Design, A Secret Weapon

Companies that consider the impact of design are the ones to beat

THEY DIDN’T WANT THE COOL KIDS SHOPPING AT TARGET;  they wanted them to spend their money at Tar-zhay. Using a French accent didn’t simply create a classy-meets-cute nickname for the discount retailer—it created a marketing gold mine.

When Target faced competition in the nineties from Walmart and K-Mart, it had to differentiate. So, the company took to the mass-merchandising market as Tar-zhay, a store that brings cheap yet chic goods to the public, revamping everything from its product offerings to its store layouts.

Target’s secret weapon? Design.

That was the consensus at the Better Business by Design conference, presented by the Questrom School of Business and Design Museum Boston in November 2014. The event highlighted case studies, such as Zipcar, that exemplify the positive impact good design can have on a company.

Siobhan O’Mahony, associate professor and chair of strategy & innovation at the School, was among the conference’s presenters. She pointed to analysis by the Design Management Institute to explain how companies like Target, Apple, and Starbucks embrace design and win big by taking some key steps: ensuring their products are aesthetically pleasing, allowing people to connect with their brand in new ways, keeping the end user in mind, and identifying new categories, markets, and opportunities for organic growth by expanding their understanding of different users.

O’Mahony said that measuring the impact of design on business has “always been a tough problem, but as we move from the land of products to services and business models, there is a larger opportunity to assess design not just as an outcome, but as a mode of problem-solving.”