“The reason you would choose, as a customer, to engage with a company and buy their product or engage in their service is very similar to the reason an employee would want to work there.”

This week, Kevin Budelmann, the co-founder and president of Michigan-based strategic design firm Peopledesign joins the Be Customer Led podcast with Bill Staikos. 

From startups to Fortune 500 firms, Kevin has worked with a vast array of businesses, including education, healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and consumer items. Moreover, he serves as an adjunct lecturer at Northwestern University. 

Addressing various exciting topics, Kevin explores the relationship between purpose, brand, and experience in today’s conversation.

[01:37] Kevin’s Story – Starting the conversation, Kevin summarizes his journey so far. Moreover, he talks about his company and how it works with its clients.

[05:00] Interconnectivity of Purpose and Brand – Kevin discusses the interrelationship between purpose and brand and the pandemic’s effect on this.

[13:30] Cross-Functional Teams – Kevin shares his take on shifting into cross-functional teams.

[16:55] Organized for Success - Kevin outlines the organizational structures he has observed firms use successfully and what they do differently when progressing from purpose to an actual product or service. 

[20:02] Initial Steps - Kevin points out how he would convince his clients to connect the brand’s purpose to the delivered experience. 

[23:39] Service Design – Kevin distinguishes service design from other design efforts and the significance of service design in the context of customer experience. 

[28:02] Inspiration – Kevin concludes the talk by detailing where he finds inspiration and who he admires in his sector, along with the reason why.

Resources:

Connect with Kevin:

LinkedIn: inkedin.com/in/kevinbudelmann/

Kevin Budelmann on The Connection Between Purpose, Brand and Experience

[00:00:33] Bill Staikos: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another week of be customer led. I'm your host bill staikos. I've got a great guest for us this week. Kevin is interested in strategic design for business education, healthcare, and society. Those are really big things for, for one person to be focused on. Kevin is president and co-founder of people.

[00:01:19] Uh, I've hired someone out of that program in the past. Uh, and the it Institute of design and Kevin has a book, a brand identity essentials, and it's available not only in six languages, but also has a second edition. Kevin, welcome to the show. So, so excited to have you here.

[00:01:36] I'm I'm pleased and honored to be. Um, and I

[00:01:59] Kevin Budelmann: sure.

[00:02:18] And so, you know, I was exposed pretty early on to not only human centered design concepts, but a pretty heavy dose of technologies. And of course, this is sort of early days in interaction design and user experience design and so on. So I think that has sort of fed into my, sort of my, uh, psyche throughout my career.

[00:03:03] And so I, at the end of this, not too long into my career started this company have been doing that for 25 years.

[00:03:22] If you can help our, our listeners and our audience understand that? And how are you working with clients? Like what's like a typical engagement.

[00:03:40] And across the side, you can imagine sort of internal and external audiences. And if you think about the intersection. Meaning for external audiences like customers, its brand, essentially, if you think about, you know, uh, meaning for internal audiences, it's essentially purpose, right? And you think about the intersection of engagement and customers as customer experience and engagement and internal teams, it's employee experience.

[00:04:24] And we have our own flavor for, for doing these things. But, you know, it's, it's based on going through kind of methods that to solve kind of strategic problems and, you know, it's, it can bridge, uh, brand issues and customer experience issues. And I think, you know, trust these things are quite related.

[00:04:45] Bill Staikos: So I love that. So let's talk about purpose for a second. So I think largely due to the pandemic, not that brand purpose wasn't important before, but certainly the pandemic really brought. Conversation to the, for much more.

[00:05:14] Kevin Budelmann: absolutely.

[00:05:36] Right? And I think these changes are forcing organizations to make different kinds of choices. And the landscape is continuing to kind of shift from kind of a, let's say an industrial land. Um, which I think had a different set of criteria for success than kind of an information landscape. And so the choices I think organizations have to make, have to do with sort of this meaning and engagement, as I mentioned, but as it relates to purpose, I think that in, as you mentioned, like the pandemic, you know, I, I'm sort of a believer that the pandemic obviously has a lot of unique characteristics, but in many ways it's also just accelerated.

[00:06:28] The reason why we talk about meaning is that I think increasingly we talked about, you know, at our organization kind of an era of choice, we've moved from this industrial landscape. You know, like, I think it was Henry Ford who famously said, you can have any color you want and any color car you want, as long as it's black.

[00:07:08] Choose as a customer to work, to engage with a company and buy their product or engage in their service is very similar to the same, to the reason why an employee would want to work there. And, you know, we are for many organizations who are looking for top talent. I mean, the sort of the, the attraction and retention is a, is a massive issue.

[00:07:51] Right. So it was sort of fundraising and they had two separate tracks. So together often had two separate messages that were they're launching simultaneously. And we said that. These things need to be connected. Like the reason you would give money to the school is very related to the same brand. So the reason why you'd send your kid to the school, you know, and I think it's similar for sort of the, the idea of employee, meaning the employee engagement in another way to think about sort of purpose then, you know, the reason, you know, so I think that the pandemic has just highlighted, you know, is this a sort of accelerated these trends and highlighted people's, you know, their ability to make these choices.

[00:08:32] Bill Staikos: and that acceleration. I mean, I get that there were some companies certainly before the pandemic that were really getting that. And I think that their message just become became even louder. Right? Like, you know, look at, you know, like Patagonia is a great example of that on some level, right.

[00:09:07] But like, why did it take that to wake people up to the fact that more effort needs to be put here, resources, uh, et cetera, and the organization and cross collab, you know, cross collaboratively across an organization. Is it just cause it's hard work and different groups need to come together or is it people weren't really seeing the need for it or what's your take on that?

[00:09:30] Kevin Budelmann: I mean, my feeling is that the. Because it's an accelerate. We move from a state where it was kind of the proverbial frog in the water. That's slowly getting warmer and starts to boil. I mean, you, don't, what happens is that, you know, it's hard to see changes when they're slow moving and organizations that people resist change.

[00:10:06] Again, but some of these trends you could have, you could have predicted and kind of were already underway, but it just sort of, it forced the issue. Right. So, you know, Simon Sineck has been out and talking and talking about, start with why for some time. So it's not like the purpose discussion was already kind of out there, but it was, I think it was, it was easy to see as kind of more a superfluous in some cases, you know, some people would say like, yeah, you know, that sounds cool.

[00:10:46] And, you know, I, I, and if you don't accept my terms, Mr. Miss employer, I just find another nother employer. Who's willing to accept those, those conditions. Then even some of the best employers in the world. I mean, it's like, I think apple famously, it seemed, but I keep, I think they've made two or three announcements about everybody coming back to their.

[00:11:40] We hope, you know, that's not much of a purpose, but ultimately in terms of trying to attract a really talented person who says like, look, join our, you know, get on board with our.

[00:12:12] Much like an Amazon does in so many different ways. And, uh, it was tough for folks to say, okay, I want to be there. I hear you, but we're not getting there because you can't do X, Y, and Z. That same institution, by the way, is telling people to come back to the office or right. Or what I do wonder sometimes.

[00:12:52] Are you seeing a shift there as well, and maybe that's driven by the pandemic or otherwise, but you know, th and your work and the clients that you're working with, are they trying to get to a place where. They can employ sort of service design or human centered design tools, uh, and a much more integrated and cross-functional way, or are they still in the, okay, we want to do this, but we want mark and do their job and, you know, see, actually do their job and finance do their job, et

[00:13:20] Yeah. I mean, I think everybody is in their own sort of state of evolution in a sense, right. I mean, it's. One of the things that we overtly tried to do in an initial engagement with a new customer is trying to understand where they're coming from. And there are all these signals in terms of how, you know, what, how do they describe their functions and departments?

[00:13:55] We're all, this is, uh, I think these are new topics, frankly. I think that I've often I started sorta developed kind of a philosophy that we sort of have drawn our departmental boundaries kind of in the wrong places and part, I think that, again, it's an industrial paradigm. I think. You know, every organization has its silos, right?

[00:14:32] Right? So you can move from one department to another. And of course, if you look at it through the lens of a customer, they don't care which department. Half is, is, is making these things happen. They just have an experience and they have an impression. And so I think it's reorienting, uh, an organization to start thinking this way.

[00:15:08] Right. Which I don't know if that's effective either. Right? I mean, so I think that the, you see the emergence of different kinds of disciplines. So I think the idea of talking about customer experience as an example is just, just saying that it's having a department or having a person, a leader in that space.

[00:15:34] Bill Staikos: So I'm seeing a lot more, I feel like we went from departmental silos to being, you know, PR product led organizations.

[00:16:07] Cause I'm always fascinated by how do you go from purpose? To an actual product or service to employees actually knowing what they're supposed to do and deliver that with excellence every day and wanting to right. Cause they're connected to that purpose and then the customer even there. And that may lead into my next question a little bit, but what kind of models are you seeing?

[00:16:34] Kevin Budelmann: Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, it's interesting. I had a colleague of mine who was actually head of the global design, uh, team at IBM and he was describing for me how, you know, part of his objective was to basically create design leadership at the GM level, within each of these sort of macro parts of the organization to kind of ride alongside the business lead to sort of evangelize these ideas.

[00:17:15] Or just even having a customer experience group or a leader in that, in that space. I think there are different models. I, I, my belief is that a lot of it should be journey based. I, I think, I think. You mean the way we connect these ideas too, is to think about it as if you think about a brand or a value proposition as a kind of promise, you know, that you're, you're staking a claim in the marketplace about we're, we're gonna, we're gonna represent this to our customers or our stakeholders, our employees, for that matter, the journey, the actual experience is the way you're delivering on that promise.

[00:18:06] There are personal interaction, some combination of these things. There are, there are new opportunities with new technology to create. Physical ones to become digital ones. There might be price reasons to do that. Also data mining reasons to do it. Sure. So it's, it's the, you know, there's this continued flow, but I think, yeah, the, the journey, it's a bit of a cliche, but I think it's, it's sort of an endless, you know, trying to put yourself in the customer's shoes.

[00:18:41] Bill Staikos: I like in my, where I am at Medallia a lot. There's a lot of conversation among organizations about connecting that purpose right down and, you know, through brand, into the experience that's being delivered.

[00:19:20] Like, what are some of the things that maybe you're bringing to the conversation with clients and asking them that they should start to be thinking about and answering as an organization to be able to start to connect those things through.

[00:19:44] And I mean, I think for people who have been in this practice for a long time, It seems obvious. But as I say, I mean, I just literally had an experience not too long ago with an executive. And I was, it was funny there I was on one of their jet, you know, corporate jet things are flying around and I just kind of made this you, so you gotta look at the customer and you, and you get my count type, flip it around you basically, it was like a light bulb for him.

[00:20:35] Well what's happened is that I think that there's, there's an argument that can be made that. Better. And often that means simpler experiences for the customer. The organization has to deliberately take on more complexity, which, you know, it's almost like, you know, for, for a lot of organizations that they're designed to repel that almost like a disease, right.

[00:21:13] So, as an example, so I think that there are, there are sort of lenses that you can look at these things to try to think about the customer experience. We had. We, we wrote a piece not long ago on, you know, like 25 lenses for a customer experience, as an example, just as a way to look at this journey and for a variety of different ways, looking at it in terms of inputs and outputs, looking at it as a, as a story.

[00:21:58] We have to engage these people in order to engage them. And there's a lot in our minds, but with those words, I mean, you have to, you'd have to know who's on the other side of the table, which kind of implies user research and customer research. So yeah,

[00:22:24] To understand the impact and the flow. That way you can do that with data on some level, right? Like what are the behaviors that drive, you know, better journeys in sort of in the moment, et cetera. But I think we're probably like a couple of years off and like truly being able to connect the two and understand the impact of these.

[00:23:01] As we

[00:23:21] Right. So, I mean, and I think it's because there, there are new things, there's a lot of new ideas emerging, but as a result, there's not always an agreement, even on terms. I believe. So one of the basics is even, you know, customer versus user, right. User language comes more from usually from the design world.

[00:24:00] Like the people are advocating for the users. Aren't, you know, they don't like the marketing people and vice versa. And if obviously the organizations who can make these things work together are the ones who are going to succeed. So, anyway, to answer your question more directly, I think the term service design again, design is in my experience has been more common in.

[00:24:34] Interesting. And I said it's because when people don't use that term here, that's probably a part of my answer. Right? I mean, people use other words, they talk about user experience or they. You know, customer experience. Yeah. But of course, I don't mean to trivialize the fact that those terms there, that also imply that people are coming from very different worlds sometimes.

[00:25:13] I mean, it's kind of like service design is an activity to work on that journey customer experience as a philosophy of looking at the whole umbrella, um, they very much overlap and people would debate just like people would debate me even the difference between. User experience and customer experience, but like at what point is the customer or user or the user or customer at some point we're, you know, we're, we're kind of splitting hairs in my view.

[00:25:36] Bill Staikos: agree. I think that we generally have, and we, I mean, towards the top of the show, we talked a little bit about this, but like, we've put a lot of complexity and I don't know who started this or like where it started, but there was so much complexity and I think your point around. Getting like agreeing on the language and the terms that we're going to use as an organization have always started there first.

[00:26:13] I think getting that common language is super important. I just don't and I'm going to be critical of, maybe I shouldn't do this. Of big CX. Like we don't do that well enough and you're right. Like there's always that this practice is evolving and continues to evolve. Maybe that's part of it, but I really do think that creating your own lexicon for your company, whatever that makes sense.

[00:26:59] Because like, you're, you're an adjunct, you you've run your own business. Obviously. You've got great content out there and we'll talk about where to go. Folks can go find it, et cetera, but like who do you look up to in this

[00:27:17] I mean, which isn't to say, I don't admire people. I mean, I'm like everyone probably I'm skimming through all the business books and all of the latest, you know, everybody is coming in, you know, I've got a stack here of service design books just to like wrap my head around how that's being discussed. And of course, you know, what happens is that, you know, Th the terms are, um, I guess maybe, maybe my bias or my belief that there's so many of these concepts overlapping.

[00:28:00] You know, and then of course there are lots of, you know, peers and authors and people in this space. But, you know, as I, I look at, you know, I even kind of drills back even to my first experience at Herman Miller, the one of the early leaders of a guy named max Dupree wrote a book called leadership is an art and talks about how the purpose of a leader is to define reality and say, thank you, which I think is, so to me, the extent to which we attempt.

[00:28:44] So presenting a point of view to get there. I mean, there's a lot obviously to do when it comes down to the, from the practitioner level. Sure. But that's going to continue to evolve and there's, you know, it's, it's also, you know, it's also sometimes feels like every idea, you know, New idea. It's just kind of borrowed from a previous version of it that was 20 years ago.

[00:29:12] Bill Staikos: I love defined reality and say, thank you. That really feels like it just really encapsulates like servant leadership on some level too.

[00:29:24] Kevin Budelmann: Well, again, I, you know, I, I'm a big, I mean, I'm a big fan of all, all the usual kind of suspects, probably Simon Sineck or Dan pink or Scott Galloway, people like this. But I, you know, for me, I guess for personally, I, I get increasingly intrigued by, you know, people, you know, it's amazing how fluid we can get.

[00:30:08] And he's a, he's a historian essentially. Right. But I guess for me, again, the extent to which, you know, either kind of circling back to the top is I think about planning that the macro changes, he's one of the most articulate people talking about the really seismic changes that are affecting us as a culture and what businesses are dealing with, whether we sort of, you know, they're almost tectonic level changes that I think aren't easily identifiable, but are, but if you start to recognize them, they start to, you can see how they kind of are.

[00:30:50] Bill Staikos: you mentioned Scott. I actually had Scott Galloway as my brand professor at stern.

[00:31:11] And I think it's just a topic that a lot of folks are struggling with today. So, uh, hopefully,

[00:31:19] Bill Staikos: with you. The pleasure's all mine and ours and look, Hey, where can people find you if they want to get in touch or learn more about what your.

[00:31:31] I'm in a number of other places, but that's, that's this that's the best starting place. You can find our book and consulting and all the rest of the things we do

[00:31:43] Kevin Budelmann: listening to be customer led with bill staikos.