TaylorBotshonCreations Doughbys is a pizza and calzone eatery in Oxford, Ohio. They came to my creativity in entrepreneurship class as a client seeking help with the analysis of their customer loyalty and developing a strategy to improve it. Let me take you through the creative process we used to win our pitch competition!
The Process
Step 1: Assumptions
We recognized that at the start of any project, everyone comes into the situation with assumptions. It is crucial to get these out of our system before they cloud our judgment. Altogether, we wrote down over 60 assumptions, and here are some examples:
After these assumptions, we visited the location and tested them. Now that we know what the experience is like and are thinking with fresh minds, we started on the next steps.
Step 2: Visiting the Location
We wanted to get to the location and take time to observe what other people are doing and how they interact with Doughbys. Before we did this, we used a design thinking technique called white hat. This is asking “what do we know”, “what don’t we know”, and “how will we find out what we don’t know?”. This tool allowed us to visit Doughbys with a purpose. My part in this process was figuring out what their current marketing techneques where. After doing some background research and visiting, we had a whole new perspective on Doughbys and could start using our creative thinking tools.
We also conducted empathy interviews during the day (sober) and night (not sober). This gave us insights into what people think is good and bad about the businesses. From all of our new data we created a lean canvas to help us see a 30,000 foot view of there buinsess model
Step 3: Ideation and Convergence
Now the brainstorming starts. Each person in the group got a different topic to brainstorm on. At the start, I created the statement “Wouldn’t it be nice if Doughby’s did something so that they had a better reputation and became the go-to place for dough products?“. All together me and, my group came up with 119 ideas. After this, we grouped and themed into customer wait and customer loyalty with subsections of distractions, methods, business processes, physical location, food-making process, and games/competition.
The next step is convergence, which narrows down our idea list by asking questions. Our list of questions was: Which of these has never been done before? Which of these would a drunk person enjoy? Which of these benefits customers? Which of these is possible to implement? Which of these brings in the most business for Doughby’s?
Learning From Mistakes
After our convergence session we realized we asked the wrong questions, which led to a bad end result…so we started over again. Our new convergence questions were: Which of these is difficult to replicate? Which of these would go viral on TikTok? Which of these would drunk people love? Which of these makes customers emotional? Which of these is feasible for Doughby’s?
Step 4: Final Idea & Client Deliverable
After this round and a few other discussions, we landed on the final idea, Calzone lottery scratchers