Design Your Way to Your Customers' Hearts

Think of your favourite product.

Why do you love it? It is likely that it is the design which rouses your passion. Great design delights customers and from a strategic marketing perspective, provides significant benefits to business.

In a competitive market, design differentiates your product, enhances your brand, generates customer loyalty and can even reduce marketing expenditure.

How? By being customer focused.

The most successful products are designed to suit the customer, and result from a commitment to understand customer needs and enhance their overall experience. Commitment, innovation and creativity create customer brand advocacy. Customers become ‘raving fans’ who, via word of mouth will do much of the marketing for your business, which means less expenditure is required to promote your business.

For mature products, re-design can breathe new life (sales and profits) into a product. Adding new features, attributes or presenting the product in a different way, kicks off a new cycle returning the mature product to growth.

Here are five benefits of customer focused design:

1. Differentiates a product amongst competitors

2. Enhances brand – (product functionality, innovation, creativity and customer commitment perspectives)

3. For mature products, re-design can extend product life, returning it to growth, increasing sales and ultimately profits

4. Builds loyalty and brand advocacy by converting customers to ‘raving fans’ and decreasing long term marketing expenditure.

3 Ways to Re-design

Can you shape your product or service to better suit your customers’ needs? Here are three ways to approach a re-design.

1. Integrate product or service re-design into the existing continued improvement processes of your business.

2. Find out what customers want and their thoughts about your products/services. Ask and listen. Social media platforms particularly make this easy to do.

3. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Be a customer of your own product/service for further ideas.

Great, customer focused design is exciting. It combines creativity, innovation and the potential to really satisfy your customer needs.

By Anne Sorensen

Anne Sorensen is Director of Marketing Is Us, a specialist strategy marketing agency. She holds a Bachelor of Business (Marketing), MBA and is a Certified Practising Marketer with the Australian Marketing Institute. T: 1300 560 277 W www.marketingisus.com.au

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