Bringing to Life a New Design Value Proposition
Project Overview
Our pharmaceutical client needed a compelling, consistent Design Team value proposition and communications strategy to effectively reposition their Design Team as a core business function. They sought to create awareness, educate people, and generate buy-in to the value this function delivered to meet the wider organisation’s vision and desired business outcomes.
A need had been identified to change people’s perceptions and mindset towards Design across the organisation. This had to begin internally, shifting them from a bolt-on service model reacting to tactical, execution-based requests to a highly strategic, embedded core business function who partner with the business from the outset to protect brand equity, loyalty and, ultimately, market share.
Incorporating existing content and messaging, a key need was to articulate the ‘why’, value and benefits of human-centred design and Design as a strategic embedded function for people new to the company. This called for a clear narrative for the team themselves, as well as for their key internal stakeholders, wider colleagues and external stakeholders such as vendors and new Design talent brought in to enhance the design community.
Our Solution
- Finding the story: uncovering a compelling, coherent, consistent, concise and clear value-driven Design narrative as a single source of content truth.
- Creating the story: developing an enriched, engaging story and visuals, bringing to life the Design value story using real scenarios and successes through an engaging look and feel, connecting people to the value and showing how Design contributes to delivery of the company vision and objectives.
- Telling the story: co-creating a strategy to embed the story and reach the relevant stakeholders, gaining commitment from leaders and key partners and providing content to make the Design story a reality.
To achieve this, we delivered a suite of tools designed to support future needs. We:
- Completed rapid onboarding and discovery including validation of existing work to feed our value proposition and confirm assumptions/scope.
- Conducted collaborative sessions with Design, validating the narrative, tone, stakeholders, engagement needs, and key value proposition, supporting and coaching leaders to achieve success.
- Developed a strategic key message framework as a foundation of communications and engagement connected to OKRs.
- Delivered visual concept ideation to bring the messaging to life visually, informing the creative approach taken by Design in future.
- Co-created a core engagement deck including success stories and speaker notes to support communications and engagement delivery.
- Defined a people-focused phased communications strategy and approach to drive awareness, desire, knowledge and generate increased partnerships across the business and externally.
The Differences We Made
“It has been absolutely fantastic to partner with you on this. This is such a well-thought through piece of work, and it’s just so impressive how you’ve brought it all together for us. I don’t think we’ve ever received such a comprehensive communications strategy before!.”
Head of Design
- Brought together and elevated a flexible and usable single Design value proposition for a busy key function, enabling priority communications and engagement to support strategic objectives and bringing human-centred design to life.
- Articulated a narrative to support a design community working within a business context to support an embedded seat at the table that people can relate to and get behind.
- Conducted benchmarking through an ADKAR-led survey to ensure data-driven, relevant, tailored content that supported strategic and priority needs.
- Enabled a fundamental shift in the Design value proposition to be visible as a strategic embedded internal partner, not an on-demand recharged service.
Learn more about Afiniti’s rich life sciences consulting experience here.
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