Bad Taste In Your Mouth...?

When a new prospective client comes to our studio for the initial meeting, it is always a bitter-sweet moment for me when I discover how unhappy they are with their current situation. I feel horrible for them as they lament the history of their brand and the wasted time and money over many years and numerous efforts to create a solid image and identity for their business. But at the same time, I am excited to have the opportunity to help breath new life into a struggling brand with new design.

Design value is a hard sell for beginning entrepreneurs and marketing professionals. Until they have experienced the success if a well-designed identity system, it is hard for them to envision the return on their investment. It has always puzzled me why a person can go shopping and fill their cart with name brands… but on the other hand not want to become a name brand themselves in their own business. Generic brands have their place in the world and some savvy shoppers swear by them for certain products. They forget that their prospects will tend to choose recognizable, reputable brands when shopping for their products as well.

Be careful before you trust your brand to a generic design firm at a reduced rate. Remember, you will spend thousands upon thousands of dollars reproducing your logo over the years. It pays to get it right!

Generic design firms come in all shapes and sizes. R & D has always stood for “research and development.” Many discount design firms have relegated their R & D process to more of a “rip-off and duplicate” exercise. So, think hard before you hire that low-ball design firm to create your business image, design your next brochure or write your next ad. I could write something trite here like “you get what you pay for,” but, I have always enjoyed the saying pictured below in this graphic much better. I first saw this hanging on the wall in the front office of a local body shop I was using to repair one of my vehicles. I have never forgotten it…

Black And White...

When it comes to the nuts and bolts of your brand, the actual logo image itself is at the center of attention, or at least it should be. In order to make sure that your logo is always the star-of-the-show, it needs to be designed in a manner that is easily reproduced across a wide variety of media. All too often, we have clients come in with a slick new logo that is hardly usable unless they are uploading to a website or printing in full-color. In most cases these logo designs have all sorts of gradient blends and shading that cannot be reproduced well if at all in a grey scale or line version when necessary. PhotoShop is indeed both a blessing and a curse.

At our design firm, Tactix Creative, we actually made a rule that a designer could not use PhotoShop to create a logo, and that every logo presented to our creative director must be easily rendered as a simple black and white line-art image. Only then was a designer able to start treating the logo with other colors and/or additional embellishments. Sure, you may want to treat your logo in PhotoShop at some point for added pizazz in certain applications. But don’t ever let a designer paint your brand into the “full-color or nothing” corner! It will be nothing but a headache and you will most likely end up redoing it at some point.
Designers need to remember that they are not creating fine art pieces. They are designing for reproduction purposes. Your logo needs to be at home anywhere and everywhere you may need it. Whether on your website, business card, black and white invoice or a low-res fax… your designer owes you a usable version of your logo/brand for any potential environment. This may sound like a no-brainer to everyone… but we deal with these problem images nearly everyday in our firm.

Make sure when your new logo design is done, that you receive electronic files in their native format, and demand vector image files when at all possible. Gradient blends are evil :)

What Goes Around...

“Others are merely reflections of ourselves… you cannot truly love or hate something about another person without loving or hating that same thing about yourself.” Wait… does that mean when a client does something I don’t like… that I don’t like it because they are just like me? I believe it absolutely does.

Graphic design is always about solving problems in the end. Many of the problems sound something like… “It seems like all my customers care about is price, I need to help them understand why doing business with us is more valuable than my competitors.” Invariably, this will be the client that is all about price when it comes to his design project. I mean EVERY time… it’s amazing.

Here’s another one… “Everyone thinks they can do it themselves, they don’t realize that if they hired a professional like us, the would have a better product and actually save money in the end. How do I get my clients to quit micromanaging everything and let us do our job?” Without fail, this will be the client that drives us to drink with endless, inane revisions and relentless micromanagement. They are also the ones that wonder why you can’t read their mind.

So, next time you get frustrated with the party on the other side of the business table… go take a hard look at the culture in your own company. Your frustration may be a simple matter of self-fulfilling prophecy. Tightwads hate tightwads, micromanagers can’t handle micromanagers and do-it-yourselfers are irritated by other do-it-yourselfers.

So, what is the answer? I advise all of my clients to follow a little bit of advice from Ghandi; (I revised it to fit business environment), “You must BE THE CHANGE you wish to see in your clients.” Take the time in your organization to define what you consider to be the “perfect customer,” then go breath that culture into you own company. You will be amazed at what happens.

The culture of your company is a huge part of your brand and can become the cancer or the cure in all of your business relationships. It’s up to you.

When it goes around… don’t be surprised when it comes around.

Creative Failure...

Tolstoy once said “ All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in it’s own way.” So, why would I include a touchy-feely quote about happy families when I am supposed to be blogging about branding and marketing? It’s simple… plainly stated, “in many ways, failure tends to be more creative and unique than success.”

When we look at the big brands, we notice some very common templates in the way they advertise and take their products to market. Sure, they get creative with the imagery and the angle, but the overall approach usually fits into one of a few molds. From an administrative standpoint, most successful business ventures share a similar discipline in the way they structure their companies. As a result, most of us look to these successful businesses and brand leaders as a model when we approach a new venture. Why reinvent the wheel… right?

Well, it seems that many business ventures fail for that very reason. They confuse creativity and differentiation with reinventing the wheel. In an effort to be different, their business models and subsequently their brands become distorted to the point of failure. So, like Tolstoy’s quote about successful families… we discover some well very defined models for brand-building and advertising success. But on the other side of the coin… wow, there are a million uniquely creative ways to fail. Learn from the big boys and you’ll save yourself a lot of time and money, and even more aggravation.

Don’t reinvent the wheel! Just make the wheel your own and make it better than the competition.

Remember… “Doing it the right way may not guarantee success, but doing it wrong almost surely guarantees failure.”

You Guys Are Everywhere...!

“How many trucks do you guys have? Like 50? I see you everywhere!” exclaimed the customer. This was the first time my client had ever heard a comment like this. Up until a few months ago he and his brand were suffering from the plain-white-trucks (or in this case, vans) syndrome. He was a local carpet cleaning company with a steady book of regular customers and a great reputation for quality and customer satisfaction. He had the same plain white problem that many businesses do. They are great at what they do, their customers love them, but they really don’t have a brand. Did the own any equity in name or recognition that tied them to their stellar reputation? The answer was no. But wait, they were still successful… so why would the owner come to me for branding advice?

“I just feel like no matter how long I’ve been in business in this town, I still have to fight for recognition. If it isn’t a referral, I feel like I am starting from square one with every potential customer,” he said. “I’ve got to do something.” In this client’s case, he already had a logo, he just wasn’t really using it. We went through the normal laundry list of marketing materials that he wanted to roll out over the next few months and decided that the quickest way to jump start his brand was to “logo-up” his work vans. We wrapped his vans with HUGE logos and a phone number. You could see these things coming from over a mile away!

What did it do for him? In a matter of six months customers were asking how many trucks he had because they were seeing them and I quote, “everywhere.” He went from nobody ever having seen or heard of him unless it was a referral to, “you guys are everywhere, you must be huge!” So how many work trucks did his company have on the road in the Phoenix and surrounding area? 40? 50? No… the answer was six. How in the world do six branded vehicles make a noticeable, memorable impact on a valley with three million residents? Visual images, once noticed, tend to multiply in our minds. A great example of this is when you buy a new car. You see a variety of vehicles on the road everyday and give them little thought. But now that you are driving a silver Honda minivan… you seem to see them everywhere! You never noticed them before, where did they all come from?

We’ve all experienced this phenomenon. Now get out there and do it with your brand. Get noticed and let the public start to multiply images of your brand in their minds. There’s no sweeter sound when meeting a new client than these words… “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of you guys.”

Brand multiplication happens…