Blog

Competitive analysis – a path to mediocrity?

I recently met a fellow design firm owner in the U.S. with a particularly salty view of competitive analysis. In his firm, if a designer is caught going online to research a client’s competition before a concept has been developed, they are immediately fired!

When he told me this—and trust me, he was dead serious—I was taken aback, but he explained that it is part of the employment contract his designers sign.

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Posted by Mark Busse

Why Great Design Doesn’t Come Fast and Cheap

Recently I asked our partners a question that they must get asked all the time. It goes something like this: Why can’t people just use a company that will design something cheap and bang it out in a day?

I know the guys could talk for hours about this, and we’ve written about this on our blog before, but this time I wanted their initial, instinctive responses. And I asked them to be specific. Continue reading "Why Great Design Doesn’t Come Fast and Cheap"

Posted by Keltie Munro

Canstruction 2012

Once again our team at Industrial Brand helped fight hunger in this year’s 2012 Canstruction Vancouver event.

This time we joined forces with Pacific Blue Cross and Omicron.

There were big shoes to fill as the competition has been growing over the years, and for the first time ever, the event would be at street level in various locations along Georgia Street—huge exposure! With 19 teams entered and a projected 91,000 cans for us all to stack, arrange and turn into art, we were ready for a fun and challenging competition since this would mark our seventh time in this competition.

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Posted by Tyler Wilman

Do your Facebook fans and Twitter followers really “like” you?

It’s the classic question—quality versus quantity. When it comes to Facebook and its notorious ‘Like’ button, are businesses better off with more ‘Likes’ or with fewer people who will take real action and support their business in the real world?

People want Twitter followers, but how many of them really know you, engage with you, or see 98% of what you write? Continue reading "Do your Facebook fans and Twitter followers really “like” you?"

Posted by Keltie Munro

Clients Aren’t Really Our Clients

Seriously, they’re not. Not really. Think about it. Our clients’ clients are our clients.

Before any fellow design instructors flip out, insisting they spend a good deal of time teaching their students how to interview clients, develop target audience personas or write project creative briefs, ask yourself honestly how often this is really done. How frequently are young designers actually speaking with those for whom their identities, marketing pieces or websites are actually created? Not often enough.

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Posted by Mark Busse

8 Fun Things Going On In Our Client’s Worlds

Azure magazine and other Architecture newsletters released their big stories in the construction, architecture, and design industries. We love following this stuff and we’ve created a recap of our Top 8 favorite hits:

1) Serious furniture with a sense of humor

During the London Design Festival, Hubert presented a fully realized collection for De La Espada that elevated the brand and displayed the designer’s dexterity in creating serious furniture, like the strappy Coracle chair, as well as solid pieces with a sense of humor – like the architectural Gabion tables.

2) Talk to Me, interacting with interfaces as part of the design experience

Talk to Me, which wrapped in November 2011 but continues to have a richly interactive web presence, archives the interfaces, social media bytes and personal communication devices of our QR-coded world. By pushing the design dialogue to a new level, Talk to Me helps us more deeply appreciate how interacting with interfaces of any kind is a designed experience.
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Posted by Keltie Munro

The top ten things you can do to prepare for working with Industrial Brand.

If you’ve crafted and successfully gone through a proper RFP process, you’re likely well ahead of the curve in establishing a solid foundation for working with your chosen branding firm. If you did not conduct a formal RFP, here are a few pointers to help you get the process and relationship off to a great start.

1: What are your goals and how do you measure success?
How will you measure the success of working with a branding and design firm? Will it be purely financial growth and market domination, or will you also measure staff moral, integration of one culture across multiple office from different cities? The answers will help you define the relationship, project parameters, areas of responsibility and help both parties remain focused on producing real results.

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Posted by Matt SamyciaWood

Design School Didn’t Tell You…

Design Edge Magazine recently launched a new section on their website and invited my friend David Berman and I to be regular contributors. My column is called Design School Didn’t Tell You… and my first post, This industry will drive you crazy, is below:

The graphic design industry has driven me crazy.

OK, that might not be entirely true, but after more than two decades as a professional designer, I feel like there are so many more important topics to discuss other than whether I ‘like’ a logo redesign, what font so-and-so used, what the latest colour trends are, or what software or technology is superior, etc. And if I get into one more conversation about inspiration or see another circle “design process” diagram (Ooooooh! You do research too?), I think I might hurt somebody.

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Posted by Mark Busse

What’s with all the interest in Pinterest?

Pinterest, an online bulletin board for your favorite images that launched in 2010 and is experiencing wild growth, is driving more traffic to company websites and blogs than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined, according to a recent report from Cambridge, Mass.-based content-sharing site Shareaholic. But here are a few things you need to know about it:

What makes Pinterest different?
Pinterest allows you to organize images – cars you like, wines you’ve tasted, favorite donut shops, killer ski jumps — into boards for specific categories. When you “pin” something new, your followers will see it. They can like, comment or re-pin it to their boards. Like Facebook or You Tube content, your Pinterest pins can go viral. Brides-to-be can pin pictures of different wedding dresses to review, and people shopping for a new phone can pin images of their options. My friend has a pinboard exclusively of varied photos of Rafael Nadal.

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Posted by Keltie Munro

Top Trends of 2012 That We Are Watching Closely

Trend #1: Mobile

The ongoing buzz around mobile marketing is for good reason. A study conducted by Nielsen reported that 45% of Web mobile use is spent checking email and 25% is spent playing games. Combine that with the fact that there are 5 billion mobile devices worldwide, and you’re looking at an enormous audience.

Trend #2: Social Media

Social media avenues can grow your prospect list, increase your brand awareness, and drive your promotions. Social media can also provide marketers with deeper customer insights, allowing for better engagement, improved messaging, and increased trust and loyalty.

Continue reading "Top Trends of 2012 That We Are Watching Closely"

Posted by Keltie Munro

The Very, Very, Very Latest on Social Media

If there is one thing we have learned from our clients (as well as our own experience here at Industrial Brand) about the adoption of social media, it’s that companies need to overcome a learning curve before adopting a proper web and social media strategy. There is so much out there on the “very latest” in social media; the fundamentals are always evolving. It can be overwhelming and very time-consuming. Though Social Media is constantly evolving, there are some things we have learned that haven’t changed all that much. We call it the very, very, very latest. Essentially there are three key components for success when executing a social media plan.

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Posted by Keltie Munro

So you think naming is simple?

Did you know the name Apple was inspired while Steve Jobs was pruning Gravenstein apple trees on his friend’s orchard? According to the recent Steve Jobs biography, Apple Computer could have just as easily been called Personal Computing International. Had it been, who knows if it would have met with the same iconic success.

The Apple name, along with others such as Virgin and The Gap are not immediately intuitive because they evoke something about the company’s unique positioning. And they are risky. If you think about it, the word virgin has negative connotations, especially for an airline: new, untested, and young to list a few. The naysayers in the boardroom would certainly pick these out as an argument against such a name. Those with a different vision might say it perfectly captures the spirit of a new entrant into a category dominated by sameness and mediocrity. When you think of the possibilities for a positive disruption to the airline (and others) business, ‘virgin’ could also mean new, fresh, energetic, willing and young.

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Posted by Ben Garfinkel

We’ll design a brand identity, but branding is up to you.

Recently a prospective new client asked us some rather pointed questions about the nature of what we provided as brand designers, the difference between branding and marketing, as well as some other rather insightful queries. This client was a privately owned, relatively young company experiencing success and growth in their industry, but recognized the need to raise their game and present themselves with marketing and communications in a way that better reflected who they are—or who they wanted to be. But they had very little experience working with a brand design consultancy like ours and wanted to better understand us and what we could offer them. These questions are often on the minds of many who consider hiring us, so I felt it beneficial to reproduce that dialogue as it transpired via email:

What is a brand anyway? And what is the difference between branding and marketing?
Terrific question. To be successful, a brand must consistently provide quality and satisfaction; it must meaningfully distinguish itself from the competition to create customer preference; it must be relevant, convenient and easily accessible to its target audience; and it must appeal to their individual lifestyles, attitudes and beliefs. A successful brand is one that generates loyalty and affection because it provides a level of quality, trust, convenience, assurance and allure for which the audience is willing to pay a premium.

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Posted by Mark Busse

Sustainable Practices

We are concerned about our impact on the environment and strive to create business practices that support sustainability. In our business we strive to reduce our use of paper and take other steps to control our impact environmentally.

In our role as marketing strategists, designers and often as the lead in the specification and vendor qualification process for print production, we are in the position to educate, create and produce on behalf of our clients. Thus, we do so with the smallest possible environmental impact. In these pursuits we are currently taking the following initiatives:

• Communicating via email (invoices, newsletter) where practical and client preference. This not only reduces paper, but also the carbon impact of mail sent via traditional means.
• Convincing numerous client NOT to print excess collateral materials such as annual reports, and if possible avoid printing altogether in favour of producing online materials to be distributed electronically.
• Educating our clients on the benefits of specifying paper from mills committed to sustainable production such as Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC); wind power, recycled content and carbon neutrality.
• Selecting printers who are committed to sustainable practices through FSC certification process and their own efforts to use environmentally-friendly materials and reclamation processes.
• Donation of used computers to schools and deserving charities, or environmentally safe disposable services.

Posted by Mark Busse

A Clients Guide to Web Design

Time and time again when we present websites and online projects to clients we are met with blank stares and questions when we begin talking about the more technical aspects of what we do. From these questions we have developed a few examples of our practice that helps our clients understand why we do what we do.

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Posted by Tyler Wilman