Designing a Brand on Purpose

Design Elements: visual/audio representation of the company used  in the brand map. Includes the logo and all forms of communication inside and outside the company.

Brand Map: strategic plan that bridges the distance from the company to the customers

Target Market Identify the core values, beliefs, and mindset of the customers you want for your business. I find that sometimes the customers my clients want are not they keep attracting. Smart branding can help correct that.

Company DNA It all starts with articulating the core values, beliefs, mission statement and/or vision statement of the company. Sometimes a business can outgrow its original identity, and a big disconnect from their clients can occur here. I can help clients define or re-define their “personality”.

Why Your Business Should Have a Brand…on Purpose.

The Big Picture

Here is a list of some of the things I have been reading this week:

Measuring the Future Brand Effect of Graphic Design by Gert Kootstra and Jos Vink; The Best Strategy is the Right Strategy by Sohrab Vossoughi; Visual Thinking: A Leadership Strategy by Mark Dziersk; Brand Driven Innovation by Erik Roscam Abbing and Christa van Gessel; Creating Smart Designing Questions by Richard Kielbon and Gerald Nadler; How to Make Sure a Brand Behaves Itself by Mark Churchman and Thomas Marzano.

Some of these articles were published a couple of years ago, so I am re-reading them…..Now, why do I tell you this? Because I will be quoting some of the material, but mostly so you know that I am doing this research for you.

Today, more than ever before, business who are interested in growing or at least staying afloat need to make an effort to create a brand. Because if they don’t, one will be created for them…..and they may not like it.  Let’s define what we mean by Brand here. A logo is not a brand….and a brand is not a logo. They are not interchangeable. A logo is simply a PART of the brand. Like your skin is part of your body. Skin is a nice, neat, easy to look at package that covers some pretty complicated stuff underneath. A logo can do that too. But this post is not about logos….it’s about brands….and brands are all about The Big Picture.

Over the years I have developed a process of designing branding materials, which I want to share with you…it’s similar to other design firms who are also members of The Design Management Institute, and a mix of marketing and graphic design. Please visit MY Design page to read about the process. (I promise it’s short!)

Follow your own lead

You nailed the business card. The letterhead, envelope and other brand Id materials look great and it’s all flowing together perfectly. Finished with branding? Nope, you just got started.

It’s very common to see a business spend months and many dollars get started with a strong branding or re-branding campaign,  only to gradually slow down to a crawl…then just flop over. This can happen in less than a year, and then another round of expensive resuscitating begins.

Know where you want to go. That is as important as knowing your own business personality and that of your market. “Begin with the end in mind” is how Stephan R. Covey puts it. Say you own a small bookstore. You can’t compete with the big box stores as far as budget and national advertising, but that’s okay because you have a vision for your store. You’re located close to many offices and medical buildings, so you make sure you have super-fast, super-reliable wi-fi, lots of comfy chairs, tables and nooks that are perfect for reading or setting up office for a couple of hours. You serve great coffee and a few pasties and snacks. The music is very soft and unobtrusive. You see it buzzing with regulars who come by everyday, and the atmosphere is so friendly and welcoming that your loyal patrons would not think of going anywhere else. (By the way, if “anyone” wants to open a store like this in Huntsville, AL please let me know….and you know who you are).

So how does this happen? Can it happen? Well yes, it can, but not be accident, it happens – literally – by design. Money and hardwork? Of course, but designing your success will help you make the most of every penny and every minute you spend, turning these pennies and minutes into investments not expenses. And who doesn’t like a good ROI? (sorry, I HAD to throw in a little marketing lingo).

The Branding Blog page this week takes a look at selecting the best vehicles to get you where you want to go.

Design your journey

I like to get to the point. I love detours when I am on a trip or not in a hurry, but when there is someplace I need to be, I like going there directly. These days, there are many ways to reach your markets, it’s just not the way it was 20 or even 10 years ago. And most businesses that I work with do not have the luxury of excess time or budget to play around. That’s why testing in small portions is so valuable as we looked at in the last post. Right now let’s look at how to select the best means of transporting your message to your market.

Know your destination: If you can’t visualize or verbalize where you want to go, how will you recognize it when you get there? What does success for your business look like? Is it a busy shop? Hiring an assistant to manage the office while you make service calls? Selling a certain number of widgets? Paying yourself a certain salary? Opening a new location? The more specific you are here, the better. It will morph a little as you go along, that’s perfectly fine; you can adapt if you really know where you want to go in the first place.

Find the most direct way to get there: If you are trying to reach a market made up of say, moms, (a huge part of the market) be specific about what kind of mom. Is she a new mom? Are the kids in school? What grades? Does she work at home? Does she work at an office? Does she home-school? Let’s say she is a mom with kids in middle school and she works part time in an office. What’s the best way to reach this busy woman? E-marketing or social network marketing. The number of women who make purchases online because of recommendations from online friends (people they interact with on a regular basis via social networks) is huge and growing.

What about the new mom? She probably doesn’t have as much computer time as the first mom we looked at, but she does go online to new mom sites checking out what other moms are doing (and if what her baby is doing is normal). She also reads baby and parenting magazines while waiting in the doctor’s office….and new moms spend a lot of time in doctor’s offices the first year of the baby’s life. Website advertising on mom sites, local search engine optimization and print advertising in parenting/baby magazines are good choices. Direct mail with coupons will also be effective for this segment. We could go on with each of the different parts of the mom-market, but you get the point.

Bottom line: if you know your market well enough you know where to find them. Go there. Use the same mode of transportation they are using. If your busy working mom is flying past you in an express train, don’t try to run along side the track holding up a sign to her – she won’t even see it! Advertise inside the train or through her laptop or smart phone. Not only will your message have a better chance of being received, but (and if you remember nothing else from this post, please remember this:)

If communicate with your market (your people) exactly where they are, they will take you to your goal. Why? Because you are demonstrating that your brand is authentic and that you understand and appreciate your market. How do they know that? You came to them on a road they are already traveling, using a vehicle they already rely on.

Testing…

Before you spend a large amount of money on a mail out or other marketing effort, have you thought about how you can test it? Good news is that today there are very inexpensive ways of testing your message before you send the whole thing out. There are a couple of things that work best for testing: the heading and the call for action.

What to test: It’s the entry point into your marketing message and the more effective it is in grabbing your readers’ attention, the easier it will be to deliver the rest of the message. To test it, have several versions designed, each with a different headline. Keep the rest of it the same. You can also test the call to action – for example one version has a phone number to call, while others have an email to respond to.

Where to test. Ideally you want to keep the test as close to the real thing as possible…so your are mailing test by mailing, if you are emailing then test via email. However, a new way to test is by advertising on Facebook. You can specify your target market and run the ad for as short or long as you want – and it’s the best way to test a print ad.

5 questions to ask before you order your next marketing piece.

The more intentional and specific you are when planning your marketing or sales piece, the better results you will have. Consider these questions before you meet with your graphic designer. This will help them create something more effective for you.

- Who is looking at the material – clients or prospects?

- How well do they know your business?

- How well do they know your industry?

- At what point in the purchase cycle are they? (not interested, mildly interested, looking for basic information, searching for specific information, looking for pricing, ready to buy)

-Where will they be when they read it? At home, a trade-show a seminar, the office?

What happens when you miss the mark?

Have you ever bought a gift for a family member that you were just sure they were going to love but was received with less than enthusiasm than you anticipated? And that’s because they were trying to be nice about it. You may have heard their real opinion at a later date….or through somebody else.

The same can happen in marketing; you get an idea for a great promotion and spare no expense because you are just sure it will work. Perhaps you saw the same idea get fantastic results somewhere else, and thought it would work for you. But it falls flat. You get no response, nada, zip. What do you do now?

As Madonna once said “Any publicity is good publicity” or something like that. Well, maybe for her that is true….but for the rest of us, not so much.

So steel yourself and start contacting some of the people who were the recipients of the marketing mistake, and ask them why it did not appeal to them. Ask them what message they thought your were trying to send….if they can. Ask several people from  different locations so you can get a good cross-section of opinions. You can do this through phone or email, and be honest. Let them know you are trying to find out what went wrong, so pick people whose opinion you respect and you know will be honest with you.

Then look at the results, and compare that with the original goals you set out for the piece; in other words look at what your were trying to say, and then compare that to what people perceived you were saying. This can be one of the most valuable bits of research you ever do.

Of course an ounce of preventions is worth a pound of cure.Thank you Benjamin Fanklin, those words were just as true in his day as they are today. So testing your marketing is very important and practical. We’ll look at that next time.

For a good laugh, visit this website-most of the mistakes are due to poor language translations; you may remember some of these. http://www.i18nguy.com/translations.html

Owning the Brand

As we talk more about the shift in the role of the Brand, we move to the internal focus: where  ownership of the brand used to belong only in the marketing department, now the entire organization are involved in building “usability” into the brand. This means that it used to be up to the marketing department to define the way the prduct was presented. A good look at the really successful brands today will reveal that this is changing. The personality/brand of the business is shared by everyone in the organiziation.

With small businesses this is much easier, or course, but there are still challenges. At a recent networking meeting I asked everyone in the room (about 30 people) to use two words to describe their personality. Only three people responded. However, the following week when I asked this same group of people to describe the personality of their customers in two words, 95% of the room answered without hesitation. Fascintating.

If you build it they will come.

I watched Field of Dreams last night. (love that movie). And there was a good lesson there. It was not until Kevin Costner’s character understood what he had built at the very end that “they” came… The field was there, the players came because they understood why it was there, but Costner was not absolutely sure why he had built it. It took most of the movie to build up to that. In the end, when he understood he had built more than just a baseball diamond, when he realized the potential of this field….they – the customers – came.

It would be nice to have a little super-natural help like he did, but the principal is the same. If you understand what your business is capable of, what precisely you are offering people, and what your company’s personality is, then you have a much better chance of communicating that. As the experiment I conducted proved, most business owners know who they want to reach. So the first challenge is taking ownership of the brand, being able to define the personality of your business and making sure that everyone in the company understands and supports that.

So it’s your turn: Describe your business’ personality in two words.

How did you do? Was it harder than you thought? Next time we’ll talk about what to do if you realize that the messages you are communicating don’t match the personality of your business.

“Reach Out and Touch Someone”

Remember that? What company did it advertise? Of course, it was AT&T. The credit goes to Marshall McLuhan for the tag-line. It has become on of the most famous and effective (most importantly) one-liners in American advertising. But why? What made is so effective and what does it have to do with design?

In our conversations, EVERYTHING I talk about involves design in some way. We were talking about how to deliver on a promise last time, and this slogan, this campaign absolutely delivers. Another thing I like about this slogan is that it allows the graphics to be adapted to speak to very specific audiences. Same message, different packaging. Since this particular product has such an enormous market, the success of a campaign depends on making it personal and specific, yet consistent across the whole campaign.

Samples from print ads

So the question is, how can we reach out and touch your market? How can your message be tailored to appeal to your potential clients? Does it have emotional appeal? That’s key, and we’ll talk about it further next week. But more than just a “feeling”- it must still be based on truth, and you must  understand who you are trying to reach. To touch someone is both a physical and an emotional promise. If the phone had not been shown, would it have had the same impact? Remember this was back in the seventies, the world was not yet virtual.  The phone represents the connection between you and business, you and family, you and those you love. AT&T delivered on that, and their marketing communicated that very clearly.

Finding the Point

Illustration: a comparison or an example intended for explanation or corroboration. I’ve always loved telling stories with artwork. When I was in high school, I was able to turn in a report once in the form of a large illustration. That was cool. It is actually much easier for me to have a message in what I am creating, so it’s a good thing I’m a designer!

So though I may use pen and ink, or pencil, watercolor or a mixed media piece, there has to be a point to the piece. When I use an illustration in a brochure or branding piece, the point is focused on supporting the text. With a magazine or book illustration, it is an organic part of the story. It expands the text rather than explaining it like in my commercial work. I love subtle humor, and while I don’t get the opportunity to use it as often as I would like in the types of illustration jobs I get, it’s really fun to do.

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