Before Design
I’d worked with design in one capacity or another through most of my career in marketing, as a brand manager, marketing manager etc. But, I guess I’d always viewed design as something which you simply add on if you like, the graphics of the products, the simple presentation. My experience was that it was a useful tool to have, but I don’t think it was as significant as I now believe it to be.
I think one of the big changes was that design could influence and be involved in every area of the business. My previous involvement with design? I guess I would have considered design more in line with graphics and clearly what’s changed is I see it in a much broader picture than that, and in terms of what’s happened since then is that design influenced not only the products, or the graphics of the products, but also the strategy of the products but also influenced how we presented those products in the market and I also guess, how we as a company viewed ourselves.
So it was a holistic event and I think that design was an important part of that but it wasn’t the only part of the process and certainly, as far as the re-launch was concerned, the products were essentially the same as before although there were changes that were made at that time which became logical having gone through the design process.
My perceptions of design have change considerably. Through our success I realise how much it can benefit – I’ve seen how much it can benefit our business and it’s benefited hugely, it’s given us a huge payback on our business in many ways. And importantly, with design it certainly transcends size, it gives us the ability to compete on an equal footing with the huge multi-national companies in that the design that we have is as good, if not better, than what they are offering. And that is clearly a huge advantage.
After Design
Design is clearly a very important aspect of the business. As I said before, it is not the only answer, it is part of what we do and certainly we treat design at a much higher level than we did before and it’s not just involved in the graphics it’s how we…the strategy that we apply to the market, importantly the design comes in to how we present to our customers. It is a complete mix or part of a complete mix and as a result of that it is a huge part of our success. Coming back to the previous analogy and how important it is to be a part of the total mix of the company, if you have Wayne Rooney coming in and relying on him on his own to win the battles, he’s not going to succeed, but if you’ve got Wayne Rooney and adapt your principles to work with him then you’ve got a team and that is what brings the big success.
As a company, we are still a small company and we still act like a small company with its strengths of being nimble, reactive. But what we realise is how important design can be to make that difference in how we present to the market as a whole. So, before that, we used to be very reactive in terms of if we had a product we liked and we thought if there was an opportunity we’d launch it and push it out into market and that gave us a basic level of success. But now we’re much more considered in terms of our launch of new products and our development of new products because the market we’re looking to grow in to needs very well thought out, very well designed products and presentations. So, we’re still the company we were, it’s just that we can now use design as a major added dimension to what we do.