Design Doing The Business
There is an interesting article in Design Week (2/8/07 - vol. 22 / No. 31) by Mark Shaw called Doing The Business. In it, Mark suggests that Senior Designers should become ‘business designers’, understanding business in general and applying a creative mind to solving business problems.
I agree wholeheartedly. In short, client (and business) expectations are driven by results. Results [should] come from targets set by a strategy and as a Design Agency, we have a responsibility to understand our clients’ business, audience and market and deliver to them. We also need to understand business to a fashion: profit and loss, cost of acquisition of new clients vs. retention of old, etc.
If you take a website or a direct mail piece for example. They need to deliver to a business marketing goal otherwise you may end up spending good money after bad with now real result and that is not good for any business. Too often, the whims of a designer or mar-comms executive with personal preferences overrule genuine business sense.
Take Google in the early days. They resisted design in favour of delivering the service of search and now look at their brand value. The Dyson vacuum cleaner was built around product design, as was Apple’s comeback in the late nineties. The key was, the design made sense and turned those businesses into something new to the market. Let’s face it, are any of these three products the very best at what they do? Probably not.
Making Time For A Strategy
So, with a well defined marketing and design strategy, not only can you create specific goals, you can measure them. You can then see if a tactic worked, or didn’t, faster than if you left it to chance.
Flexibility is also necessary. Markets change very quickly, especially in the tech world. Word of mouth spreads quicker than ever and consumers have more of a say. It is no surprise that more marketing campaigns (online especially) are being driven towards (and by) consumers. Let’s face it, them telling other people about you is much more powerful than you saying it yourself.
I’ll leave the last words to Mark:
A brand cannot be created without a company having a clear idea of its target audience, its core offering and the USP it brings to the marketplace.
Comment by Graphic Design by Shycon August 14, 2007 @ 11:48 pm
Good read. A design business should be run just like any other business. Goals need to be set, and if you don’t have them then you don’t know where you’ve been or where you’re going.
Comment by Louise Fulford August 15, 2007 @ 5:07 pm
Absolutely 110% agree - a deep understanding of your client’s aspirations and business aims is crucial if you want to produce successful design solutions that show measurable ROI. In fact, more often than not, it is not just a case of understanding the client but helping them to understand themselves - interrogating them to see whether their (often nebulous) ideas of what their client base likes/wants/needs are accurate. Sometimes even the client is way off in their thinking, basing their brief more on personal aspiration than on reality. A good agency can work to help clients understand what they should really be aiming for, instead of making assumptions about what their audience wants….