Author: Chris Talbert

We embrace all of our client partnerships, from the well-established brands that have been around for decades to fresh-faced start-ups. Even though Designsensory is approaching 15 years, we believe an entrepreneurial culture is valuable at all stages of business.

The Lean Startup author Eric Ries defines “entrepreneurship” as “the management discipline that deals in a scientific way with situations of high uncertainty.” In a Huffington Post blog, “Lean Startup and Design Thinking,” author Cosmin Gheorghe shares “what Lean Startup and Design Thinking have in common is the focus on the customers and their actual needs.”

According to a Gallup study and associated article “highly successful entrepreneurs can creatively look beyond the present and imagine possible futures for their company. If you are a Creative Thinker, you are driven to steer your business in new directions.”  

The “Great Entrepreneurs Are Creative Thinkers” piece goes on to share seven ways to maximize your creative thinker talent:

1. Balance current and future customer needs. It is easy to be tied down with day-to-day business management and focused on delivering what your customers expect from you. Set aside time to disconnect from the present, and feed your creativity to imagine your customers’ future needs. This will help you dream and plan for the future and maintain your competitive advantage.

2. Use measurement to evaluate your ideas. When weighing which idea to implement, ask yourself, “How can we measure this?” Pick ideas apart to identify issues that could crop up during implementation. If the results show that a project isn’t viable, then modify or abandon the idea and move on to the next one.

3. Minimize potential pitfalls by releasing your new product or service incrementally. Implementing new ideas is risky. Iteration is key. Launch the prototype, gather feedback from customers, make necessary changes, and test again. Using this low-cost approach, you can turn your novel and creative ideas into products or services without much potential downside.

4. Maintain a simple organizational structure. Fewer layers of hierarchy will enable easier information flow between you and your team. A simple organizational structure will also increase employee involvement in implementing ideas, encourage employees’ creativity, and lead to quicker execution and understanding of new ideas.

5. Balance efficiency with creativity. Process management techniques, such as total quality management or Six Sigma, which can increase your growing company’s efficiency and productivity, are also likely to decrease your ability to innovate. Don’t let efficiency-enhancing practices act as barriers to exploring new ideas. Nurture your natural creativity. Continue to invest in new ideas as you increase operational efficiency.

6. Mobilize resources to fuel your innovation process. You need two things for successful innovation: diverse experiences that spark your creativity and resources to drive the innovation process. Tap in to your existing network or build new alliances internally and externally to stimulate your creativity and access shared resources.

7. Learn from your failures. When carefully planned new initiatives fail, the potential to learn from them is immense. Don’t let this learning opportunity go to waste. Conduct a post-mortem, make sense of what happened, and add what you have learned to your knowledge base. Fostering intelligent failures will help you learn what not to do as you dream about the future.

Innovation and entrepreneurship often go hand in hand. James Dyson, founder of Dyson, has shared, “We are all looking for the magic formula. Well, here you go: Creativity + Iterative Development = Innovation.”

How are you celebrating an entrepreneurial culture and creative thinking in your business?

Unless your business strives to be mundane and introverted, we’d like to think that your brand has something newsworthy to share. It’s safe to say that every day may not bring a front page article, evening news story or online coverage reaching millions. However, utilizing the power of public relations can help connect moments of truth to momentum for your brand.

Simply defined, PR is about creating and growing relationships with people who will help share your messages.

In a recent Fast Company article, “How To Spice Up Your PR When Your Business Isn’t Sexy,” Leron Kornreich answers four questions to help guide PR strategy:

1. What TRULY interesting story can you tell?

Your product may be of interest to a narrow audience, but your PR need not be limited to product announcements.

Consider the story you can tell. Sometimes the focus should be on customers: Is your product or service enabling a small business, nonprofit, or large enterprise to succeed in ways that were not possible before?

2. Who are the top influencers in your space?

If your company produces products that are of interest to only a limited niche, seek out that audience.

3. Who cares?

Ask yourself: Who cares about our product or services? Don’t give the cop-out answer of “everybody” because that’s disingenuous. Getting covered in numerous irrelevant publications will not get your business the traction that a smaller number of media hits in highly relevant publications will garner.

4. Are there ways to reach your audience beyond traditional media?

We launched a series of original eBooks that were sent to customers and potential customers alike, and were well received because we made sure they answered questions our audience was curious about.

Public relations—when applied creatively and strategically—can be a low-cost but highly effective aspect of a successful marketing program.

Is your business newsworthy? How are you sharing that news? Talk to our PR team about your ideas and needs.

The words “social strategy” may leave some of us cold but the connections that fire between client and brand as a result of social engagement will warm and inspire even the coldest keyboard. The benefits of engaging in conversations with your clients are multifold, and those conversations were never more relevant than in 2014. We’re using Nordstrom as an example since its social strategy is netting the merchant significant customer traffic. However, the basics and the practice of employing a social strategy are readily applicable to most businesses.

Facebook
Nordstrom has attracted 2.4 million Facebook “Likes.” The Nordstrom FB page has an simple yet enticing header image. By posting several updates daily, it shamelessly directs traffic to its e-commerce store. Most posts are product-focused, with a line of text and a hyperlink to the category page on the website, and the typical post attracts several thousand “Likes” and more than 100 comments. Nordstrom is faithful in responding to queries and comments, with product advice or simply making conversation.

Twitter
Nordstrom posts several marketing tweets a day, the vast majority linking back to its e-commerce store. Its Twitter feed efficiently repurposes Facebook content, as well, and makes effective use of the Twitter image preview window so images appear in followers’ feeds—a great way to snag more screen space. Nordstorm responds to Twitter @mentions and converses with users, ranging from product questions to complaints to casual brand mentions. Another brand that is getting considerable Twitter thumbs up is American Airlines, with customer service reps answering questions and taking care of problems via tweets. The company’s Social Media Specialist Stephanie Scott says, “We’re able to take probably about 50 percent of customer issues and turn them around. We can resolve issues and make people happy. The company believes it’s an important new tool for helping people.”

Pinterest
With almost five million Pinterest followers, Nordstrom uses the social network to highlight products displayed in-store. Going one further, the retailer utilizes Pinterest as a decision maker in which products it merchandises in its brick-and-mortar stores. Store products that receive the most pins get a red “P” tag, drawing a link between the offline and online worlds.

If the words “social strategy” still give you a chill, substitute the word “community.” It’s all about building a conversation and a community with clients.

At Designsensory, we are always on the lookout for new ways to bring better service to our clients. We’re especially pleased to be able to enhance our capabilities with still photography, video and motion expertise.

Our goal is to provide more integrated, end-to-end solutions with branded content in every medium. Our photography, video and motion graphics capabilities have already made a difference to several of our clients, including Patricia Nash Designs and the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development’s Travel South and Vacation Guide behind-the-scenes videos. We’ve been able to offer help at every step, beginning with preproduction services like scriptwriting, storyboarding, location scouting and booking talent, through the art direction of photo and video shoots, to postproduction editing and motion graphics.

Why is this new capability important?

First, it’s crucial to carry branding across all media, with content that reinforces the brand at every turn.

Second, the statistics are staggering: Web video keeps visitors on websites longer, boosts sales and minimizes buyer dissatisfaction. According to studies by Internet Retailer, 52 percent of consumers say that product videos help them feel more confident about their online purchases, and 66 percent will watch a particularly informative video more than once. And, visitors who have watched a video are as much as 174 percent more likely to buy than those who have not.

BizChair.com has tracked 33 percent of the company’s online sales to just 13 percent of its visitors—those who watched the online videos. Smartphone companies have tied video to increased sales in a very specific—and convincing—fashion. One million video views usually translates to 1.2 million units sold in the 12 weeks after a new product launch. Video is important to search engine optimization as well, since videos appear in about 70 percent of the top 100 listings for a search.

Our new capabilities mean a more integrated and more efficient process for our clients and—-we hope—-will translate into noticeable success.

Watch some of our recent work »