A recent analysis by the Design Management Institute, a nonprofit focusing on design management, shows with statistics what graphic designers suspected all along: that good design increases profits. In the past 10 years, design-driven companies outperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500 by 228%. These companies included Apple, Coca-Cola, Ford, Herman Miller, IBM, Intuit, Newell Rubbermaid, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Starwood, Steelcase, Target, Walt Disney, and Whirlpool. The money that these companies invested into smoother user experiences, beautiful branding, and innovative advertising have turned into higher net profits.
The Design Management Institute partnered with Motiv, an innovation strategy firm, to create the DMI Design Value Index – a list of design-led, publicly traded U.S. companies that meet a set of six design management criteria. The above-mentioned companies were only a few in a pool of 75 that met DMI’s criteria. They measured the success of this design-led segment of companies against other companies in the stock market, and found that, indeed, those companies that put design first had a significant stock market advantage.