What really matters is that unboundary seems to be one of a very few companies that are applying design thinking to business problems. They see that the usual linear, data-driven approach to business thinking often leads to limited communications strategies —things that have worked in the past as opposed to things that will break through the clutter.

Design thinking adds the human element that matters at the point of contact (customers’ eyes). Designers are more apt to see patterns and possibilities. They’re more apt to be comfortable with the messiness of intuition. They’re far more open to change. And designers actually make things instead of just talking. Add their outsider perspective and cross-industry experience with corporate cultures, and you can see that clients can get a lot more out of design firms than just handsome collateral. They can get new ways of seeing their businesses, new processes and approaches, new ways of reaching out to customers and staff.

This is the industry-altering trend that I think unboundary’s name change and visual design system points at. And this is where I may go very wrong, because the few firms I mentioned earlier are all in my neighborhood (the San Francisco Bay area), and I helped to form one of them. This small group of firms, to which I’m speculatively adding unboundary, has figured out that they sidestep resistance to creative solutions by bringing their clients into the creative process—especially at the discovery stage.

Discovery may be a new word to you in this context, so I’ll explain. It’s basically background research. You talk to as many people in the company’s network as possible to find out what’s really going on around issue X. This can be done by a research team that interviews as many stakeholders as possible, and then dumps their findings on the marketing team. But it’s just data at that point. It doesn’t tell the marketing team how to translate the data into brand stories, much less designed communications. That’s why marketing teams just dump the data on designers, who go away for a while and come back with three to five concepts. Thus the client is basically uninvolved in both the discovery and the creative process. Since they don’t own the project, it can be very hard to get them to buy into anything but the safest solutions. This serves their job security well, but it doesn’t always serve the company’s real needs.

Firms like Stone Yamashita, C2, Neutron, and (I think) unboundary get buy-in by helping marketing teams do brand discovery themselves, based on their intimate experience with their companies and contacts. (It works best if you can pull in people from as many divisions as possible to get as multiple points of view.) Once the discovery is done, these firms lead the teams in brainstorming sessions to come up with possible messaging and communication strategies. The design firms then collect all the ideas thus produced, and distill them into a coherent proposal.

You can imagine how much easier it is to convince clients to accept proposals they’ve actually contributed to than ones that are just dropped on them. Clients get well-thought-out communications they can truly believe in. They get stronger connections to other marketers in their companies. They get a finer understanding of brand and design. Design firms get other benefits from this collaborative approach than just buy-in to their creative concepts. They get a higher profile within the client company, a greater appreciation for and understanding of design among their clients, more access to key people, and far, far better information to build their verbal and visual concepts on. Have I guessed right?

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RESPONSE FROM UNBOUNDARY PRINCIPAL TOD MARTIN:
Either we got our new identity system right or Nancy has a brilliant career as a psychic. (Maybe it’s both.)

Unboundary (née EAI) has been working with an increasingly immersive, cross-boundary approach for the past decade. A few years ago we began to recognize that the impact we have is disproportionate to our size—we’re only 30 people, after all. And yet we’ve been at the nucleus of major transformations at some of the Fortune 100’s most admired corporations, often working outside the specialized silos that have come to define most design firms these days. This realization led us to do something that proved to be incredibly difficult: undertaking the same kind of deep, immersive work on ourselves that we would for a client.

The most important insight we gained from the exercise was that clients value us most for our ability to develop thinking and ideas that pulled their organizations together and made them better understood—both internally and externally.

When your identity, or even your name, no longer reflects who your company really is, it is time to change it. So we did. And what we tried to create was something reflective of our belief that it’s important to make sure the pieces create a greater whole, that broader perspectives come from collaboration, and that it’s possible to create very different things out of the same basic elements in the same space.

Thanks for validating that we’re on the right path.