Traditional marketing vs. service design

Traditional marketing vs. service design

Traditional Marketing is focused on selling products on segmented markets. Meeting customer expectations is the key purpose to attract new customers and hold existing ones. Market research as a time consuming and partly expensive tool that has been an successful appliance all over the years to figure out the needs of our customers. But since the evolutionary discovery of service design, target-group-specific advertisement has become much easier.

Thinking about the relationship between marketing and service design leads us to the question if service design is the new marketing?

Here are some reasons why you should definitely overthink your traditional marketing gags and incorporate service design into your business:

1. Innovation engine and customer understanding

Service Design offers the foundation for design research. You want to launch a new product or create an innovation but don’t know where to catch your customers? Service design helps you to figure it out. The possibility to create personas is the key to get to know your customers.

If you spend time thinking about the people related to your business you spend time thinking about your customers’ characteristics. Now that you know how your customers tick can you start thinking about their references, which leads us to the next point.

2. Meeting customer expectations

Delivering meaningful customer experience in order to have satisfied customers is essential nowadays. Studies have shown that one happy customer brings nine referrals. „Walk in your customer’s shoes“ is an often used quote when it comes to customer satisfaction, but slipping in somebodies shoes is not easy. You really have to go back to the basics and focus on the person who buys your product instead of the product itself! Customer journey mappping helps you deal with that problem. Illustrate multiple touch points and add emotional journeys, comments and photo material to figure out how and what your persona felt at each touchpoint. This is an easy way to reveal need for improvement and to explore your companies strengths.

3. Create a stronger bond

Stakeholder maps help you to visualize relationships between you and your customers.

This gives you an idea of how and where you can reach them and tie them stronger to your company.

4. Content production – customer experience

Marketeers spend a lot of time providing contents customers are interested in. And therefore it is not always easy to find topics. Analyzing customer’s needs shows up certain problems you could deliver solutions for.

Whether you are already doing service design or not, you won’t get around with it. Human centered design is „in“ today and so will be your organization if you make use of service design tools and methods to create meaningful customer experience.

And now, what's next?

You can also improve your marketing strategy with service design – learn more about journey mapping in marketing.