Design Thinking for Global Growth: A Strategic Catalyst for Market Expansion
Design thinking has become a major driving force for innovation across industries in recent years. With the market size for design thinking expected to nearly double in the next eight years, it has demonstrated significant benefits for scaling business—especially regarding global market expansion. In the promotional realm, integrating the concept of design thinking into marketing for international business can lead to more impactful and personalized campaigns designed to reach audiences more effectively. At the same time, however, leveraging design thinking for global growth is by no means automatic.
Businesses looking to scale up using the theory may face challenges and must be strategic in their processes. Done right, the concept is a significant boon for scaling your business internationally. Adapt the idea to meet the unique cultural and consumer demand in different markets, and the potential benefits for global market expansion will be significant.
Design Thinking: An Overview
At its core, design thinking is an approach to business innovation that puts the audience at its center. Also called 'human-centered design,' it considers how to solve potential problems from the audience's perspective, using a non-linear and iterative approach that continues to improve on itself.
Beyond that core aspect, researchers and scholars have proposed slightly different versions of the design thinking model over the past two decades. For the purposes of this guide, we will follow the Stanford model, popularized by the Interaction Design Foundation. It consists of five distinct stages:
Stage 1: Emphasize
Start every process or innovation with a strong understanding of your audience. Research precisely who they are, how they behave, and their pain points that call for potential solutions. Every subsequent step in the process should be based on your audience's perspective.
Stage 2: Define
In this stage, define a problem as clearly as possible, keeping an intentional focus on your audience's perspective. The problems you need to solve through innovation or marketing should never be internal—reserve other paradigms and processes for internal challenges. Instead, they should focus on the problems your audience has.
Stage 3: Ideate
Based on your audience's definition and the defined problem, brainstorm potential ideas that might serve as possible solutions. Consider different perspectives from your various audience segments, then use ideation techniques like brainstorming or mind mapping to build as many potential solutions as possible.
Stage 4: Prototype
The next stage focuses on determining which ideas and potential solutions have the highest chance of success. In traditional product design, this means building inexpensive prototypes that can be shared and tested both internally and with select testing audiences. Experimentation is still encouraged to improve on initial ideas.
Stage 5: Test
Finally, it's time for a broader test of each solution with your audience. Avoid letting internal perspectives drive the outcome of these tests. Instead, only audience data and feedback should inform which potential solutions are the best to solve the previously defined problem.
Crucially, these steps do not have to happen in the same order every time. Prototyping and testing will provide new audience insights that help to improve the ideating stage. It might also spark new ideas that deserve to be prototyped. At the same time, testing can reveal insights about the problem that could adjust or change its definition.
That is why design thinking, at its best, is never entirely linear. Instead, it's an ongoing process that interacts with all of the above stages.
How to Apply Design Thinking to Marketing for International Businesses
As some of the above examples show, design thinking was first envisioned for traditional product design. However, it can be just as relevant for marketing innovation and implementation, especially when you’re expanding your promotional strategies globally.
Use Cases and Impacts
Think about how the above stages can influence your marketing for international business as you look to expand globally:
Empathizing helps you better understand the local markets you are looking to enter. This is a key component for localization. Deliberately design your messaging so it’s more relevant for each market you are scaling businesses into.
Defining the problem in the context of global marketing helps you better focus on the problems your product solves. Expanding the concept can also help you define problems like different channels in your new markets and cultural differences your marketing needs to account for.
Ideation ensures that as you expand your messaging and marketing globally, you can develop plenty of creative concepts that solve the problems you have identified. Through activities like mind mapping, rapid sketching, and even role-playing, you can create more tailored marketing strategies.
In this context, prototyping means testing your marketing before rolling it out broadly. It enables you to ensure that your marketing for international business will be effective for new audiences before making massive investments. You can test the waters before you make a company-wide commitment to these new markets.
Testing enables your business to get accurate, authentic feedback from your actual customers in each market where you are looking to scale. The data you gain can help scaling businesses make better strategic and budget decisions.
Put simply, design thinking can be a core global marketing driver. Its inherent focus on the customer and a strategic approach that minimizes overspending can make all the difference as you dip your toes into the international or intercultural market and expand your business potential.
Sustainably Leverage Design Thinking for Global Growth
Its usability for international marketing is just one benefit of design thinking for global growth. Ultimately, your entire global expansion strategy can revolve around similar concepts, putting the user or audience first as you look to maximize your solutions for relevance and efficiency.
In developing markets, for example, one variant of design thinking for global growth suggests adapting the core concepts as follows:
Develop deep empathy through extensive fieldwork and community engagement to understand populations with sometimes significantly different needs than your previous audience.
Engage in co-creation and collaboration. Give local stakeholders and audiences a sense of ownership over your brand or business while ensuring culturally appropriate approaches.
Leverage iterative prototyping in your services, programs, and policies. Go beyond a prototyping approach that only applies to your physical products. Community feedback continues to lead to improvements.
Consider long-term viability and scalability in all of your efforts. Even if you test a new market entry on a small scale, consider the resource constraints and other hurdles that might prevent broader adoption down the road.
Design Thinking for Global Growth Strengthens Localization—And Vice Versa
This speaks to the core concepts of localization. By adjusting your approach according to the unique needs and preferences of the local culture you're looking to enter, you can build better marketing and market entry strategies that consider the context of the communities you serve.
That way, you can genuinely and sustainably drive global growth and access revenue benefits and advantages in how audiences adapt and embrace your brand and products globally.
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