What is Market Place Design?

Market Place Design answers the following design questions:

• Where in the market do we want to position our business? ... and

• How will we differentiate our business in the minds of customers?

Market Place design connects your purpose, brand, market positioning and value proposition. The design process requires you to define the following:

• Market offerings – i.e., the product and service categories your business will deliver

• Customer segments – sized and categorised according to Customer Job(s) to be Done

• Brand Landscape – which other brands play in the same space and where your brand aims to be positioned relative to them

• Brand Architecture - i.e., brand promise, value proposition, brand characteristics, key messaging and moments of truth, and brand performance metrics.

Brand design is a big topic and very important to get right. For this reason many businesses turn to specialist agencies, and increasingly the use of AI. A risk with both, however, is that the process results in a ‘done to you’ rather than ‘done by or with you’ experience for personnel within the business. Why does this matter? Because the level of engagement and identification with company brand by employees is one of the most powerful drivers for outstanding and differentiating customer experience.

This is why brand design is such a good candidate a human-centred design approach that is deliberately ‘hands on’ and that demands creativity from all involved. Such a process is far more likely to produce genuine ownership and personal alignment with the output.

That said, it need not be a binary choice. A good agency will ensure plenty of co-design opportunities, and AI can certainly be used to speed up the process – just so long as both are used to supplement and not replace the creativity of people within the business.

If you do choose a human-centred design approach, the process definitely benefits from initially designing at a conceptual level (e.g., brand identity and characteristics), and then dropping down a level of detail to design the brand at the physical level (i.e., the tangible and sensory experience of the brand).

Market sizing is another key element of Market Place Design. The intended market offerings, customer segments, and brand landscape provide the parameters for market sizing - a key technique for estimating the amount of revenue a market opportunity represents. Depending on the potential impact for the business this might be a simple desktop exercise or something you pay someone else to perform on your behalf. The reason you might consider using an external agency for your market sizing is that it is likely to improve the objectivity of the estimation exercise, and avoid the trap of ‘selling your business proposition to yourself’...