Service-design: what’s your game plan?

Marketing teams are under the pressure to shift from a product marketing to a service design approach. To create a competitive marketing strategy, it is the critical to understand the processes and resources it requires.

Service design has become an imperative to businesses wanting to hold their position and avoid disruption. But to be honest, this isn’t about digital transformation this is about being prepared, as a business, for growth in a connected market.

The traditional resources the business could rely on to generate growth are being disrupted and new capacities need to be developed. These come from understanding both the new technology paradigm and design thinking, something traditional marketing teams aren’t educated on.

Strategy is about understanding your constraints and designing a plan of action, but today, designing that strategy becomes overly complicated because the plan of action looks more like a map for uncertainty than directional instructions.

The resources are drastically changing and the business isn’t always ready to operate in a new way, so when a brief comes in for a service design / digital solutions approach its implementation sounds overly complicated and disconnected from the reality of the business.

Marketing teams can close that gap by understanding the changes that need to operate. We are not in a product era any more, we are in a service era, and the first truth is to understand that the way we create value changed.

These shifts impact the entire marketing function in an unprecedented way. How to move from communication planning to experience design? How do we sell usage not units? These are some of the question a service-design approach will lead your team to consider.

In such a new set up, you need to approach your outcome as a progressive, almost fluid, build up to deliveries. And it’s just fine. Your role is now to map out micro changes and educate the business.

This is not about the bigger picture just yet, it starts by creating the capacities for your business to get to the bigger picture in the future.

• From a traditional marketing mindset to a customer experience mindset
• From designing transactions to designing interactions
• From selecting technology platforms to thinking modular system design
• From protecting product advantage to creating transient opportunities
• From data collection to data activation

The opportunities are complex to grasp, and in a world where speed of execution is critical self-education and collaboration are essentials.