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.
