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One of the great things about digital marketing is the ability to quickly test ideas, concepts, messages and offers to find out which engage the audience, which convert and what just falls by the wayside. In the old days of marketing, your options for testing messages or offers was limited to focus groups or more in-depth interview-based research. These approaches still have their uses – but for a quick and cheap snapshot of the likely response, digital is brilliant.

One of the main tenets of design thinking is checking that your solution is fit for purpose. You start by empathising with the problems of your target audience, you frame the problem, you go off on a wild, creative magic carpet ride to come up with brilliant and weird and simply off the wall ideas, and then you have to evaluate them. This is sometimes where the process falls down in marketing, because, despite having all the previous framework in place, often people revert to old ways of thinking and old assumptions to evaluate an idea.

Being creative – this is the part that marketers get excited about! However, people who aren’t naturally creative may be nervous about what design thinking terms ‘ideation’. So what is ideation? Within design thinking, ideation means coming up with ideas in a brainstorming-like environment. Any idea is a good idea during this process. In fact, the more ‘out-there’ and imaginative the ideas, the better.

In this second part of the series, I want to explore a fundamental requirement of creative problem solving (remembering that marketing is at its heart a problem solving practice – the problem being: how do we get our product or service to the people to want or need it at a price that works for us and them). Within design thinking – this step is around framing the problem.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you have probably heard about ‘Design Thinking’. Originally conceived as (funnily enough) a product design methodology, it has now been co-opted to many different settings as an easily repeatable problem solving methodology. It has been used by start-ups as an innovation framework, in change management to help drive sustainable change, and within continuous improvement to drive customer-centric solution building.

Once upon a time, back at the dawn of time, the only way humans had to communicate with each other was through the spoken word. In order to survive, we had to pass on important information by word of mouth. But what has this got to do with marketing, I hear you say? Well, the best brands tell stories.