Make Sure You have a Designer in Your Next Meeting

Why savvy execs are falling in love with designers (and we don’t mean Ralph Lauren).

Today customer experience defines your business: how prosumers engage with your business and in some cases make “Darwinian” decisions about buying your products/services.

In the “ancient day’s” designers were geeks who were kept in closets, fed fast food and just trotted out for “design review meetings.”

Today that’s brand suicide.

Design is no longer just about making objects pretty, it’s baked into just about every part of marketing strategy.

It permeates every aspect of how you engage with your customers: events and tradeshows (booth, literature, hands outs), PR (format and images) and of course digital interactions: web, social, video, mobile.

Your customers expect and want a a remarkable design experience across all engagements with your business. It’s a global eco system and sophistication in design permeates customer touch points.

What a Good Designer Can Teach you About Marketing.

1) How to look at the market through the eyes of your prospects, suspects, customers and others.

2) Provide your business with context about design. You’ll have a better understanding of what a user experience is and how it shapes sales.

3) How to setup testing methodology using the cloud or a web site for high speed and frequent testing: “why are people buying or not buying.”

4) Help you brainstorm about what options that touch on design need to be baked into all of your marketing processes.

5) Inject a design perspective into meetings and discussions about any revenue or lead generation your business is undertaking.

6) Design is the prism for how your customers “see” and “experience” your company. Not involving design on business strategy is foolhardy (Google “Apple Newton” for perspective).

7) Richard Dyson should be the 3D holographic image for why every good company needs to learn from designers: it took him years and lots of trial and error. But, in the end, his design trumped every vacuum cleaner on the market. (Savvy marketing helped too.)

8) Every business must have visual as part of their DNA. Text and content frequently take a back seat to visual. A great designer is a shape shifter, moving your business in ways no others can. Think about it.

9) A great designer softens your look and makes it more attractive. Look boys, whether you like it or not there’s a reason why feminine colors rock, drive back end conversions and resonate. Harsh, masculine “Clint Eastwoodesque” colors are outdated.

10) Just one word: speed. If you can’t get to market fast your competitors will eat you for lunch. You need speed baked in to every aspect of your business and design is an enabling skill for speed to market.

Why Great Marketing and Design are Forever Joined at the Hip

Great Marketing has Two Critical Deliverable

• Attraction
• Relationship Building

Every marketing message has a sense of urgency in it: images help to drive the recipient into the message

Great marketing makes an emotional connection - images provided by designers are an integral part.

No successful brand today can create and share high value content without quality images, videos, infographics.

High impact marketing is visual. Today, a “selfie” can be worth a thousand words, not that “selfies” will define your business.

A great design is always going to reinforce your marketing message. Visuals (as above) evoke a message.

Key Takeaways for Smartphone Engagement

Embracing and inculcating design into your business starts with knowing you have an issue. It’s like sobriety, until you admit you have a problem, you are not going to find the promised land.