Despark has repositioned itself to become a more product-led business, with the aim of creating more value for brands and their audience.. The relaunch includes an updated website to communicate this approach better coupled with some groundbreaking work.
Despark’s CSO, Stoyan Ilchev explained why we went through the repositioning exercise and how we intend to be more useful to brands and end users.
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In today’s economy we have so many brands fighting for users' attention — which basically means that most marketing campaigns are getting lost on people. Users only really want to interact with apps/products and brands which provide real value — these can save time or money, provide a more bespoke and customised experience, or increase loyalty and engagement — and are therefore seen as being really useful.
With the general public’s huge attention deficit, it’s very important for brands to find ways to connect with people where they already are — such as through chat apps and existing products. If this engagement approach isn’t feasible — which it won’t be for every company — then the next best thing is to create useful products which might have a slow uptake, but can provide real value over time.
Don’t forget that your audience invests their time to sign up to your service and parts with their personal data, but if you can build value into the product, then your users will see that as a fair exchange. Airbnb is often used as an example of a game changing product vs other hospitality products : let’s focus a little on why that is. The product is just the mechanic — the brand and business model are about Airbnb enabling real people to power their business through the product vs traditional hotels, which rely on a standard marketing website and generally have an outdated and cumbersome booking process. So, Airbnb proves useful to end users, whether they are hosting or renting a property.
Brands today need to interact better with customers and focus less on campaign work and more on the usefulness and the immediate value people can see in their product or service. It’s all about experience and if brands get it right then it’s becomes very easy to recommend these type of companies to others — that’s how viral marketing works and that’s what brands should be striving for when creating digital products. Plus you get free advertising, which almost creates infinite ROI. If the product doesn’t provide good value and is not easy to use — people won’t be using it or recommending it. It really is as simple as that.
Marketing today is about providing value, utility and creating brand awareness through platforms and usefulness.
At Despark we knew we were ready for a shift in operations from a “digital/web agency” to a digital product led design agency whilst working on a recent 6 week discovery project for a new groundbreaking product using AI. We kept questioning ourselves as a business “Where is the industry going? How will design and technology evolve? What is our role in all of this?”. Throughout this journey we constantly came across a universally agreed hypothesis, that marketing today is about providing value, utility and creating brand awareness through platforms and usefulness.
As part of our repositioning we have redesigned despark.com. The website has nothing that doesn’t have to be included on it. We’ve overcome the challenges users had before on the site by focusing on just what we want to communicate and removing all the unnecessary fluff.
