Hastes makes waste in the branding, marketing, and design world

Building a brand takes patience, dedication, and consistency. So a word of advice.. do not rush.

A huge part of building a brand is designing your touchpoints in such a way that they properly represent your brand, and are also attractive/functional for your target audience.

Note: Touchpoints are anything where your brand interacts with your audience. Your website, social media channels, business cards, menus, coupons, etc. are all examples of touchpoints.

When you rush on pushing a touchpoint out the door you often don’t make something that properly represents your brand, even if it happens to be ‘functional.’

Let's envision the following scenarios:

Scenario 1: Function without form

You’re a restaurant and all of your menus have a constant look and design. This includes your digital menus, handheld menus, and drink menus. All of a sudden there’s a need for a to-go menu that can be sent out in all to-go orders. You don’t want to go through any type of design process because you want to solve the problem now.

The result: You rush to create a touchpoint that isn’t consistent with your other touchpoints, which ruins your own consistency in the eyes of your customer. Because the touchpoint isn't consistent, it also fails to move the customer to the next step in supporting your brand.

Just think for a moment about the brands you know or admire. What do they have in common? They’re very consistent.

Scenario 2: Form without function

You’ve created an event flyer for your brand and it looks amazing. It even looks similar to your other brand touchpoints. You decide to send it to print and receive 100 flyers.

You soon find that the QR code you put on the flyer isn’t working, thus people can’t register for your event as easily as you wanted them to. Now they need to type in your web address, and navigate to the correct page for registration (which you know isn’t likely.)

The result: You spent all of your time thinking about aesthetics and didn’t stop to test your design to ensure it would be functional. You not only wasted the money from the first print round, but you also missed out on all the event revenue that you could've received had the process been simpler.

Conclusion

Always remember, in the world of branding, design, and marketing.. haste makes waste. Take the time to understand your brand and your customers, then make things that properly represent both.

Why is it necessary to build a brand?

You could be the nicest person, your product could be the best, or you might be the best at what you do - but it’s not enough if your customers can’t differentiate you from your competitors. This is why building a brand is so important. But first let’s clear up the question, “what is branding?”

What it's not

The words 'brand' and 'logo' are often used synonymously, but this is a misconception. While logo design is an important part of a branding, building a brand goes so much deeper.

What is branding?

A brand is a reputation, or rather, a perception. Your brand is your audience’s gut feeling about your business. Branding is the ongoing effort to reshape your audience's perception so that it’s in line with how your brand describes itself.

Now that we know what branding is, we can talk about why it’s necessary to build a brand for your business.

Summary

Building a brand helps to establish your business’s identity and differentiates it from your competitors. A strong brand increases customer loyalty and trust, which can lead to higher sales and long-term success.

Identity

One of the benefits of building a brand for your business is that it helps to establish your identity. A well-designed logo (and other brand elements) can convey your values and mission - which makes it easier for customers to understand what you, or your business stands for.

This makes it easier for customers to connect with and trust your business.

Differentiation

A strong and well-established brand will differentiate your business from its competitors, which is especially necessary in the crowded marketplace we deal with today.

Ask yourself the question: “If other businesses do something that’s similar to our business, what would make potential customers choose us over them?”

Everything you think of to answer this question won’t matter unless people commonly think of you the way you think of you.

Loyalty

When customers feel a strong connection to a brand they’ll be more likely to return to the business and recommend it to others. This leads to increased sales and long-term success.

Attraction

A great brand creates awareness and interest for your business, which leads to more people learning about your business, which increases the chance that new people become your customers.

Conclusion

Building a brand is an essential part of any business strategy. I’ve said it before: “In a business, brand strategy is the left side of the brain, and business strategy is the right side.”

Building a brand helps to establish your business’s identity, differentiate your business from its competitors, increase your customer’s loyalty and trust, and attract new customers.

Be warned - branding is not a short-term play and it's not for the faint of heart. Building a brand requires the investment of time and resources to set your business up for long-term success.

What is design thinking?

Design Thinking is simply using design to solve real business problems, to think of the root cause of the issues businesses are facing. It's also part of the reason clients trust certain designers as experts to think outside the box in searching for better solutions.

I think of design as this: to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

Design thinking requires that we look at all problems as being interconnected systems. Often enough the problems our clients face go much deeper than the surface level.

Why Design Thinking?

It puts people first

The closer you stay to a person and their stories, the better the solutions you provide will be. Creative elements are often used to target certain audiences of people, so it's important that we're putting them first.

Repeatable success

Design Thinking is a systematic process used to uncover information; it can be applied to solve many different types of issues.

Gets to the root

Design Thinking helps to find the root cause of issues. It takes us beyond the surface and beyond self-diagnosis to find the real solution.

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Let's talk about an example where design thinking was used in real life at the Washington Monument.

The team that maintains the Washington Monument noticed that the monument itself was starting to chip & crumble. The maintenance team thought that this might be because of the cleaning chemicals they use to keep the monument clean. So they thought about changing or reducing their use of said chemicals. (Notice how the team jumped to solving this issue at the surface.)

Luckily, a Design Thinker asked the question: “Why do you need to clean it so often with those chemicals?”

The maintenance team replied: “It’s because of the pigeon poop.”

The Design Thinker responded: “Why are the pigeons there? There’s not really anywhere for them to sit on the monument.”

The maintenance team replied: “They like to eat the spiders around the monument.”

The Design Thinker responded: “Why are the spiders there? There’s lots of foot traffic, it doesn’t seem like a great place for spiders to congregate.”

The maintenance team replied: “The spiders are there to eat the moths.”

The Design Thinker responded: “Why are the moths there?”

The maintenance team replied: “The moths are there because of the massive lights pointed at the monument, they come on just before dusk.”

The Design Thinker responded: “Why not just turn off the lights?”

The maintenance team took the analysis and tested the theory; after 3 weeks of not turning the lights on there was an 85% reduction in moths, which lead to less spiders, which lead to less pigeons, which lead to less pigeon poop, which lead to there being less of a need to clean and use harsh cleaning chemicals, which lead to slowing the damage on the Washington Monument.

The outcomes: Less money spent cleaning, and less damage to the monument.

Conclusion

Design Thinking, and Design Thinkers themselves go beyond the surface by asking the right questions. By doing this they uncover novel solutions that everyone else missed.