Designing the strategy

Design Lifetime Management™ – Combining art with science to make better decisions.

We have developed a proprietary model mainly due to many of the same questions we discussed with clients regarding when and how to introduce changes, or how to find your sweet spot in the marketplace.

It is not your traditional qualitative or quantitative study where people are asked about their opinions on something, and thereby putting on their “thinking hat”, hence not acting as true consumers. We love to dig into those, but we tread very carefully when it comes to drawing any conclusions.

It is not about collecting trend studies from here and there and create your own from the best.

It is not about observations (although we know from numerous research papers that this is probably the best way of actually interpreting a current market situation)

It is, as far as we know, the first take on using market data in a forward-looking way, where we use statistical modeling for prediction and forecasting (what will happen…), but also to infer casual relationships between different events (what happens if…?).
We named it Design Lifetime Management.

Design Lifetime Management™ is our proprietary tool and helps brand owners make decisions before changes happen. It digs deeper into a brand’s lifecycle in all stages – introduction, growth, maturity, decline – in order to avoid the ”decline” part. In our experience, making decisions about design changes when a product experiences plummeting sales almost always leads to the decision to introduce a completely new revolutionary design which may pay off, but more often leads to scaring away current consumers and not attracting new ones.

Design Lifetime Management™ looks into several aspects – both within econometrics and behavioral science. We analyze time series, volatility within a segment, the impact of disruptions, etc. We look at positioning, the archetype consumer, purchase drivers and attribute response, etc. And, we do it with one thing in mind: Results.

It can be of help when considering:

• Management of design as an asset
  
  
• Monitoring the impact of design strategies and marketing investments
  
  
• Determination of the optimal level of investments in design, marketing and sales activities

It encourages brand owners to focus on the long-term value instead of investing resources in acquiring ”cheap” customers with low total revenue value. It helps you find the optimal allocation of limited resources for ongoing activities in order to achieve a maximum return.

We have used it in various ways since its inception:

• Finding sweet spots for new brands, both regarding design, origin and style.
  
  
• To get a better understanding on when and how to introduce design changes.
  
  
• To determine the life-span of designs in a given segment
  
  
• To identify sleepers in the market that has the potential to stir things up
  
  
• To interpret where a market is heading when it comes to certain design styles

In short, it is a way of combining art with science to make better decisions.