Why rebranding requires a human-centered approach: For B2B health CEOs and CMOs leading change

What does it mean that Orange Square embraces a human-centered approach?

In order to talk about that, I think we need to talk about the opposite of a human-centered approach, which is a corporate-centered approach. This is where a lot of companies operate from. It makes sense. I’m not blaming you. It’s okay. But corporations have a culture, right?

A lot of times you’re setting goals and thinking it’s a financial goal or something you’re trying to reach. So when a company has an initiative, what happens is it goes through a process: initiation, planning, execution, delivery of whatever you’re making, and then measurement and refinement. The problem with corporate-centered goal setting is you aren’t finding out what the audience wants until too late in the process because you didn’t check in with that audience.

I wrote a whole book on this called Shift: Leading Change with Human-Centered Innovation. You can check it out on Amazon.

So what does it mean that Orange Square takes a human-centered approach? It means that we’re centering people in everything we do. It could be your customers, your teams, your partners.

In a rebrand, we’re looking at all aspects of your business and every single kind of audience you have, internal and external.

We are focusing on the real challenges that any of these audiences are facing. We dig into the right problems, which means we have a problem-finding mindset. I think that often what happens in business is everyone’s so anxious to get to producing something that they define something quickly, get excited that it’s defined, and move straight into problem-solving. I would implore you to really take some time and have a problem-finding mindset.

This probably comes from my background as a designer, because what we were taught is if you solve the wrong problem, you get the wrong answer. I know we’ve all had that experience.

So a human-centered approach means defining the right problem clearly.

This is where you understand what it is, then connect ideas to solutions, prototype, and test. You can think about what the possibilities are. It doesn’t mean that business goals are bad, but it means that you’re going to waste time and money if you invest in all those steps before understanding that you haven’t solved the right problem.

That’s what makes our approach to rebranding stand out: In every aspect, we take a human-centered approach.