it possible for the hospital staff to work together as a team to envision a new system.”

This team work was very new for the hospital. “All the different disciplines involved in breast cancer diagnostics

“What’s impressed me most about this process is the enthusiasm it’s been met with by all who work in this field”

LEFTAndreas Moan, Project Director, Oslo University Hospital (left) and Skule Storheill, Director of Innovation at the Norwegian Centre of Design & Architecture

worked in silos,” Marie recalls. “From GP to the referral office to the radiologists to the pathologist to the surgeon to the oncologist to the plastic surgeon - none had a real picture of how the entire process worked or what the experience was like for the patient. Referrals and diagnostics were structured around the different professionals’ individual work routines. Everything was segmented, and there was no single common point of contact through the process. The result was a highly

inefficient and incoherent patient experience, with very little support for a highly sensitive user group.”

DesignIt established a new process that was designed around the patient, a radical concept for the hospital.

The designers started by mapping out the optimised patient experience, and worked backwards from that, working out what the GPs, receptionists, radiologists, nurses, pathologists, oncologists and surgeons would have to do to achieve this better experience.

And gradually the medical team came on board. Pathologist Kristina Myrvold explains: “I had no belief that designers would understand how to run a hospital,

Rather than the patient having to organise themselves around the hospital, the hospital now adapts to the patient and a specific and clear process is in place for all to follow:

DAY 01The GP makes a clinical examination, before making a referral based on urgency. The quality of this referral is imperative, and the project has ensured improvements have been made in this area including the introduction of an enhanced internet site for GPs. Under the new guidelines all referrals are now sent to the same place, where before there was confusion on this. Patients are also given a brochure clearly explaining next steps along with a phone number to call with any questions, helping to alleviate the sense of fear and uncertainty at this difficult time.

DAY 02A radiologist now assesses all of the referrals on a daily basis to ensure prompt call up of patients and the appointments are scheduled quickly, with time now freed up by the employment of a private institute and the streamlining of the diagnostics teams’ schedules.

DAY 03The patient attends the appointment and tried and tested procedures are applied such as diagnostics, taking pictures and samples. If possible, the aim is to try and ensure these all take place on the same day.

The samples are analysed within five days and after that treatment begins within the next twenty days, which is in line with government treatment targets and a huge step forwards in helping alleviate the distress patients feel at this most vulnerable time. The project is quite simply a fantastic example of design thinking not only streamlining a complex process to the benefit of all those involved, but also the hugely positive impact improved user experience can have on people’s lives.

HOW IT WORKS:


but they opened up an arena to get us talking, shedding light on all aspects of the treatment process. We came to a shared understanding of what patients might have to endure.”

What came out of the conversations led to something extraordinary. “The designers asked a host of questions, simple questions that seemed quite basic to us, but which shed light on a lot of the problems,” Myrvold continues. “We’re a diverse group of professionals, but we have different perspectives on the treatment process itself.”

Simply by getting all the different processes under the microscope, and looking at them from the perspective of the patient experience, the designers were able to pinpoint the key issues that were causing problems. “It’s a question of understanding the situation not just in terms of reading reports or talking to people, but by observing how people work and collaborate,” says Marie. “We used a unique method in order to translate user-insights into various solutions, visualisation techniques which enable professionals of varying disciplines to understand the message. In this way the scope of the mission was clarified almost as if by magic.”

The outcome of the project is a new process that, quite simply, saves lives. GPs examine patients, make a referral (using an improved website), and all referrals go to the same place, triggering an appointment the next day. At the same time, the GP equips the patient with all the information they need via a specially produced brochure. Samples are analysed within five days, treatment begins within 20, and, crucially, waiting times have been reduced from 12 weeks to 48 hours – all achieved not through investments in new equipment or facilities, but through the power and insight of design thinking.

This groundbreaking and unique innovation project placed emphasis on listening to patients and has succeeded in implementing an entirely new way of organising resources to better meet their needs. It is now directly benefiting around 5,000 patients a year, as well as all of the professional medical staff involved in breast cancer diagnostics at the hospital.

Marie hopes that design thinking might be applied more across public services. “Very few public services have actually been holistically designed,” she explains. “They have just evolved and been pieced together from different departments’ objectives and work routines. I believe millions of organisations could benefit from actually identifying the best user-experience (rather than just organisational objectives or operational efficiency), and working backwards from that.”

Ellen Schlichting, a surgeon at the hospital, agrees. “What’s impressed me most about this process is the enthusiasm it’s been met with by all who work in this field,” she says. “This enthusiasm was in no way a given, since there have been a number of aborted projects, but

everyone wants this – all departments, professions and both hospitals that are involved. Asking patients for their opinion is quite scary because they give us answers that challenge your own comfort zone, but the patients are the most radical agents for change – it’s worth listening to them.”

Which is why the last word should go to Berit Bunkan Heir. “Two days after calling the doctor, and here I am. It’s marvellous,” she says, through tears. “In such a difficult situation, they’ve shown great care, been instructive and kind.”

WHEN DESIGN SAVES LIVES

uktvG2… Catchy? Memorable? Confusing? Who would have thought it would become the biggest television channel outside of the public broadcasters and watched by more than half the men in the UK, along with millions of women too.

When uktv reinvented its channel uktvG2 in October 2007, within one-month audience share increased by 35%, in 3 months they had attracted an additional 8 million viewers and in 6 months delivered £4.5m in profit. “One of the most successful TV marketing coups of the last decade” as John Plunked, Chairman of the Broadcasting Press Guild, called it.

In a time when total TV viewing in the UK is down across all other networks, the rebranded channel continues

to go from strength-to-strength more than seven years later. That channel is Dave – the iconic brand Dave, the brand that feels like a friend, draws us in, has personality; makes us want to be a viewer.

Dave now reaches over 26 million people every month. By the end of 2013 it had grown share by over 20% on the previous year and has maintained its growth trajectory across 2014. It is the number 1 non-PSB channel in the country. It is an unquestionable story of the power of branding and as UKTV’s Marketing Director, Simon Michaelides, points out “We successfully created an iconic TV brand that is greater than the sum of its parts; with a purpose (“adding wit to your world”) that extends beyond the TV screen.”

Few could have predicted the run-away success of Dave, a small digital channel that transformed into an iconic brand, says Hannah Paterson

BACK IN TIME

The Goliath


BACK IN TIME

And so the world of Dave was born. Engaging viewers with unusual situations and stories. Oil paintings, gilt frames, stuffed giraffes and zebras all helped to create a highly peculiar sense of place and introduced to the public an utterly compelling, adventurous, unique and ever-evolving brand.



v

People have become such passionate advocates of Dave that when surveyed:

BACK IN TIME

Back in 2007 the marketplace for small digital TV channels was becoming increasingly complex. The explosion of channel choice (over 470!), along with the arrival of on-demand services, was making channel growth intensely difficult to achieve. uktvG2 was a minor player comprised almost entirely of repeats, with no resources to buy new shows and in danger of being passed over and never watched.

uktv’s core objective was to increase the number of 16-44 year old men watching the network. Following a strategic review of the business, the company identified an opportunity for growth by reaching out to this lucrative target audience through Freeview, replacing uktv History’s Freeview slot with uktvG2. A straight swap would have naturally grown their audience, but the review identified some significant issues such as virtual invisibility and a confusing name, that would stop the opportunity being maximised and probably lead only to a short term ‘hit’.

It was clear from research that the programmes featured on the channel were strong – with viewers loving their content and the ‘intelligent and irreverent humour’ they shared – but the channel was weak. If they wanted to make a splash, they were going to have to work extremely hard. In a brave move, uktv and their appointed agency Red Bee

Media identified how a strong design could play a powerful role in helping viewers navigate the congested TV landscape by signalling what they stood for. They were clear that they needed to think longer-term; that they needed to create a distinct, personality viewers could instantly recognise. They needed a brand.

Overturning conventions for traditional network branding, they set out a strategy to be more than just a channel – it was a ‘place’ to spend time with very funny men like Stephen Fry and Paul Merton – a surrogate, if you like, for being down the pub with their amusing mates. It would be the ‘home of witty banter’.

First, the decision was made that the uktv name needed to go, and, furthermore, letters and numerals were to be avoided when choosing a new one. For real stand out and personality a name that engendered passion was required. And ‘Dave’ was just that. It treated the channel as a friend and it gave that friend personality. What’s more, no other channels had called themselves a Christian name, ever. The creative invention came straight out of the insight – rather than present ‘Dave’ the person, they would present him as a ‘location’, with tone playing a critical role in communicating and reflecting the nature of their content – more ‘Stephen Fry’, less ‘Bernard Manning’.

And so the world of Dave was born. Engaging viewers with unusual situations and stories. Oil paintings, gilt frames, stuffed giraffes and zebras all helped to create a highly peculiar sense of place and introduced to the public an utterly compelling, adventurous, unique and ever-evolving brand. A brand that people became such passionate advocates of, that when surveyed, 53% of adults claimed to watch the channel weekly – a 100% overstatement of the actual weekly reach of 25%.

Over seven years later, with the brand embedded at the very heart of the business and permeated throughout, the channel continues to thrive. As Simon Michaelides concludes of today’s ‘Dave’, “by constantly galvanising around a shared understanding of the brand identity, we collaborate to draw together the various parts, from the programming and the on-air look and feel, to the marketing communications, and wider activities such as Dave’s Leicester Comedy Festival and our award winning podcasts. Dave’s business performance is not only a sign of its strength as a brand, but is also a measure of how hard our external partners, and the various functions within our business, work together to build that brand.”

Dave – DBA Design Effectiveness Awards Grand Prix winner 2008.

The reinvention

Rip Roaring factsJoint number 1 non-terrestrial channel amongst their target audience within 5 months

35% increase in audience share in just one month

8 million additional viewers were added in only 3 months

£4.5 million profit delivered in 6 months (growing from the 5th to 2nd most profitable

channel in uktv portfolio)


53% of adults claimed to watch the channel weekly

The actual weekly reach is 25% – a 100% overstatement

v

Turn off your phone, think big, fulfil your promises and look after your people: succeeding in the world of branding is easy if you follow these

simple rules, argues Nick Liddell

HOW TO GET AHEAD IN

BRANDING


#1 Do what you say you will

Nobody will work with you unless they feel they can trust you. And nothing erodes trust quicker than failing to deliver on a promise. It’s a boring place to start, but this means noting down every commitment you make, setting a deadline and then delivering to it. Unless you can master this basic rule, there is little point even reading what follows, because you’ll be too busy looking for your next job.

#2 Don’t box yourself in

Many people seem to think of themselves in either/or terms: analytical or creative; visual or verbal; left-brain or rightbrain; intuitive or judgemental; introvert or extrovert. Really great consultants are all of these. They are analytical and creative, capable of communicating through visuals as well as verbally. Unless you have a doctor’s note that says otherwise, you’re probably capable of whole brain thinking and feeling. Deciding that you’re left-brain or right-brain is simply selling yourself short.

#3 You are what you eat

Moving seamlessly from numbers to ideas to words to images requires a balanced diet of material. If you struggle with numeracy, spend more time looking for stories in the profit & loss accounts of businesses you find interesting. If you don’t feel comfortable with your level of visual literacy, read Paul Rand or Milton Glaser; read graphic novels. If you struggle to come up with ideas then visit museums and galleries. Open your eyes to the world around you. One of the great things about being a brand consultant is that we are constantly surrounded by relevant stimulus. And we travel frequently. We are never short of opportunities to appreciate the cultural, creative and commercial value that brands inspire.

#4 It’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission

An idea can only be considered great once it has succeeded. Until then, you’ll find there are dozens of reasons why an idea might fail. And relatively few compelling reasons for why it might succeed. If you’re smart and you have a solid basis for believing in what you’re doing, then I’d suggest you go for it. If things don’t go as planned then apologise without hesitation, without reserve and without complaint. Then review rules 11 and 8 in that order.

#5 There is such a thing as a bad idea

It’s absurd to suggest otherwise. And it’s your job to tell the difference between bad and good. So think deeply about this distinction and learn to critique your own work. Keep what works. Fix what’s broken. Most people will be too polite to tell you the truth about your work, so don’t rely on them to do so.

#6 Look after the talent

At some point in your career you may be given a team to manage. You’ll be tempted to think that the members of your team work for you, but the opposite is true: you work for them. Your success will depend entirely on the extent to which they feel respected and inspired by you. You won’t be able to progress in your career unless they can step up and fill the gap you leave behind. That’s why it’s important to recruit people you think are better than you and to do everything you can to hold on to them. Because trying to replace great people is one of the most soul-destroying, time-consuming and expensive jobs you will ever undertake. And if you’re not a manager yet, enjoy the freedom while it lasts.


#7 Always ask what you could have done better

One of the things I love about brand consultancy is that you could work for a hundred years and still have plenty to learn. Fifteen years in to my career, I feel like I’m just getting started. Your ability to learn is directly proportional to the number of times you ask, “What could I have done better?” At first, people will laugh at you for repeating the question after every pitch, briefing, debrief, or seminar. But over time, they will begin to ask the same question themselves. It’s not a sign of paranoia. It demonstrates that you’ve got the confidence to accept you’re not perfect and the desire to improve.

#8 Worry about the big stuff first, then take care of the detail

Great brand strategy involves adopting a strong point of view about the future and how you intend to make it better. It should be expansive and imaginative. This is what motivates people to turn strategy into reality. But strategy isn’t a purely intellectual exercise; it should also be practical. Grand visions don’t count for anything if they can’t be delivered profitably. A good brand strategist reconciles the big picture with the little picture. This also applies to the way you present your work: typos, pixelated images, poor alignment, missing page numbers and sloppy delivery can critically undermine the quality of your thinking in the eyes of your colleagues and your clients. Read your work before sharing it with others. Rehearse before you present.

#9 Take it personally

This is the advice my first boss ever gave to me: you’re going to spend most of your waking adult life at work; if you don’t take it personally then you’ll die a little every day. He was right. If you love your job, you’ll pour a lot of your heart and soul into it. It’s absolutely right that you should take it personally. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be able to critique your work or to receive criticism from others. You should be able to bask in the glory of a job well done. But you should also embrace the bitter sting of failure; it’s what helps you grow up.

#10 Nobody dies

Sticking with the subject of failure, it’s inevitable that at some point you’re going to screw something up. Someone will shout at you. They might threaten to fire you and you might deserve it. But one of the manywonderful things about brand consultancy is that nobody dies. You’ll find that few situations are beyond your ability to redeem. This also means that you don’t have to feel guilty about switching off your phone for the weekend, during your summer holiday or on your daughter’s birthday. It doesn’t kill anybody in brand consultancy to take a break once in a while.

#11 Give people the opportunity to disappoint you

One of the benefits of switching off your phone while you’re on holiday is that it gives the people you work with an opportunity to step-up in yourabsence. It’s very possible they might screw things up. But it’s also possible that they will positively surprise you. Brand consultants are supposed to be problem solvers. This is why one of the worst mistakes that managers can make is to try to fix everything for the people who work with them. One of my favourite line managers would respond toany request for help from his team with the same question, “Before I help you, can you tell me what steps you’ve taken to fix this problem yourself?” At first, I assumed he was lazy. Perhaps he was. But I quickly realised that I was capable of solving most of my problems without his help. This is the flipside of delegation, which is one of the hardest things we have to learn to do as we become more senior.

#12 Develop an allergy to compromise

We can’t tell clients anything they don’t already know about their business. The value we bring is in applying insight from one category to another. The sheer number of businesses, markets and industries consultants are exposed to gives us a fantastic opportunity to lend a breadth of perspective to a client’s problem. We exist to challenge our clients to see things differently. This is the value we bring. It’s (another) one of the reasons why being a brand consultant is so interesting. To quote the Financial Times, “In the ping pong [of discussion], you need the pong.” We’re not here to start arguments or fights, but we are here to help people go to places they wouldn’t have reached on their own. Compromise is the enemy of challenge. Being open to criticism can improve your work immeasurably. Being open to compromise dilutes the quality of your ideas, devalues the quality of your work, and defeats the point of your chosen profession.

Nick Liddell is Strategy Director, Dragon Rouge


We live in the age of service. Our economy depends on service businesses. Whatever you design, you can bet your bottom dollar that it’ll be consumed as part of a service. The chair in your hotel lounge, the magazine that comes free with your shopping, the mobile app that lets you buy a DVD, the widget that lets you remotely manage your central heating. Customers like products that contribute to a wider experience. Businesses like customers that buy into wider experiences, as they tend to spend more.

So what we need is designers who can orchestrate these service experiences. Designers who can elevate up out of information design, digital design, marketing design and product design into ‘service design’. These designers are able to look at the end-to-end experience and apply interdisciplinary design to deliver an experience that resonates at every touchpoint. These sorts of designers are massively in demand.

Yet our design schools continue to pump out design graduates that are very craft and product focused. Don’t get me wrong, these skills remain valuable, but I feel we’re missing a trick.

One organisation that’s setting the blueprint for educating this new breed of designer is the Royal College of Art (RCA). Their Service Design MA is putting out graduates that are getting snapped up by an enviable roster of blue chips and agencies, from Apple to Ideo. It’s worth calling out what they’re doing right.

Leadership – Nick de Leon has created a course that is commercially rigorous. Service design is not like other design disciplines. The end is not a designed artefact – the end is a live service that is commercially profitable. I’ve said before that service design creates the conditions for profitable customer behaviours – I think that the RCA’s course understands that very well.

Practical – as well as learning method, RCA students are expected to apply that method in real world environments. A project from last year prototyped a new form of localised job agency from a garage in north London. Service design can’t be done in the corner with headphones on. So the RCA course puts student theory into direct contact with reality, reinforcing the importance of agile and iterative practice in a digital era.

Networked – the team at the RCA do a good job getting challenging briefs from real companies, so that their students get to tackle concrete challenges. Anyone can design an abstract service. The challenge is to design a service within a legacy system, with all the constraints and challenges you’d expect – technology that’s hard to change, staff who have ingrained habits, processes that are broken. RCA grads are grounded by this experience, and produce better work as a result.

Luckily the RCA isn’t alone in spotting this opportunity, and more service design courses are coming online. But given that services make up 97% of the economy, be reassured that the UK will need plenty more.

Joel Bailey is a service design consultant and former director of experience and service design at Capita.

Service designers have never been more in demand, but design education has failed to catch up… until now, reveals Joel Bailey

AT YOUR SERVICE


what we need is designers who can orchestrate these service experiences


to your to do list

Time to move

PENSIONS


A long time ago, an advert was doing the rounds on television with a man telling us that when he retired, ‘he wanted to live a little’, and his wife retorting that she was fully intending to ‘live a lot’. These dreams are likely to be more realistic following the announcement that all businesses must offer auto-enrolment into workplace pensions by 2017, but the pressure is on for small businesses to get themselves into gear, because pensions can be costly and complicated, not to mention time consuming.

As John Sutherland, Creative Partner at BPDS, puts it: “We looked into pensions a little while ago; we were looking for a fairly conservative drawdown portfolio with decent yields. But the complexity of the terminologies, volatility of the market and the fact that our chosen provider, HSBC, was suddenly front page news for having the worst performing pensions ever, made us think again.”

The problem is, pensions might be something you’ve been firmly placing on the ‘maybe next year’ pile, but auto-enrolment means that you can’t avoid it for much longer if you employ staff, and the sooner you develop a plan, the easier it will be.

So what does auto-enrolment actually mean? Simply put, you need to have a pension scheme, and you need to enrol anyone who works for you.

The process started in 2012 when large companies were required to implement the changes; small companies will start the process in 2015 with all UK companies enrolled by April 2017 (if you were set up after 2012 you have a little more time, with staging dates ranging from May 2017 to February 2018).

All qualifying staff (that’s anyone aged between 22 and the state pension age, earning £10,000 or more) must be enrolled into the scheme and pay contributions into it. Employees can choose to opt out, but employers cannot. Minimum contributions by employers must be 1% (with a corresponding 0.8% from the employee); with the 0.2% tax relief, this equates to 2% of earnings. These contributions must rise to 4% from the employer and 3% from the employee by October 2018.

The benefits are likely to be considerable to your employees, and the scheme is going to, rightly, focus all our minds on retirement provision.

As John puts it, ‘It gently persuades people into thinking about pension provision. Most people in their 20s think they’re indestructible and planning for retirement is rarely a consideration. We’ve seen it when we’re working on health plans for clients – the 18-25 market really don’t care about comprehensive health-screening, even as a free employee benefit.”

Anything that forces us all to take responsibility for their future has got to be a good thing. And with financial experts recommending that we need to save a retirement pot of over £400,000 if we want to achieve a pension income of around £26,000, it’s definitely time to start saving.

But whilst pensions are important and can act as a valuable employee benefit, an additional 4% on payroll costs will have a huge impact on businesses who have struggled to even offer pay-rises in recent years. It won’t be quite as painful as it sounds, because contributing into a pension scheme will reduce your National Insurance contributions; employee contributions come out of gross earnings, meaning less National Insurance to pay at the end of the month. But it’s still a large amount of money, which needs to be planned for.

So how do you go setting up a scheme? Financial advice is essential – there is nothing simple about setting up a pension scheme from scratch.

But the good news is that there are many ‘turn key’ options on the market. Private providers such as Scottish Widows, Legal & General and Aviva have schemes aimed specifically at small businesses, whilst the taxpayer-backed NEST scheme is available to all. A financial adviser will be able to talk you through the various options, cost them out, and also ensure that employees receive comprehensive information on the scheme.

But ultimately, the first move has to be taking pension provision off the ‘next year’ pile and putting it firmly on your ‘to do’ list. Complexity, cost, and apathy will not be accepted as genuine excuses by the government. And anyway, don’t you want to live a little in retirement – or even a lot?

Gemma Townley is the Editor of Design in Business

Auto-enrolment means that retirement planning should be at the top of your priority list,

writes Gemma Townley

Most people in their 20s think they’re indestructible and planning for retirement is rarely a consideration

PENSIONS


RELEVANCE IS EVERYTHINGZOMBIE BRANDS

ILLUSTRATION DAMIEN WEIGHILL


ZOMBIE BRANDS

Zombie brands are simply those that have failed to demonstrate their currency to consumers, and the new digital economy is only going to make the challenge more pressing, argues Mark Artus

The late Rodney Fitch, a huge champion of design, believed that shopping was the purpose of life and that design should help to enrich everyone’s shopping experience. He was certainly right from my perspective, but over the last few years the tectonic retail plates have shifted and will continue to reverberate for some time. Simply put, we are now living in a new digital world, and this has fundamentally changed the way we now want to shop. The good news is that innovation feeds on disruption, so we are at a seminal point in the evolution of the retail experience… but will it be for the better?

Each day we head through life surrounded by businesses and their brands. However, recent estimates predict around 100,000 zombie companies and brands operate worldwide. Zombie brands are those which have lost their purpose or meaning to us, brands such as Kodak, Mothercare, Warburtons. These brands are on life-support, their sales are probably flat lining and they aren’t generating the profitability required to grow.

There will be many internal reasons for this that cannot be seen, but there is one that is very clear: these companies have lost their relevance to us, and have failed to ensure that their brands are meaningfully different in a competitive marketplace.

These companies had the intellect and capability to build their brands in the first place, so what happened? Why did things start going wrong?

In my opinion, the tectonic plate shift that has occurred has fundamentally changed the rules of retailing and branding, so boardrooms needed to adapt accordingly, but many have struggled with this.

Take the grocery business. It is hard to imagine that they are still following the basic rules invented in France over 40 years ago, and yet whilst customers’ shopping habits have been changing for some time, some retailers still expect shoppers to trudge around the aisles that are suited far more to store efficiency than they are to the shopper journey. And this is wherein the problem lies.

Massive super stores have built amazingly complex systems over this time to ensure that we get the very best when we need it 24-7. The algorithms to achieve this kind of distribution must be mind blowing and

require these big companies to build ever more complex procedures and silos, but these juggernauts mean that it is hard for these procedures to change as fast as consumer preferences. We do like the freshness, the convenience, the quality, the variety, but did we mention that we also really like the experience? The ‘big shop’ is declining, but that isn’t just down to lifestyle factors; it’s also because the ‘big shop’ is a rather boring affair. Talk to anyone about some of the big players and they will tell you that something has been lost, that the drive for efficiency has adversely impacted on the personality and the emotion of the experience. The line “every little helps’ had a real purpose once upon a time, but we all now wonder who is being helped – us or the shareholders.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Retailers such as John Lewis, Waitrose and Next have demonstrated that engaging customers in this brave new world is achievable – it just takes courage and innovation, looking at the world through the eyes of their customers and giving them what they want – whether that’s same-day delivery or consistent, unbeatable quality. Brands such as Dove, Virgin, Apple and Land Rover, meanwhile, continue to build customer loyalty with products that resonate with consumers; that engage and excite us – functionally, intellectually and emotionally. So how do these companies do it? It’s simple, really – although not simple to achieve by any means. They do it by having brands that are relevant and meaningful; by having confidence in business models that don’t depend on discounting to attract customers; and by building (and nurturing) long term relationships with consumers.

Today we have the perfect storm: a struggling economy, city pressure with its demand for short-term results, and a fundamental shift in our shopping habits. But out of crisis comes opportunity, and this is definitely the case in retail. Those who can work out how to appeal to us at an emotional level, who can make us feel good about ourselves as we shop, and who turn a necessary chore into a pleasurable experience (whether online or in-store) are surely the companies who will continue to be relevant for years to come.

Mark Artus is CEO of 1HQ


01

Design is no longer limited to an intermittent logo blitz. It has to be an ongoing process ensuring that the organisation and what it offers are always as good as they can be. And when things are as good as they can be, customers reciprocate.


DESIGN EFFECTIVENESS AWARDSA taste of things to come


01 & 02

BT Home Hub 5, Grand Prix Winner

by Alloy

03

Keelham Farm Shop Gold Winner

Brand Identity under £100,000 by Thompson

Brand Partners

03

02

Business has got a real taste for the increased value that design can bring to quality earnings and reputation, differentiation and bottom-line performance, and this year’s winners of the DBA’s Design Effectiveness Awards lend quantifiable proof to this claim.

Design and quality earnings

Today’s business world is global, fast-moving and complex. Given that any organisation, no matter how small, has multiple stakeholders, how it is seen, experienced and interacts with each of them, across multiple channels, adds to this complexity. Stakeholders include, at a minimum, staff, customers and shareholders. The active management of the design process to affect their experiences is now more important than ever. And as if things weren’t complicated enough already, customers and journalists the world over have instant access to market, company, corporate reputation and customer service stories in an instant – witness the speed with which the markets reacted to the recent financial crises while corporate spin strongly rebutted, for longer than was credible, any suggestions that all was not well.

All this means that design is no longer limited to an intermittent logo blitz. It has to be an ongoing process ensuring that the organisation and what it offers are always as good as they can be. And when things are as good as they can be, customers reciprocate. Consider for a moment this year’s Grand Prix winner.

The BT Home Hub 5 is an integrated VDSL modem and wireless router and is the core device used to connect customers to the BT fibre optic network. A customer experience audit of the BT broadband offer identified several issues that needed to be addressed. At the top

of the list was redesigning the device so that it would fit through letterboxes, thereby eliminating missed deliveries. This redesign saw the ‘windscreen’ form and deployable feet being added to provide stability; the letterbox size has reduced packaging and distribution costs significantly, and now 30% of customers no longer require an engineer visit to install the device. The integration of design with technical innovation and collaborations has also allowed BT to achieve significant experiential benefits. An integrated VDSL modem means a web-based installation process that permits customers to use any wireless device to set up the device. Hub 5 will also reduce BT CO2 emissions by 13,147 tonnes per year and BT customers benefit from millions of pounds in reduced energy costs. (Source: Energy Savings Trust)

The Procter & Gamble Fairy Shelf Ready Packaging project makes a similarly powerful case. These projects show that, when designing, it pays to have a consuming interest in people – customers, operators, end users – because it will create loyalty which is hard to earn, but once earned, protects margins and generates high-quality earnings.

A great showcase for the positive impact that design can have when we use creativity to improve the user experience

Jenny Fleischer is Global Head of

Design Management at Beiersdorf


BT home hub

Fortnum & Mason Teas, Gold winner, Packaging by DECIDE and Peter Windett Associates

Procter & Gamble Fairy Shelf Ready Packaging, Gold Winner, Point of Sale by Webb deVlam

Design and differentiation

History teaches us that strategy, and its part in creating differentiation, becomes more critical in the unforgiving times than it does in the good ones. Experience also teaches that design can make strategy not only visible but also tangible in very many ways. And for busy people living and working in a world where there is ever more information and ever less time, the quickest and most effective means to manifest business strategy is of particular interest.

As we now confront the harsh economic realities of a global, medium-term, recession, intensified by the peculiarities of the many European micro-economic climates, making business strategy tangible is a compelling argument for design investment. As organisations confront the challenges of reduced competitiveness and increased costs, what really is the role of design? More importantly, what is its potential to contribute to the future development of the business? 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 making it visible and tangible in a relevant and powerful way at every organisational touch point. By doing so, differentiation can be created and maintained. The Fortnum & Mason case demonstrates this point well.

London specialist food store Fortnum & Mason were looking to reconfirm their brand as a leading seller of speciality teas. A complete overhaul of the packaging of around 150 premium tea blends was undertaken, with Fortnum & Mason’s 300+ year heritage leading the new approach. The packaging needed to reflect the Englishness of the famous brand, effectively communicate the differentiation of the range, improve the shopping experience and create a sense of ‘theatre’ at the flagship Piccadilly store.

The redesign helped to communicate the client’s eminent status both in-store and online, with sales volume increasing dramatically as a result. The new packaging stimulated an average overall 103% increase in total like-for-like range volume sales, and a return on design investment was seen within six months. Additionally, individual ranges such as ‘Famous Teas’ rose by 41% and total internet revenue increased by 82%.

A compelling example of 360⁰ design – beautiful packs, clear range differentiation, easy to navigate merchandising, and a significant sales uplift

Jeremy LindleyGlobal Design DirectorDiageo


Fortnum & Mason Teas

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DBAfinal artworkCMYK.pdf 1 4/20/15 2:00 PM

01 Virgin Atlantic

Economy Meal Gold Winner

Industrial design by MAP & The Virgin Atlantic

In-house Design team

02 Mansfield Library

Silver Winner Interiors & Environments

by Newenglish Design

03

Heck Gold Winner

Brand Identity over £100,000

by Elmwood

04 Dress2Kill

Silver Winner Brand Identity

under £100,000 by Design Bridge

05 Goal for Perform

Gold Winner Brand Identity

under £100,000 by Elmwood

02

01


Design and the bottom line

The fundamental challenge facing every business, irrespective of size, customer base, location or sector, is how to increase their return on investment while at the same time reducing the costs of making that investment. In relation to the ROI ratio, accountants and management consultants forensically examine costs and look to reduce them wherever and however possible. Cost reduction, containment, savings, efficiency and now ‘The Recession’ and its close companion ‘The Crisis’ is the vocabulary of senior management and the boardroom.

In these circumstances it is easy to view design as a cost and not an investment. The inevitable consequence of considering design a commodity is that the cheapest, rather than the best, prevails. Once it becomes a commodity and the only measure of its value is cost, design stops being a wealth-creating tool to realise business potential.

Virgin Atlantic wanted to explore the product and service design aspects of their economy meal, with the drive behind the project to generate concepts that would improve passenger experience and help deliver future investment. By serving dessert separately, tray size could be reduced and the paper liner removed, allowing for fewer trollies on the aircraft, equating to an average weight saving of 129 kg per aircraft. This yields a potential fuel saving each year of 176 tonnes for every aircraft. Norwegian economist Bharat Bhatta suggests that reducing the weight of a plane by 1kg would result in fuel savings of £1,760 a year. Using this figure, the savings made by the new service design solution equate to £8.6 million per year across the fleet of

38 aircraft. Coupled with this the new design has led to the number of passengers who rated the service as excellent increasing by 9% in a 20 month period.

Bottom line performance is not always measured in strictly financial terms, and it is not always the perogative of large companies to benefit from carefully focused design. Mansfield Library is a good example.

Mansfield Central Library, part of Nottinghamshire County Council Libraries Services, was a tired and dull space, failing its community. Hidden away, above the shopping centre, the dated and uninspiring interior was an unpleasant space for the public and staff. The design brief was to create an interior that would offer a unique and uplifting experience for all members of the community to visit time and again. Creating a simple and bright illustrative approach to the library interior has been transformational, resulting in a positive change in the use of the service, contrasting with declining national figures. The investment has seen immediate return, with the number of items borrowed per year increasing 72% and member numbers more than doubling to 4,820. Computer and internet use has also increased with an 88% increase in user hours in 2012 and 75,934 hours logged in 2013. The impact on staff has also been hugely positive, with improved morale and engagement with their working environment and the public.

And finally – the next challenge

The DBA’s Design Effectiveness Awards continue to be the only awards, acknowledged internationally, that recognise the contribution design makes to business performance. However there is much more that can be achieved by the integration of design leadership into the way businesses, government and society work. Using design to help shape the future of these organisations, by securing the value of its strategic input, will increase competitiveness for business, improve government efficiency and make society safer and more enjoyable for everyone. The next challenge for the DBA Design Effectiveness Awards is to demonstrate the reality of this claim.

Raymond Turner FCSD

An impressive design story that delivered significant long term savings, reduced waste and created better service

Maggie HodgettsHead of Graphic DesignWaitrose

Virgin Atlantic

03

04 05

2015 DESIGN EFFECTIVENESS AWARDS


“Design is a core competence of the organisation, deeply embedded in its culture and a key influencer of decisions.

news

Jeremy Lindley, Global Design Director at Diageo has called for businesses to build expertise around design management, arguing that these skills enhance the output from agencies, hard-wire design capability into an organisation, and build openness and creativity into a business.

“Both the UK’s Design Council and the US based Design Management Institute have conducted studies showing that “design led” companies outperform their peers by up to 150%,” he told Design in Business. “The critical feature of these design led companies is not that they employ designers or that they use external agencies, but that design is a core competence of the organisation, deeply embedded in its culture and a key influencer of decisions. They all have at least one powerful design champion in the C-Suite, have consistently employed

and developed talented designers and have high levels of investment in design decisions – not just staff but capital equipment, processes and experiments.”

He argues that the core to driving business results through design is leadership: “My team at Diageo have the job title “Design Leader” and are all exceptional visionaries able to bring about transformation and change thinking.”

Lindley argues that to be a design leader involves:

• Securing buy-in from the top – only then will it genuinely become a strategic tool that can drive consumer connection and brand growth

• Defining and articulating a compelling vision for design

• Sourcing and motivating the best designers – people really are your greatest asset

• Defining a project’s strategic intent – getting underneath the project to really understand what’s required

• Meshing teams together – collaboration results in the best ideas

• Experimenting and play – feeling and sensing is as important as analysis

• Simplifying the process, with as few people involved as possible

• Making brave decisions

• Focusing on execution – it’s the final result that matters, not the concept board

• Applying design thinking to broad business areas – innovation and design need to be integrated

Get it right, Lindley argues, and the rewards are plentiful. “The business performance and cultural benefits of harnessing design have been demonstrated many times,” he says. “Ultimately, creative businesses are more successful.”

DBA Grow intensive design management training will support the development of your own design management skills. Visit dba.org.uk/grow for more details.

DESIGN LED COMPANIES OUTPERFORM THEIR PEERS BY UP TO 150%

DIAGEO DESIGN CHIEF: DESIGN MANAGEMENT IS AS IMPORTANT AS GREAT DESIGN

“


Ever wondered what your clients think of you? Now you know:

• The vast majority can’t remember ever visiting their agency’s website

• They overwhelmingly look forward to meetings with their agency

• They don’t think agencies always work well enough together

• They remember mistakes from over a year ago

• They’re always looking to reduce costs (and generally think their agency is ‘a little more expensive’ than others in the market)

• They want their agency to be more proactive

• And more self-critical

• They would recommend their agency… but with caveats

• They are unable to name five competitors to their current design agency

Source: Up to the light, Jonathan Kirk: www.uptothelight.co.uk

Inflation may be flatlining and the economy uncertain, but UK design businesses are investing in future growth according to the latest Charge Out Rates and Salary Survey from the Design Business Association. 80% of design agencies have reported that business is growing or solid, a significant improvement on last year’s figure of 73%. 50% of agencies expect growth of 10% or more in the year ahead, whilst a further 20% anticipate growth of 8-10%.

Equally encouraging is the 77% of agencies who are anticipating a growth in income this year; in preparation of this, 69% of agencies anticipate a growth in staff numbers this year to keep up with demand.

Wage inflation is on the up with average pay rises of 1-3% likely to be awarded at agencies’ next review; equity owners and statutory directors are likely to face a wage freeze however, reflecting the need to keep a tight reign on costs.

“Design agencies are engaged to drive innovation, develop new product lines, and reinvigorate existing products, so growth within the sector is a great sign of business recovery,” said Deborah Dawton, Chief Executive of the DBA. “We are delighted to see that our members are seeing this investment boosting their growth targets and staff numbers.”

The DBA Charge Out and Salary Survey is published annually.

DESIGN INDUSTRY SHOWING OPTIMISM

WHAT CLIENTS REALLY THINK

OF CLIENTS BELIEVE IT IS ‘DIFFICULT’ TO EVALUATE DESIGN CONCEPTS

88%

DESIGN SHOULD BE DEEPLY EMBEDDED IN A COMPANY’S CULTURE

Design in Business is the must-read magazine for designers and commissioners of design. To make sure you don’t miss out, visit www.designinbusiness.com








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