A few weeks ago, Amanda and I made a late decision to kill our 1,500-word opening piece that a friend described as a “real head-scratcher.” We had tried to cover everything under the ‘business of design’ sun in a single piece, and we lost our focus. Nothing like starting a new venture and feeling like you’re experiencing an identity crisis!

However, the botched attempt helped us tighten our focus.

At our core, we’re about people and how they are redesigning experiences—of products, services, organizations, and the way we communicate. Talk to sharp people, listen to how they approach problems, ask about the trade-offs they weighed, and share the lessons learned. Try to do one thing really well, hope to educate and inform, and we’ll go from there.

So it felt therapeutic when Accenture Interactive Chief Strategy Officer and Fjord Co-Lead, Baiju Shah, said the brands of the future will be built by their experiences in this week’s feature interview. Few people know this better than Shah, who discusses the value of design in business, in particular the need to pivot away from selling creative services purely as a deliverable. Why? Of course, we’re going to save that for the story.

As always, thank you for reading our newsletter. We sincerely appreciate your interest.

Matt McCue & Amanda Tuft, Co-Founders / Editors@thecreativefactor.co

Photo of Baiju Shah courtesy of Accenture Interactive

The renter’s insurance company Toggle came to Accenture Interactive’s design unit, Fjord, with a dilemma: millennials, a priority customer demographic, weren’t buying renter’s insurance. So the team set out to talk to people to understand the reasons why.

What they learned is that millennials didn’t understand renter’s insurance, a product where the benefits come with a host of stipulations in the fine print. Because of that, they viewed it as a discretionary purchase.

Once Fjord understood the customer mindset, they were able to help Toggle reimagine its renter’s insurance product. This included summarizing in two sentences what renter’s insurance plans cover, offering customizable options, and designing a visual pricing graphic that compares product costs to relatable items, like the Basic package costing about the same as a latte.

As a result, a complicated, technical product was clearly explained in a single user interface view. And the entire product was designed to be personalized as simply as toggling settings on your phone.

“The new brand and service experience has been met with high user sat and growth rates, much higher than traditional insurance products in this space,” says Baiju Shah.

Credit the project win to the power of “and”: combining human insights and market insights; linking empathy, emotion, and strategy. The human component needed to be understood to rethink the experience and solve the business challenge.

Shah believes in the power of “and” so much that he is building the future of Accenture Interactive around it. Beginning with the acquisition of Fjord in 2013, he has led growth of Accenture Interactive to one of the largest design consultancies in the world.

Since Fjord, Accenture Interactive has acquired 30 more digital and creative agencies, including Droga5 earlier this year. “Creative and creative deliverables are more important than ever,” says Shah.

But how should companies value creativity? And how do the two sides work together? And, despite some seeming contradictions, are business and design more alike than we realize? (Hint: Yes.) Shah speaks to these in the following conversation that explores why the brands of the future will be built by great experiences.

Why is a $127 billion global consulting company acquiring a new creative and design agency every few months?
If you take our business at Accenture Interactive, our belief from the onset 10 years ago was that brands of the future would be built by their experience.

Put it another way: Brand is a promise to the market, but the total experience is where that promise is or is not realized. When you think about transforming a total experience, it has to start with humans, and that starts with empathy, and that starts with design. Empathy and emotion are at the root of great experiences—you don’t find these in a spreadsheet.

For brands looking to sustain relevance and businesses looking to grow, we believe experience in the primary lever to do that

What have you learned from the acquisition of Fjord and others, about the role of design in building meaningful experiences?
The way we think about design and creativity is that it touches everything from pixels to products to possible futures, so the importance of human-centricity, empathy, and emotion is paramount to solving problems.

What else have you learned?
At the time of acquisition, Fjord had less than 10 studios and less than 200 people. Now we are over 1,200 people and 30 studios in six continents. That can’t happen unless you find a way for the cultures to co-exist. This was a core element we needed to figure out with Fjord, and we’ve applied the idea that you can’t indoctrinate culture—it’s living, it’s breathing—to all of our acquisitions. We [the entire Accenture consulting company] have to embrace a culture of culture and learn from each other and allow the best of all worlds to flourish.

For instance, on the design side, design defaults to focusing and empathizing with the end users. Consulting defaults to empathizing with clients. Design defaults to human impact. Consulting defaults largely to commercial impact.

There are many of these seeming contradictions. But, if you tackle this as a design problem, you actually turn the contradictions into the power of “and” and can now focus on human impact and commercial impact as a joint proposition.

How do you view the power of “and” between design and business?
Business and design need to work together, if you aim to solve the real problems that business, society, and the world face. Business, at its core, is people. So empathy and emotion are crucial to solving business problems. You need to combine human insights and market insights. Business leaders are relishing the opportunity to bring forth an empathetic lens to strategy.

It makes perfect sense: You have to understand the wants and needs of individuals, if those individuals are customers, employees, or investors because you need to bring them along as you bring new products to market. The work we are doing is elevating creativity and design to thinking about human-centered strategy.

It can be trying, but, again, designers really lean into this because they are exhausted from designing something that doesn’t hit the hands of the users. Creative teams are exhausted from creating world-class comms that don’t actually move the needle for the business. We are trying to make sure the creative integrity is there, but that it also has the business consequence.

You’ve said that creativity is more valuable and relevant than ever. How should we value our creativity?
There is a pivot that is required from selling design as a creative deliverable to selling value from that creativity as part of a larger experience. The real objectives from creative is to create sustainable commercial impact and human impact. Linking creative to business impact and human impact (not just marketing impact) has been elusive for the industry.

The Accenture Interactive service model spans design, build, communication and run of experiences, which allows us to stitch together what’s needed to deliver the entire customer experience, from front-end to back-end, and then prioritizes initiatives and investment based on what will deliver business objectives and human objectives.

Experience-led business objectives can include business growth, brand relevance, loyalty, agility (cycle time) and, on the human side, it could be saving money, saving time, or increasing enjoyment.

Culture fit is a pressing issue for companies that are integrating design teams, something Accenture has done well. What are some ways the corporate culture at Accenture gives the creative cultures a chance to demonstrate their value?
There are many differences between a creative culture and a consulting culture. When integrating acquisitions, we went out of our way to protect what is precious and distinct. In Fjord’s case, this included its open-space studios and design methodologies. To work together, we needed to invent a new methodology across the firm called FORM, that all disciplines use now to build trust and get the most from each other.

This allows the rigor/discipline and industry focus from consultants; with the human-centered approach from Fjord. It’s increasingly common now to see integrated teams that have business strategists show up in business attire and designers can arrive in jeans, if that is what keeps them authentic and comfortable.

Conversation Starters

On Japan Airlines, Never Sit Next to a Child Again

Choosing your airline plane seat is a bit like playing roulette—which square seat icon won’t put you next to someone who falls asleep on your shoulder, takes your armrest, packed tuna salad for lunch (and we like tuna salad), or, worst of all, is a crying baby.

Well, now Japan Airlines has introduced a new booking feature that will take care of that last one. “Passengers traveling with children between 8 days and 2 years old who select their seats on the JAL website will have a child icon displayed on their seats on the seat selection screen,” writes JAL. “This lets other passengers know a child may be sitting there.” The baby icon is of a smiling child looking right up at you—so innocent.

JAL no doubt means well, but the move elicited a range of comments on Twitter. Some applauded the move. Other suggested noise-cancelling headphones. And still another recommended using good old-fashioned empathy. "They are babies, as we all once were,” wrote user G Sundar. “We need to learn tolerance or will soon start needing a map of seat locations for mouth breathers, droolers, farters, drunks, and perhaps a lot more things in life.” And, when we need to start designing with droolers and farters in mind, then we’ve totally lost it as a society.

Who Can Participate in an Online World?

It’s the question at the center of an ongoing Supreme Court case between Domino’s and Guillermo Robles, a blind man who sued Domino’s after he couldn’t use its website app to order a pizza. As of Monday, October 7, the case remains in limbo on whether Domino’s, and more broadly any company, is violating the Americans With Disabilities Act if visually-impaired people can't access their web sites.

There are currently no U.S. rules on whether or how companies must make their website accessible for everyone. Those denied the chance to participate in the online world today are largely being denied the chance to participate in society. This no doubt raises challenges for businesses. But we need to do more than throw our hands up and say “it’s complicated”. It might be, but it ultimately doesn’t matter what the courts decide: We need to design a more inclusive internet accessible to all.

In Historic Russia, Let there be Light

Herbert Seevinck, the CEO and owner of Mijksenaar, an Amsterdam-based wayfinding design firm, had a unique constraint when he set out to make signs and maps for the Hermitage General Staff Building in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Since the arts and cultural museum is considered a monument, Seevinck and team couldn’t screw anything into a wall—not ideal when your business is signage. So they introduced projection mapping. The lights not only provided directions and information, but they also allowed Seevinck to add some playful, contemporary touches to the experience rooted in history. “We made a dynamic bookshop logo with a projected bookshelf, and every minute one of the books falls off the shelf,” he says.

Image of the Hermitage General Staff Building, Mijksenaar.com

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/ Final Thought

“Of all the things people love to hate — Mondays, the Kardashians, candy corn, Nickelback — few evoke the scorn and indignation of what Mr. Connare affectionately calls “the Justin Bieber of fonts.” Hating Comic Sans Is Not a Personality from NYTimes.com. (But really, how can anyone hate candy corn?)