Intentionally Industry-Agnostic
How a service design-led approach to business and strategy establishes agency value, limits competitive imitation, and solidifies durability.
This week we’re moving away from superstar product-led businesses to look at the agencies that support them.
It’s easy for us to conceptualize how and why the Spotifys of the world benefit from a service design-led approach to business. It is more difficult to understand how an agency that works horizontally across many verticals might use service design thinking to establish lasting value for the firm and its customers. Methodologies are great, but how do they hold up when working for businesses that are paying for tangible, measurable outcomes? Will a design-led approach achieve business goals?
In this piece I am going to analyze a case study from Huge, a partner agency of Spotify’s. I will unpack how a service design-led approach establishes agency value, limits imitation by competition, and solidifies durability for the agency to succeed in the long term.
Huge is huge. With twelve office locations globally, they touch many markets across many verticals and product lines. Their approach to value creation is simple: put people first, an obsession with craft second, and create amazing work that resonates with the customer every time. The products, experiences, integrated marketing efforts, and branding efforts (etc.) Huge engages in are rooted in this concept. The agency positions human-centered thinking and design as a core offering of their business to insight lasting, sustainable change for the brands they work with.
Huge brought this methodology to their work with Spotify when designing the Spotify Advertising platform. 1 For those not in the know, Spotify recently released an advertising platform that makes it easy to understand audience segments, target to their listening behaviors, and serve content that matters to them most at key moments in their listening experience. The design-led strategy Huge employed served to unify the fragmented ecosystem Spotify was previously offering their advertisers, giving brands a one-stop-shop by which to serve advertising content to key customers.
In What Ways… Did Huge Use Service-Design as an Approach to Succeed with Spotify Advertising?
There are a few.
The design process is an iterative process. Learnings from the field lead to relevant insights that inform new strategies and pathways for growth. The best products and services never stop upgrading. This is what makes Huge’s approach to Spotify Advertising a long term success, the work is rooted in consistent growth and iteration. Structuring projects in this way is a win for both a design-led agency and their customers.
The first step in the design process is (usually) research. The best design-led teams even spend time designing research. At this stage of the design process there are many questions with much ambiguity and hypothesizing. As designers and strategists it is our job to see through the fog, to make shape of the land ahead.
As a design led agency, Huge put research first, collaborating with Spotify to identify motivations and goals for the end user. In this case, the end user is not the listener, but the brands using Spotify to grow their audience. This work ironed out consistent messaging for Spotify Advertising and identified key components of the user experience. Upon testing, re-testing, and iterating the product, Huge and Spotify were able to release Spotify Advertising to much acclaim.
Key Product Details:
A new “Command Center” for advertisers to quickly and easily keep track of how their ads are connecting with target customers.
A distinct focus on “cultural moments” for advertisers, helping brands tap into significant shifts in culture and serve content that rides these waves. Traditionally, predicting a shift in culture was seemingly impossible, unless you were the one creating it. Spotify advertising provides a crystal ball, giving the advertiser a lens to peer into the future to craft culturally relevant strategies rooted in data.
A B2B “Wrapped” Campaign that gives businesses an insight into how people are interacting with audio, ultimately providing a roadmap to smarter marketing campaigns on Spotify.
Outcomes
Spotify’s customers saw a +66% increase in direct sales leads through the platform, and a +22% increase in new account sign ups. 2
These aren’t small numbers.
In taking a design-led approach, Huge was able to uncover critical behavioral insights and translate them into product solutions. This insight gathering, synthesis, iterative prototyping, and execution is critical for a successful design-led strategy to succeed.
Ultimately, Huge created a limitation to competitive imitation by designing a product so good, and so bespoke to the Spotify experience, that competition (Apple Music, Soundcloud etc.) has yet to catch up. There is no streaming product that comes close to the level cultural relevance and effectiveness Spotify Advertising provides.
Huge also established a durable relationship with Spotify by using the design process as a framework for business partnership. Using an iterative approach to product design and strategy positions Huge as a long term partner agency, bringing value to both Huge and Spotify. It’s clear a design-led approach to business helped Huge create measurable value for Spotify’s advertising initiative and establish Huge’s role as a lasting partner for the long term.
https://www.hugeinc.com/work/spotify/
https://www.hugeinc.com/work/spotify/