Your Brand, Your Audience and “Design Thinking” was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Jess addressed an issue yesterday that all businesses face at one point or another: getting into your customer/user’s shoes to make sure what you give them is what they need.

In 3 Ways to Align Your Blog Content with Your Target Audience she writes:

When you understand what challenges your audience faces at what stage, you can begin assigning topics to keywords and building that content into your editorial calendar to offer content to this type of persona.

She’s talking about a blog or website content specifically, but the challenge of empathizing with those using your product or service has a broad reach. It reminded me of a segment I saw last weekend on 60 Minutes, the weekly TV news magazine.

I think every product manager, small business owner, and marketer will enjoy this interview with David Kelley. He’s a designer who’s teaching “design thinking” at Stanford and was the inventor of the first computer mouse (technical revolution) as well as the stand-up tube of toothpaste (everyday useful).

Reporter Charlie Rose starts the segment calling design thinking an “innovative approach that incorporates human behavior into design.” Call me crazy but if you’re not considering human behavior as you design — be it products, services, software, an ad, a website or a content piece — then what are you doing?

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