Design for marketing

on May 05 in Uncategorized, branding, marketing, sell story

Clear message

Puffery and clutter are not your friend. Smoke fades—mirrors break. An unclear or subjective message will dilute credibility and effectiveness of your design and eventually your brand. People are bombarded with hundreds if not thousands of marketing messages a day. It’s now become a race to win people’s attention then their business.

How do I clarify my message?

1. Keep the piece simple and uncluttered but still arresting
2. Make your focused message easy to find and well supported with imagery and copy
3. Keep the copy to the point—avoid puffery and other subjective claims
4. Know your audience or ideal audience and tailor to their tastes

Message Support

Get to the heart of what your product or service does.

Use supporting imagery to tell a story of what you do. Use copy to tell your ’sell story.’ Make the piece compelling and easy to read. Go over in your head what your story is. Commit it to memory and then tell it in every piece of collateral. As soon as you get sick of your message you know it’s working.

Use objective data to compare against your competitors.

What are they doing well? What are you doing better? Compare your product or service to a known entity. Relationships and analogies help bring credibility and understanding to your sell story.

Tell your story well.

Appeal to the left brain’s “need to know” and the right brain’s “want to know. This back and forth of decision making happens very quickly. It is influenced by the environment, perception and peers. If you are thirsty you may buy water. How does your mind decide which water to buy? Some will base just on need and go for the cheapest one. Some will have a brand favorite or some will have the water bought for them by someone else. In the end bottled water is just water. It’s the story that helps sell it. Perhaps people like to think of a spring in the woods of Maine. Or if they can conjure up an image in their mind what artisan water is and how clean the water comes out of an unspoiled well never touched by man that may influence their choice. It is water. Which would you buy? What type of consumer are you?

Brand focused messaging is important in a wholistic way.

Everything you release into the world is either promoting or detracting from your brand. If you run a store and a customer has a bad experience–they will tell others about it. The same is true of a good experience. Which has more impact on your brand? It is hard to say but what is for certain is that you have to be mindful of your actions, interactions, communication style and your collateral when you are thinking about your brand. Like it or not your brand is you. You are the representative of it every time you answer the phone regardless of the size of your company. It is important to know what you want to represent and align your message to that goal.

Keep fishin’