Driving the AD pitch through consumer intelligence, guided by design thinking
The situation is: you are a fantastic communication agency, you bet everything on digital and your strong point is branding and storytelling. One day like any other, you get a brief from a client in your current portfolio or (better yet) a brand new prospect. The account and the strategists begin to heat up the engines, the creatives, the art directors and the copywriters begin to jot down ideas, to paste post-its on blackboards. It is a routine life situation that anyone who works in an agency or in a media agency knows well. What are the challenges facing a communications agency to obtain new contracts and expand the volume of its customer portfolio? In KPI6 we are perfectly aware of what it means to participate in a tender, present a pitch to a prospect and up-sell on current customers. All this being supported by great teamwork, made up of briefs, challenges, workarounds, brainstorming, meetings, many meetings, personal crises, artistic periods, anxieties, deadlines, and deliveries. The many ways to approach a tender brief can be very different, especially depending on the figures present in the agency, but certainly the most challenging and interactive being Design Thinking. Design Thinking is increasingly taking hold among business processes and beyond (just think of the university world) and is based on some principles that can be applied to all processes: empathy, understanding what the user wants and trying to please them. The strategy: understanding what is important for the business and the feasibility of making a specific choice, the ability to prototype around these two levels of relevance. Design Thinking is a practice that can be focused on any type of competition and communication brief, but we must also remember the importance behind certain objectives. Discovering the needs of the brand, specifically when you want to launch new products and redefine the positioning of a brand, is based on research and consequently on data analysis. What is the most precious data, between big data and small data in a Design Thinking project and which ones offer the most support, especially in the initial brainstorming and exploration phase? While small data is linked to specific user experiences, it is easily understandable and manageable by the designer. Big data, large in size and complexity, can only be analyzed with the support of powerful tools with the aim of searching for inferences, identifying trajectories, and creating user segments. KPI6 is positioned within everything: thanks to its consumer insights and the presence of figures such as data and research analysts, it is possible to approach a tender pitch with data-driven creativity, with contents and strategies validated in advance by data and based on the study of the market through unsolicited data. How can our technology, and in general the consumer intelligence information deriving from our technologies in the workflow, intersect for the production of a final pitch within a Design Thinking process? We experienced it for the first time together with friends (as well as our customers) of Kettydo +. KPI6 continues to be alongside very important players among digital agencies. Among them, the collaboration with Kettydo +, an “engagement designer” with whom to conduct important business objectives together, is important and fruitful. Within our collaboration, we will go beyond the projects already carried out together, with the aim of creating observatories for industry, joint reporting, and important co-marketing activities, in order to be able to create a perfect mash-up between all our skills and make them converge with an excellent result. An important step within this renewed relationship was the involvement of KPI6 within the brainstorming and strategic process that precedes the tender document processing phase.
The Brief
The occasion was to work on the brief of an important company, a leader in the tissue paper sector, which requires a new digital strategy for its brand, defining the digital brand identity for all online channels, creating a new content strategy. In line with the objectives, finally improving the customer experience on digital channels. All with specific objectives: from improving the usability of the site to target loyalty, to the acquisition of new leads and customers. Once the brief has been analyzed and commented together, this is where the challenge starts, kicking off the workshop and it starts: everyone abandons and puts aside their seniority and their job title, we are all equal, from C level to interns. What matters is only one’s ability to work together and one’s strategic creative instinct.Reframed challenge
“What could we do to revive the brand?” “How could we create a new content strategy starting from company values?” These and many others are the questions to be answered within the design thinking process. Once the brief has been understood and his wishes have been metabolized, the most challenging phase begins. The entire multidisciplinary team, made up of strategists, content, campaigns and data analysts, begins to create questions formulated to stimulate the creation of ideas. Slowly all the points of the brief are rattled off (also digging back into the history of the brand) in order to start defining a strategic approach, always paying attention to the “warnings” or the dangers that can derive from various factors (such as the consumer or the competitive context). It is precisely within this phase that the digital market research of KPI6 is inserted, as the web and unsolicited data can answer many questions within the brief, granting you a broader view validated by the data strength:- exploratory research: it is essential to know how end consumers express themselves when they talk about a product, an industry, what register do they use? How can you resonate with their words? What problems do they have most often?
- segment consumers: profile and deepen the data segments or explore new segments that emerged from the analysis of the unsolicited conversation and from the first phase of brainstorming. Without having the first-party data, knowing even the smallest segment becomes crucial in transferring the preparation and attention to detail to the customer.
- validate hypotheses: every new moment, during the brainstorming and planning of activities, can bring out new questions. Further exploratory research will serve to dispel doubts and validate hypotheses, bringing consistency to the storytelling which will then be subject to evaluation by the client.