Marketing Review — Fall 2008 - (Page 10)

ONLINE MARKETER assets of over $81 billion and employs 130,000 persons worldwide. P&G is continuing its legacy of business innovation through a recently-launched Design Thinking initiative that seeks to make design a key factor in nearly every aspect of the company’s activities. In order to “jump start” Design Thinking all through the company, P&G is using a team of over one hundred facilitators to conduct Design Thinking workshops at its locations across the globe. Proctor & Gamble’s Design Thinking initiative was developed by Vice-President for Design, Claudia Kotchka. Team members involved in the initiative represent a broad spectrum of expertise ranging from information technology and marketing to research and development, and design. In a recent interview Proctor & Gamble’s CEO, President and Chairman “A.G.” Lafley suggested that Design Thinking can be a positive factor in business innovation through “imagining what could be possible.” The notion of embedding Design Thinking throughout a 130,000-person global company may seem daunting. Yet, Proctor & Gamble clearly believes this effort will pay off through increased corporate creativity and business innovation in the years ahead. Leveraging Design at W Hotels Starwood’s successful W Hotels brand is the fastest-growing luxury hotel brand in the world. It is a design-focused brand that successfully leverages design to differentiate the W Hotels brand from its competitors. The company’s hotels display distinctive and unique design approaches in their architecture, interior spaces, and furnishings. Excellent design makes W Hotels’ promotional and informational materials, advertisements and Web site stand out from those of other hotel brands. The company’s design-focus extends even into uniforms worn by its employees that feature styling by designers such as Michael Kors and Gwen Stefani. A customer-focus and prototyping are two key elements of Design Thinking and W Hotels used both when it launched its sub-brand aloft Hotels within the popular virtual world Second Life. Online visitors were able to experience and comment on the design, providing the company with valuable insights that could be used in the design of its real-world hotels. By focusing on its customers, thinking creatively, and leveraging design to obtain a competitive advantage, W Hotels employs many of the concepts used in Design Thinking to help make it the world’s fastest growing hotel brand in its segment. Design Thinking & Your Organization Design Thinking can be leveraged to help you create new products, services, customer experiences, business and marketing strategies, and more. Following are Increase Your Design IQ Design is being leveraged by an increasing number of organizations from all across the globe as a method of obtaining a competitive advantage. In order to expand your business thinking horizon, and to gain greater insights in this area, consider increasing your “Design I.Q.” Following are several suggestions to help you become more design-aware: Read more about business and design in relevant media such as Business Week’s Design & Innovation section and in other relevant media (see resource list). n n Attend a seminar on Design Thinking, or business and design, to obtain useful and actionable insights for your organization. Enroll in or audit an art, architecture, graphic design, Web design, or product design class to help broaden your business thinking and to bring new insights to your work. Consider how the best companies and organizations in your sector use design to differentiate themselves, create stronger brands and offer better customer experiences. n n n Learn more about how leading companies including Apple, BMW, IKEA, Target, Motorola and others leverage design to be more successful. Visit art and design museums to look at examples of design—including products, automobiles, posters and more—in order to consider design’s role in building stronger brands, and more successful organizations. Spend more time exchanging ideas and information with designers to gain a greater understanding of how they think and how they approach their work. n Visit the Web sites of leading design organizations (see resource list) to gain additional information and perspectives regarding how design and Design Thinking can benefit your organization. Consider how design has influenced the purchase of products and services you own or subscribe to and use this knowledge to develop insights you can use in your business activities. n n n 10 HSMAI MARKETING REVIEW • FALL 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Marketing Review — Fall 2008

Marketing Review – Fall 2008 Contents The Online Marketer Success Stories Forecasting Trends Ian Schrager: The Revolutionary Man Leaving No Stone Unturned: The Quest for Ancillary Revenue Gaga Gadgets for Execs on the Go: Functional New Portable Technology to Make Life and Work on the Road More Hospitable Effectively Weathering the Ups and Downs of the Economic Cycle Experiments in Podcasting Higher Transportation Costs and a Slowing Economy Shift Hotel Room Demand

Marketing Review — Fall 2008

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