Our ethos.

Design and technology are today’s most important drivers for value creation. Unlike more tangible assets, intangibles such as e-commerce apps don’t follow the same laws of diminishing returns as a physical retail store. Design impacts how customers perceive, discover, and use products and services—including the ability to service exponentially more customers with far lower capital investments.

Design focuses on broadcasting a brand’s core strengths and delivers value to customers. And while some may have the brand power to profit from novelty for a short time, customers are quickly rejecting products and services that aren’t valuable or sufficiently useful. Customers have a direct impact on profitability and design has a direct impact on customer awareness, perception, and advocacy. Today’s most successful brands invest heavily in design and technology because they understand its value is the major competitive advantage.

Despite new opportunities enabled by the internet, the increasing challenges to compete for and retain customers remains. The power of design and design thinking is apparent throughout the entire customer experience lifecycle. As customers continue to adapt to new design and technology innovations, design will continue to be the growth engine of corporate value.

The key importance of adopting an empathetic process is to understand the behaviors, motivations, and perceptions of your customers, both actual and targeted. Shaped by our individual experiences, we all have our own way we see the world and research and empathy uncovers the ‘why’ behind our choices. We make a commitment to create meaningful engagement with people and demonstrate a brand’s authenticity to make their lives better.

People are getting wise to the tricks some brands play and those who lack integrity. We believe that empathy is an ideology designed to aid follow-through on the brand promise and strengthen customer relationships. Companies are not conduits for every kind of customer issue and the majority of your customers will understand that—you must differentiate between what you can and are willing to address.

Customers have the power to advocate or ignore brands. User engagement strategies will unlock what matters most to the people brands depend on and dig deeper than generalized segmentation—user engagement needs specificity. Meaningful user engagement is a two-way street. Today’s digital customer is giving brands the information they need to identify issues and experiences never thought of, even informing new products and services people didn’t know they needed. Driving growth is a matter of truly listening.

In any piece of creative work, it’s impossible to appeal to everyone. Even what Steve Jobs considered great design was never universally accepted. Great will always be personal, creativity strives to gain maximum acceptance to the audience who matters most.

Fear of bad and of failure leads to mediocrity. The one-off success is no substitute for repeatable creative performance enabled by a boldness which can only come from unfettered imagination. Consistency requires fearlessness—the ability to differentiate between creatively good and bad, and the ability to learn from experimentation. Creativity must first understand absurd to understand amazing; we need to hear noise before we can filter it from music.

Empowered by our current pace of digital innovation, consumers quickly recognize and reject complexity. They’re more adept at experimenting with what is new. Successful technology accentuates simplicity and in turn demands creativity—the intuition to remove the unnecessary. Creativity requires freedom of vision and the constraint of rules to design what is truly useful. Creativity is the strategy that emphasizes innovation over competition. It is during this process where businesses identify growth opportunities and strength in brand.

Without knowledge and data, creating value from digital is impossible. Intelligence, from research to data to analysis, defines market opportunities—strategic initiatives prioritize both existing and future opportunities, aligning technology needs and performance benchmarks. People want what is useful and organizations need what is viable—intelligence is essential to effectively manage process and outcomes.

New insights lead to greater creative possibilities and digital experiences users find valuable. As user data grows more ubiquitous, knowledge will continue to become more granular—uncovering precisely how individuals see the world around them and predicting the choices they are likely to make. By determining the right balance between analytics and user feedback, continual improvement processes better respond to changing market dynamics, enabling rapid-release digital products and services consumers can’t live without.

Intelligence is engineered for digital transformation—measureable hypothesis and disciplined process over guesswork. Today’s most successful digital brands are emphasizing quality of digital experiences and collecting new avenues of user intelligence to unlock new growth opportunities—the consumer-digital loop.