When design consultant Ashley Shaffer and her team were asked to help a long established US insurance company to appeal to a younger audience, she came back with something a little different. Rather than simply saying how the company should appeal to younger clients, she found that younger clients actually had very little financial education. And that way they solved the problem.

Shaffer is a design consultant with the international firm Ideo, a company that is over 30 years old and a pioneer in the practice of design thinking. At Ideo, Shaffer’s speciality is design research. A company will approach them with a product they want to rebrand or launch, and she and her team will come up with the best way to do that.

When working with the insurance company Mass Mutual, they identified that the lack of education about financial products amongst the target audience was key to sell the insurance products of their client. “Their target actually needed more education than buyable tools,” she said. So they came up with ‘Society of Grownups’, a new brand, service and offer centered around education.

While taking part in the MIT Media Lab workshop in Dubai earlier this month, hosted by Community Jameel and Wamda, Shaffer shared with Wamda some tips she had on branding.

In this video she talks about how they first tackled the “problem” brought forward by a client; how they go to the stakeholders in a company to find out what they want for the product and then go into the field to see what the users would want; and finally, how you should be confident with your target audience, and communicate simply.