Fueled by shifts in business focus, organisations are increasingly looking to HCD as a way to drive improvements and respond to the renewed focus on customer. While I welcome anything that contributes to the strategic significance of real human needs in branding, we need to ensure HCD is not merely something that’s on the marketing shopping list like social media, apps or chatbots once were.

HCD works on the premise that acquiring a deep understanding of unarticulated needs (through empathy) inspires creativity and innovation. By uncovering deeper human insights, we can identify needs people themselves may not recognise, allowing companies to get ahead of competitors by enhancing experiences.

It’s closer to anthropology than to marketing science. It’s about gaining perspective, stepping into someone else’s world and understanding their context, beliefs, fears, and the experiences that shape how they see the world, how they look at themselves and brands. It only works if we’re willing to climb down from the ivory tower and get a feel for the current brand experience and how it could be better.

So let’s start with what it’s not. It’s not a buzzword, it’s not a panacea, it’s not a process and it’s not a product.

HCD is a mindset, a philosophy, a graceful coalescence of empathy, applied strategy, and creative thinking. It’s not something agencies sell.

Before embracing HCD as if it was a ‘silver bullet’, marketers need to ensure they’re solving the right problems and using an approach that can bring real value. It may be right in some instances but not others.

The way we put HCD to work is by using different methodologies to bring the brand and customer together, leveraging relationships, expectations and emotions to deliver a distinctive customer experience. If you’re interested in exceeding expectations and delivering a distinctive brand experience, HCD could be the ticket.

If that’s the case, it doesn’t hurt to know how to put it into practice. There are different methodologies and approaches that can be used, one of which is Design Thinking.

The framework for Design Thinking was established by the UK Design Council many years ago and it involves following the process of divergent and convergent thinking. You start with people, understanding their world and empathising with them. First, you weigh up the pains, gains and what people are trying to achieve in life. Then you take that into the “define” stage where you converge, synthesise and identify the insights that are relevant to the problem you're looking to solve.

A lot of people who work in agencies have been doing this for a while, but now, it has a name. And that's part of the reason why it has become so popular. Once you can put a label on something, suddenly everyone wants in. And therein lies the danger.

In an effort to stay up to date with the latest trends, some agencies may simply pepper their website or their proposal with the acronym HCD or process of Design Thinking without having the expertise required to follow through on the promise.

Similarly, marketers looking to freshen up their pitch to the C-Suite or their team may jump on board in an effort to be all over the next big thing.

On the flip side, it can be hard to get buy-in with HCD if the organisation isn’t open to it. When there’s a problem a company just wants solved or the people have a fixed mindset, it can be difficult to see the value in exploring the human context. This isn’t helped by practitioners identifying their expertise with the activity – e.g. “I run focus groups” – rather than focusing on the outcome and the applied thinking HCD requires.

Processes become substituted for disciplined strategic and creative thinking. In the case of HCD, it becomes simply, “asking people what they want”. Often we hear the famous Henry Ford quote, “If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses".

But that misses the point of what HCD is all about. The process is designed to get to the heart of the issue and that goes beyond what people think they want. While a traditional focus group may have only been able to identify insights such as this that sit on the surface, HCD has the power to go much deeper.

Adopting an HCD philosophy means we can bring the brand and customer closer. It allows us to uncover fundamental human truths that help brands exceed customer expectations, distinctively. So let’s use it wisely and not allow it to become diluted and degraded.