Design management and success

The essential prescription for the "will" is the "mean".

Leading a business to succeed happens by protecting the business value of Design.

Brand driven innovation happens by grasping creativity and design management modus, yet, the statements above may appear to some as “over-preaching” design, so what can be said about the statement of California College of Arts "Design is the future of business" . This indeed can be debatable, nevertheless, through analytic thinking, Design as a management discipline is at the core of doing business. Management succeeds through two essential shafts, which are creative and innovative thinking. Design managers set a course of actions, an action plan, to follow a predefined strategy, careful and skillful carving of innovative practices, processes and structures, fueled by the dissatisfaction with the status-quo, operational problems, strategic threats and impending crisis  while these can be avoided only if the business is well managed and the management is well designed... Design management is a customer-centered research and perspective following an analytical approach by “the wisdom of the crowed”. Customers and clients have latent needs, needs they can’t articulate, and needs they are not aware of. Innovation in management and creative strategies implementations, mitigate the stated above and happen only if endorsed by design management.

Innovation and creativity alone can lead to chaos and underperforming factors to the business if not based on clear strategies and strong management. Thinking strategically is a process consisting of a set of skills that one must learn, practice, and apply in a particular sequence. Don’t plan your direction statement, design it... Creating an innovation strategy has to be endorsed through a design strategy that converts it into a tangible framework bridging the gap between the concept and the reality, the vision and the value. Design management justify the strategic execution process, and act as a platform to sustain an increasing credibility through an efficient customer experience. Along with the competitive and monopolistic strategies led by monstrous corporations in mostly all the markets, the success with a product considering the already stated perspectives,

is based on succeeding with the experience offered by this product. The four stages of brand-driven innovation stated by Eric Koscan Abbing’s book Brand Driven Innovation

• Human-centered branding
• Innovation strategy
• Design strategy
• Touch-point orchestration

Design management encounters all these stages and defines the processes for the most efficient results foreseen. The human-centered branding is based on functionality of both the marketing function and the innovation function, creating a kind of a promise. The brand promise, in other words “the customer needs” consists on searching the right solution for the following question: what can we do to fulfill our brand promise? yet, the starting point to find the solutions lies in acknowledging the brand’s resources and capabilities. Furthermore, how can we deploy our capabilities and resources as efficient as we can, in order to develop new products and services, which delight our customers in every  phase of their relationship with us? Therefore, the design manager should take into consideration building a personalized but not indivi-dualistic relationship between the customer and the brand. The front end of all this process is the brand touch-points orchestration. The brand touch-points are not just about grabbing the customer attention while the main objective is to strengthen the relationship between both the brand and its customers. The opportunity provided should take a wise and efficient management with a continuous analytic processes to assess the results, sustaining the growth and reinforcing the needs already created. The design manager should Design a journey, creating an optimized and personnalised, even personified at some points, aspect for the brand, tailoring it to the expectations of the client and giving it the ability to grow with them. This journey should take into consideration run away from passive brand behavior while grasping its essential vision and mission. Success in design management lies in the value given by this discipline at first place and the numbers generated as a result. Design management measures of success are more qualitative such as improved brand image, increased organisational learning, and reflect quantitative outcomes, such as increased customer loyalty, profits, units sold and market share. One of the key roles of the design manager is assessing the performance of the brand and its relation to the target audience and defines as one of the management goals the ways to put on record how design as a process and as a discipline can demonstrate a “return on investment” in both financial and non-financial terms.

Design management modus are introvert as much as they are extraverts...