“Correlation is not causation, of course, but some of the world’s most successful companies are good at design.” So suggests Bennett Voyles in an article featured by LiveMint, published by HT Media. This company found its beginning in 1924 when its flagship newspaper, Hindustan Times, was inaugurated by Mahatma Gandhi. HT Media (BSE, NSE) has today grown to become one of India’s largest media companies. To read the complete article, check out others, and learn more about LiveMint and HT Media, please click here.

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Design has come a long way in a relatively short time. In 1985, 32% of the S&P 500 value was in intangible assets. By 2015, it had reached 84%, according to Ocean Tomo, an investment bank focused on intellectual property. Not all of intangible value depends directly on design, of course, but it does seem to be a major component: between 2004 and 2015, the returns of an index of 15 major design-driven companies (including such disparate firms as International Business Machines Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Nike Inc.) outpaced the S&P by 228%. Nor is this pattern unique to the US: another study found that in the UK, market-to-book values for design-effective companies were 40-80% higher than for the less style-savvy.

Correlation is not causation, of course, but some of the world’s most successful companies are good at design. Apple Inc.’s gross profit margin is now roughly 40.10%, but even companies without many patents but a good sense of style can do well: at 45.3%, IKEA actually earns even more on the dollar than Apple; and Inditex SA, the owner of Zara and other fast-fashion brands, brings home 59%.

Their success has not gone unnoticed:

o More and more companies now have chief design officers who report directly to the chief executive officer. After watching its rivals Coca-Cola Co. and Starbucks Corp. succeeding in part through their design leadership, PepsiCo Inc. added a board-level CDO (chief design officer). “I thought we had to rethink our innovation process and design experiences for our consumers—from conception to what’s on the shelf,” Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, toldHarvard Business Review last year.

o Companies are buying design firms like crazy. Of the 42 design firms acquired by major companies since 2004, half were acquired in 2015 and 2016, according to a Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB) report.

o In Silicon Valley, designers are now listened to with the seriousness once reserved for technology gurus. Designers are turning up as start-up co-founders, even in venture capital firms. Influential designer John Maeda, former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, is now a partner at KBCB, one of the biggest names in venture capital. He has said, “I believe art and design are poised to transform our economy in the 21st century like science and technology did in the last century.”

o Convinced that design is a source of competitive economic advantage, a variety of US educational institutions have begun to expand their STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) initiatives to incorporate an A—for art.

“Design is becoming a very important part of everything from conversations that are happening in board rooms around it being a strategic lever that can be used to build brands, all the way through to design being thought of as an incredibly powerful tool to tackle big, very complex problems that the world’s facing,” says Charles Hayes, a partner at design consultant IDEO and managing director of IDEO China.

Why now? After all, designers have been around forever, and the term industrial design was coined in 1919, nearly a century ago.

Factors behind the boom

Several factors seem to be driving the current boom.

First, as Steve Jobs once noted, design is not only how something works, it’s what it does. In the digital era, this is doubly true. Unlike in the pre-Internet days when design might be limited to the shape of a soda bottle or the angle of a tea kettle spout, to an extent, design is now inseparable from the offering. From Google Inc.’s minimalist home page, to the patented One-Click box on Amazon.com Inc., to the live car map on Uber Technologies Inc., smart designs were an important part of the success of the business.

The Internet’s winner-take-all economics add a second incentive to invest in design. In network economics, there often is no second place and few opportunities to build niches. Many of the most successful Internet businesses have ended up with the lion’s share of their market despite the fact that their competitors could often match most of their functionality.

Third, globalization has expanded the potential reach of any consumer business in two ways. With larger and larger markets available, businesses can make money either by focusing on the development of key core offerings or by facilitating mass customization. At the same time, scale has driven production to cheaper and cheaper markets. As a result, the fast fashion companies, for instance, have turned to style as a primary source of differentiation. Through their nimble response to emerging trends, companies such as Inditex’s Zara have transformed clothing shopping in many markets from an occasional event to an ongoing entertainment. In 1930, the average American woman owned nine outfits; now, she owns 30.

Perhaps most important of all, the world has more shoppers now than ever. The number of middle income to rich consumers is now nearly 1.8 billion compared to 1.1 billion in 2001, and the number of people living in absolute poverty shrank by 669 million, according to the World Bank.

Many of these buyers are also increasingly sophisticated. Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design as well as the director of research and development at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, argues that although some people might attribute the increasing level of sophistication to exposure to goods with sophisticated designs such as Apple’s products, something deeper is happening to popular taste. “I think it’s culture in general that’s changing. Products are very powerful transmitters and communicators of culture but they’re not the only thing. Altogether, I think the world is becoming much more sophisticated when it comes to objects,” she says.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Bennett Voyles is a global business writer. He and his firm, Voyles Editorial Services, are based in the Berlin Area. Here’s a link to several of his articles.