Unified Brand Design.
Over the last sixty years, the giants of our discipline created the foundation of the methods we use today, such as Design Thinking, Design Generalism, Experience Design, and Human-Centered Design.
We have synthesized all of this goodness into a new system—a set of frameworks that creates a through line from the intentions of a brand to the delivery of experiences to all of its audiences.
We call it Unified Brand Design, a collaborative methodology to inform and direct the making of thoughtful brand and customer experiences (BX + CX).
FRAMEWORK ONE
Aligning intentions and experiences.
There is incredible pressure on senior leadership to focus intently and purely on their own business unit, resulting in a structure of siloed verticals.
Customers, on the other hand, experience brands in a completely horizontal manner. A single, simple transaction can touch every vertical discipline within the leadership team.
Our Brand Intention Architecture fosters cross-funcational collaboration, and gives each discipline leader a full view of the business from the customer’s point of view.
FRAMEWORK TWO
Reframing the definition of customer experience.
Current definitions of Customer Experience focus on the financial, transactional relationship between a brand and a customer.
While this is accurate, we think it is also incomplete. Two additional audience groups should also be viewed as customers of the brand: Communities and Cultures.
Communities would include incredibly important groups of people such as Users. The value of many social media platforms, for example, has been built on groups of users—who do not pay for their user accounts.
Cultures include meaningful external and internal groups, such as employees. Research has proven that the quality of an employee’s experience with a brand is a powerful predictor of the quality of a customer’s experience. It is widely known that the quality of a customer’s experience with a brand can be traced directly to the quality of the employee’s experience with that brand.
The 3CX model captures this expanded, complete definition of “customer.”
FRAMEWORK THREE
A more expansive—and inclusive—framework for Design Thinking.
Over the last six decades, the role of design in business has been defined, redefined, and expanded multiple times. Which underscores its lasting nature, as well as its adaptability to changing needs.
We have taken the best of Human-Centered Design and Life-Centered Design and combined them with classic Design Thinking principles to create a fully informed method we call Life-Centered Design Thinking.
It can be used throughout the design process to capture initial audit states, inform ideal future states, and measure progress.
