Why Does Your Company Need a Design Strategy?

For the world’s leading companies, the concept of design strategy is a valuable tool for an efficient and successful innovation process. Design is now increasingly viewed by businesses as a resource that will create value for businesses, regardless of their industry. It is not seen as a supplement at the end of the process or as the icing on the cake.

Yet still, the misperception that design is only about the looks also continues. This is why in the recent conditions of a changing world, clarifying what strategic design is and what it can do for businesses is more important than ever.

What is Design Strategy?

Design strategy is a planning process where business objectives are addressed through creative solutions, far beyond just aesthetics. In other words, design thinking is used as a problem solving method.

As Arman Design we do not consider design to be product cosmetics, but a value-creating factor in the systematic process of product development. We enhance your products with a design strategy that is compatible to target-groups and gives strength to brand character.

Design strategy involves a unity in decision-making on all stages; from the research and determining the correct product to invest in, to cost efficient production and successful commercialization. The development process is seamlessly interactive and we eventually convert the market opportunities into the right products, services and brand communication. In Arman Design, our team of designers and engineers take account of costs and customer satisfaction, as well as form and function. The success of our client in the market is the goal.

The Solid Effect of Design in Productivity

Good strategy is more than just idea generation. It is a roadmap that is practical, scalable, cost-effective and it successfully delivers value. It is the implementation of revenue-generating solutions.

In a study carried out by the Design Council, they created what they called the ‘Design Index’, an index of 61 design-led businesses. From this report it was evident that the design-led businesses had outperformed the FTSE 100 by more than 200% over a ten-year period (1995–2004).

This showed, for the first time, the efficiency on the long-term that design can have on businesses and was clear evidence of a relationship between investment in design and business performance.

According to the report:

Design increases turnover: For every £1 invested in design, businesses can expect over £20 in increased revenues.
Profit and design are linked together: For every £1 invested in design, businesses can expect over £4 increase in net operating profit.
Design boosts exports: For every £1 invested in design, businesses can expect a return over £5 in increased exports.

It is important to understand that the value of investing in design needs to be measured over long term goals .The existing business methods for immideate measurements are invalid in this case. This can cause many businesses to hesitate when prioritizing design investments as a business strategy. The businesses who do include strategic design, especially small businesses can observe a strong growth in the long term.

For us, design strategy means, seeing the entire scene from a vantage point of multi-disciplinary experience and handling the challenge creatively, beyond a traditional analytical approach. This is how we create value and growth for our clients.

What Integrated Aspects Does Strategic Design Include?

The strategical design approach can mean creating solutions in many different areas according to the needs of a business. A wide variety of subjects like designing the business model, designing the system that business will serve through, developing user relationships and improving the experience, etc can be the focus of strategy developing through design-thinking. As Arman Design we contribute to business developing phases of our clients through creative planning and a focus on innovation. We develop product and production strategies with our multi-disciplinary team and apply them. For the given purpose, the service we give can be examined under three main composing elements: Creative research and analysis, design and engineering and commercialization.

Creative Research & Analysis:

Our process begins with the research to deeply understand our clients and their customers; the market, the competitors, human experiences and needs, in order to identify efficient product opportunities. This can save our clients from investing in the wrong direction, to a product that is actually not the real need of their customers, or it can even lead them to realize an innovative market breakthrough.

Design and Engineering:

Companies can have a tendency to think backwards; ideating only within the limitations of their current capabilities. We help them get past these limits and fulfill their market potential. By creating significant design feature¬¬s, we give your products identity and character. This increases your product’s value and your brand’s presence. From industrial design to engineering, from prototyping to small-batch production, everything here is under a single roof and from a single source, running with interactivity and in unison. The advantages of this unity includes cost optimizations, fluent and fast development processes, exact application of designed strategies and products, and many more.

Commercialization:

Ideas that don’t come to life are not products, nor they are innovation. That is why we don’t see commercialization as a separate stage but as an overlapping factor of all development process, presenting our clients an end result that is ready to manufacture. We are proud to have a remarkable ratio of %90 of our projects fully commercialized and on the market with the right strategy.

With all the benefits of a strategic design approach, one thing is vital: Having creative ideas is one thing, putting these ideas into practice in a market-compatible product is another. Only a development partner who understands the processes and tasks of your company can deliver brilliant results.

What can a good design strategy provide to your company?

Every business have different needs and whatever the job to be done is, Design is a powerful tool that means doing the job in most productive ways with creative understanding and use of existing conditions. As Arman Design, giving services for industrial product development, our design strategies most importantly offer these following values:

Business Innovation – Creative Planning

We do an immersive research to correctly define our clients’ and their customers’ need. This process can lead to a discovery that the initial hypotheses is not correct, the market calls for a different product. This leads to a correct and efficient investment. And it might even breed disruptive innovation, making your company the single player of a new sector, addressing the previously unattended human needs.

Multi-disciplinary Experience

We have delivered top to bottom projects on behalf of our clients in a wide range of industries. Our vast scale of work has taught us many ups and downs of product development and realization process, and earned us the knowledge of endless pitfalls in all stages from ideation to product launch. Shortly, we already mapped out the path for our clients so they can reap the benefit of our know-how , and shortcut the time consuming and highly costly trial and error period.

Product & Production Strategies

As a design company serving a vast range of industries, we have extensive experience, and the learnings of dozens of production management processes. We’ve been there all, from consumer products to packaging Design, from industrial products to medical equipment, from urban Design to defence industry… This means we can cross-pollinate between industries and easily come up with with the ideal materials and production methods that might be quite innovative for our client’s sector. We speak the language of our manufacturers and push them forward with every project we work on. Furthermore, we develop our own production techniques and even machines when needed.