Posts Tagged ‘process’

Building a brand from scratch takes considerable time and attention. But too often, in an effort to launch a new company or product, branding hasn’t always gotten the attention it deserves. The reasons are understandable: There are so many things needed to be done. Resources are limited. There is an urgency to get to market and start generating revenue.

Maintaining and growing an established brand is an ongoing process that requires a lot of work. And it’s only getting harder and more complicated today, as more and more, external factors are beginning to have an influence over a company’s brand. A recent article by AMA Access cited a study of senior executives in both marketing and general management which stated that while overall, 66 percent of respondents believe that their company owns their brand today, the dynamics of a shifting marketing landscape will mean less control of their brand over the next 3-5 years. Interestingly, marketing people in both B2C and B2B environments felt that their company already had less control over their brand than their non-marketing counterparts.

From this, three conclusions can be drawn. First, more than ever, it is critical that the proper amount of time and resources be allocated to build and grow your brand. Second, what constitutes your brand needs to be thought of in the broadest terms possible. And third, in a world where people outside your organization are increasingly gaining control over some portion of your brand — it’s critical to control those aspects of your brand you can control, as tightly as possible.

Building the Brand

All too often, development of the brand is initiated toward the end of product development, when it should be started much sooner. Doing it sooner can help ensure that the brand strategy is thoroughly developed and tested, and that the brand design is complete and  support materials ready for launch. Brand design, if developed soon enough, can also have an impact on the final product design. For example, one of our clients is developing a new product for interventional oncology. We began working on their brand early on, so when the time came to develop the look of the product itself, they were able to integrate the brand design into it.

Think of Your Brand in the Broadest Terms

When we start working with a company and ask them about their brand, it’s not unusual to be shown their logo, fonts, color palette and a few examples (e.g.  their website, PowerPoints and some printed material). All these things play a part. But there is much more to it. Every touch point your company has with the world reflects on your brand. From the most obvious (e.g. website, packaging, signage, collateral) to the less  (call center, delivery trucks, emails — even the words, actions, and attitudes of your employees), they all play a part.

Establish Control of Your Brand

As mentioned, it’s impossible to totally control your brand today. But you can control much of what is communicated externally.  One way to do this is by imposing clear rules for all the people responsible for communicating your brand to the outside world to follow. Guidelines and templates are an indispensable way to get everyone on the same page and speaking the same language. Besides ensuring correct and consistent use of the brand, they can help improve productivity and lower costs.

Guidelines can be broad in scope, with topics ranging from how corporate materials should look to how employees should answer a phone and engage with customers. Guidelines should be simple enough for everyone to understand, and detailed enough to support those responsible for developing whatever materials they need. Guidelines present the rudimentary elements of a brand and show how specific materials should look, and provide enough information and samples to guide in the development of new and unique materials. Templates are often developed in conjunction with guidelines to offer even more consistent and efficient application of the brand. Templates can be created in a number of applications (e.g. InDesign, Quark, PowerPoint, Word) for a number of different purposes (e.g. brochures, data sheets, presentations).

Not long ago, a colleague asked me “Who stole my profession?” He was bemoaning what had happened to the career we had chosen, one to which we have both devoted our entire lives. Graphic Design has changed as much, or more than just about any other role in business. In fact, it’s hard to know how to advise young graduates who come to us with their freshly downloaded degree in Graphic Design since the job is about so much more than it used to be. Almost ten years ago, I wrote about the changes I saw happening in an article titled: “The Strategic Designer Becomes a Key Part in Management Decision Making” – Boston Business Journal, May 24, 2002. The pace of change has only accelerated since then.

To understand the role of the designer today, it’s important to understand where we’ve come from.

The 60s
Our profession has had an identity crisis for years. In the 60′s, it was called Commercial Art and its practitioners were Commercial Artists. It was an accurate description of the role, but to some, it seemed an oxymoron. “True artists” believed that art and commerce could not coexist and, in fact, Commercial Artists were nothing more than uninspired artists who had sold their creative souls to the corporate devil. By the time the 70s rolled around, Commercial Art had been replaced by a less offensive term, Graphic Design.

The 70s.
Nobody really knew what the term meant.  “Graphic Design? You mean you design graphics? What kind of graphics?”  But at least it was no longer called commercial art. As the 80′s progressed, companies developed an understanding of what graphic design was — the artful combination of words and images to communicate messages, primarily intended for reproduction by offset printing. Designers worked with many skilled tradesmen to accomplish their work, including typesetters, photographers, illustrators, photo retouchers, proofreaders, paste-up artists, printers and finishers.

The 80s
With the advent of the personal computer, the world changed. With each successive software upgrade, tasks which once had required talented and practiced artisans were being performed on the computer by the designer. Entire trades disappeared, one after another — typesetters. photo retouchers. paste-up artists, pre-press persons (strippers). While the graphic designer took on more and more responsibilities, the term was at the same time being devalued. In an article written by Sandra Cirincione in “For Women First” magazine called “Best Jobs for the Nineties-No College Degree Required”, she recommended a career in Graphic Design because “it’s highly creative”. For training,  readers could “Investigate night courses offered at local universities and technical schools.” She even added, “Training is available at many computer stores.” OUCH!!! As perceptions of Graphic Designers lowered, highly capable firms looked to separate themselves from the term. Needing to better communicate the breadth and value of the services they offered, they chose instead to call themselves a Marketing Communications Firm or a Communications Design Firm.

The 90s
The changes brought about by the computer were nothing compared to the impact caused by the emergence of the World Wide Web (or the “information superhighway”, as Al Gore liked to call it). Designers had taken on more and more roles over the years and when it was determined that every company MUST have a Website, business again turned to designers. The perception of designers within the executive office was beginning to change. No longer were they seen merely as window dressing. Business leaders were starting to see that designers had skills they could use to benefit the bottom line. To call yourself a graphic designer would invite the question… “Oh, you design Websites?”

The decade gave birth to a second sea-change for business, almost as powerful as the advent of the Web — Branding. Branding was nothing new, but the practice had been more common in consumer marketing and larger B2B companies. The Web had leveled the playing field and now even small and mid-size companies were beginning to understand the importance of clear and consistent communication. Libraries filled with books about branding. Evangelists spoke to everyone who would listen about the value of a brand. Everyone and his brother was suddenly offering Branding as a service, and each developed their own convenient definition of the term. To corporate identity firms, branding was all about the logo. Printers would claim that branding meant consistent, high quality literature. To a writer, branding was an elevator pitch and a tagline. And Web firms seemed to believe that branding began at the home page and ended at the contact page.  So much was changing — the demands of the new technology the expectations of the business world. As the ultimate generalist, designers were again the ones best postioned to take on the expanded role. No longer just Graphic Design, now it’s Strategic Design.

The 2000s
Advances in technology continued to change the communications industry, and continued to steamroll over the talented people who had served it. Photographers and illustrators sold their collections to stock photo agencies and nearly insured the demise of their trade. Printing presses came to a halt as companies had less and less need for large inventories of literature. The dot com meltdown and the resulting recession forced companies to find new and less expensive ways to communicate with their customers. Email marketing emerged an inexpensive alternative to expensive and time consuming direct mail. Search Engine Optimization became the rage and corporations brought more and more of their marcom needs in-house. Working with no marketing budgets, marketing specialists were asked to produce corporate literature and print them on their ink jet printers as concerns about quality and effectiveness became a thing of the past. The 2009 economic meltdown corresponded with a rapidly evolving Social Media to add to the culture of FREE. And again, smart designers evolved to become trusted advisors on how best to navigate this new world.

Graphic Designers who have weathered the rollercoaster of change in the past 30 years are the ones who understood their fundamental value to business — their ability to apply creative problem solving skills to a wide range of business problems. In fact, the creative process used to develop strategic solutions for business today is the same process that has been used by designers for years to solve a wide range of communications challenges. Now the process has a name — Design Thinking. (defined in Wikipedia as a process for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that looks for an improved future result.) The term, coined by David Kelley of IDEO, is now part of business lexicon. The impact that Design Thinking can have on business is exactly what I wrote about in that 2002 Boston Business Journal article.

To my colleague who wondered what happened to Graphic Design, it’s not gone. It just goes by a new name — Design Thinking.

I recently got a call from one of my clients. In an exasperated tone, he asked me how I get people to agree on anything when it comes to design. He was in the middle of redoing his company’s website, and before he could even give me any direction about the design, he needed to figure out how his company should present their product solutions. Because he either didn’t want to or didn’t feel capable of making the decisions himself, or perhaps because he wanted to do some team building (a very popular concept in companies, and one with great merit), he had gathered people in a room to try and figure out what they needed to do. Everyone had an opinion of course, and many were in conflict. The question before him was how to get all these conflicts resolved and make everyone feel included.

I mumbled some answer that I felt was frankly missing something. I mulled it over later and came up with an answer:  the design process is not a democratic one. That’s the short answer really. The longer answer is a little more involved.

The design process should be treated the same as other disciplines we employ for business. Companies don’t go around asking everyone’s advice on financial, personnel or investment  matters. They hire people for their expertise, either as employees or outside consultants. They then look to these people for answers, not opinions or options.  Think about it. When we go to the doctor with a problem, we don’t want his opinion or choices for treatment. We want to be told what is best for us.

For many companies, there is no need for a full-time designer to handle the decision-making. As a result, companies sometimes attempt to fumble through things internally, trying to figure things out before giving it to a design firm to execute. The problem with this scenario is that they can easily misdiagnose the problem, so the remedy that’s created to fix the problem is ineffective.

Even when outside help is obtained, there can be problems when the design firm presents a number of options for consideration. The burden falls on people inside the company to make the decision. You can see the dilemma already. Like a patient having to decide which treatment is best, this poor person is left making decisions he or she feels unqualified to make. No wonder they go around asking for everyone’s opinion. 

The fact is, like any other consultant, a design firm should typically offer the one or two best solutions. That is what they are paid to do. 

Now to get back to my initial point. Design may not be democratic, but it can be inclusive. It can be very helpful for employees at companies to be informed along the way about directions that the company has decided on. This allows them to digest these changes in small bites rather than being forced to swallow it whole at the end. It also allows them to raise legitimate concerns sooner rather than later. What’s important is that along the way, you frame things properly so they know what they are allowed to comment on and what they are not.