What Reach does can be described as ‘design-led customer research’, which we abbreviate to design research. To achieve this we combine two approaches:
Understanding people’s practices to drive innovation
Understanding the people and situations you design for is crucial for successful innovation. These insights only come from spending time with your customers, and developing empathic conversations with them. When presented in an inspiring, visual way such insights are a strong driver of innovation.
Bringing design skills into customer research
Design skills such as generating, modeling and prototyping new ideas are crucial for successful innovation. If these skills are already used in immersive field work and insight creation, the resulting innovative ideas are rooted strongly in the markets your company or organisation innovates for.
We work with our international partners, driving design research at a local level yet maintaining a global vision. This has helped our clients deepen their understanding of customers in multiple markets without having to reach out to individual expertise in each location. In the process, we have also accumulated a vast body of knowledge in how to conduct design research in several countries, either simultaneously or in phases. So we established Reach School to help organisations who want to build their internal capacity of design for a global audience.
As a network, we celebrate our achievements and share learning regularly. Our Great Outdoors Of Design (a.k.a GOOD) conferences have attracted attention from a wide range of audience & experts from all over the world. With the world being more connected yet unique in each part, we believe that it’s only by creating deep empathy with people in their context, organisations can create solutions that their customers love and last in the changing global environment.
