Designerly design, e.g. design as taught in professional design schools, is becoming a mainstay within the world’s executive suites, where it is being used to form organisational structures, strategy, change, policy and more. The speed and extent of its uptake have come as quite a surprise to the traditional, analytically driven design disciplines within business studies; as is sometimes said of earthquakes, no one saw it coming. A watershed moment was when the American Broadcasting Corporation aired its ‘Deep Dive’ documentary on IDEO in 1999. The programme’s implication that design was ideal for innovation, that it could be applied to anything and the sometimes evangelical tide of design thinking literature that followed created a tectonic pull within business practice and education. I argue that this was due in part to a ‘Candy Man’ effect, where executives longing for easy, sure-fired innovation saw ABC’s sunny depiction of design, read the popular press articles and books on design thinking and swarmed in – often with unrealistic expectations and subsequent disappointment. I further suggest that we treat design thinking’s mixed reception as a call to reconsider where and how it might be applied to strategic level concerns, perhaps thinking of it as we might high end desserts and less like fields of candy canes for mass consumption.
This paper presents an analysis of the way brand authentication operates through discursive enchantment as a series of ongoing negotiations among different market actors. We suggest that one specific type of enchantment, the concept of craft production, has been given too sparse attention in conceptualisations of authenticity. Through a qualitative multi-method inquiry based into the guitar subculture and a brand genealogy of the pseudo-Swedish guitar brand Hagstrom, we show how the rationalising trajectories of modernity can not only have disenchanting effects, but can also be dis-authenticating. We illustrate how various marketplace participants collectively engage in brand re-enchantment processes that provide the springboard for re-authenticating rationalised production through five enchanting craft discourses: vocation, dedication, tradition, mystification, and association.