My mother taught me how to write. My father taught me how to defend myself (verbally). Art Center College of Design taught me how to present my ideas. But none of these venerable resources taught me how to read minds. What does mind reading have to do with marketing or design: practically everything.
What can cause a web design project to go over budget or off schedule? This question is often asked of web firms. Similarly, client’s ask, “What can we do to ensure success with our website project?”
Good news, bad news: this is not rocket science. In design, success is often subjective. Reigning in subjectivity is where we can realize economies, both in money and in time. To that end, the following recommendations apply to a majority of website projects, regardless of industry and irrespective of intentions.
Sometimes when people come to us for “branding,” I quickly ascertain that what they really mean is an updated “visual identity.”
“So, you’re looking for help integrating your vision, competitive positioning, audience messaging, market perception and corporate culture,” I might ask. Just as often they respond, “I just need an update to our logo, collateral templates, PowerPoint, web design, etc.” For many, the visual manifestations of a brand are “The Brand.”
In our data and analytics driven marketing world, why would something so touchy feely, so ethereal and hard to quantify as brand personality be something you care about?
Everyone wants to be Apple. Everyone wants to, “Think Different.”
We’ve talked about Market Strategy, Brand Strategy and Content Strategy, so why do we need a Web Design Strategy? Because, of all of these strategies, only your Website Design Strategy is externally facing. Let’s put Website Desgn Strategy into context to clarify how these strategies work in tandem.
Using a funnel metaphor, your Market Strategy is your highest level strategic decision, in which you define the markets for your products and/or services and determine whether your market approach is industry specific, solutions or applications-focused or some combination.
Once this is determined, your Brand Strategy encompasses the way you describe what you do, for what audiences with a compettive value statement, which sets you apart from your competition. You socialize this brand internally, and externally at every customer and employee touchpoint.
The power of a relevant Content Strategy — based on sound Market and Brand Strategies — is to create a program to disseminate and exchange your valuable content across all media and over time, which leads us to your Website Design Strategy.
In a previous post, Three Cases of Websites Using Modern design Techniques, I touched upon some of the exciting new design techniques — that have become available on the web—which are beginning to change the face of the modern website. Digging down a level, these design techniques exist to serve your company’s need to tell your brand story. The speed at which business is being done and the amount of noise you must cut through have elevated the need for distinctive, on-brand digital storytelling.
Family lore has it that my design career began at age 4 when after a rain storm I came upon an oil slick in our driveway and was so astonished by the rainbow of colors that I grabbed my crayons and started to draw. Working with color has always been a pleasurable and highly intuitive and experience for me. But lately, there has been a growing number of research studies and articles about the science of why we respond a particular way to colors and design in general, which have implications for business as well as being of academic interest.
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