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.

Continue Reading “Competitive analysis – a path to mediocrity?”

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.

First up was Ben, who touched on the process that goes on behind the scenes. This is what he had to say.

“Because good design is based on a deep understanding of what is behind the work. Without the research, insights and understanding, it’s just a paint job. So, maybe you can get $5 design, but you are leaving the effectiveness and longevity and resonance with the intended target purely to chance.

We charge what we do because we deliver design AND certainty.”

Matt came out of the gate with the ol’ you-get-what-you-pay-for approach. Basically, if you want it done well, you have to pay well. The right solution and expertise is worth it. Here was his response:

“People can design something in an hour, but will it be any good, will it solve the problem, will it communicate the desired message to the desired audience? In our experience, no. People shop at discount shops because they want to purchase something on a reduced budget – and with this they understand that the quality will match the price tag. If someone only designs, say, a logo identity in an hour– then the quality will also be reflective of this minimal time investment.

We pay a premium when we want to have something done right. People wouldn’t go to a shady dentist to get their teeth fixed and expect a quality product AND a cheap price tag- so don’t expect it with design. We base all of our decisions on years of experience and a solid understanding of your problem, audience and your industry. Do you pay a premium for our service? Yes – you do, but you can rest assured that the outcome will be more valuable to your business than if you had skimped and saved and gone with a more economical design solution.”

Our last partner Mark, who has never been short on words, expanded on the idea of focusing on a unique solution vs. using a template approach offered by the quick design websites.

“Cheap isn’t a word that works with design. Never has. Anyone who offers standardized fixed pricing like a shopping list is using a templated approach. And while that may work for some for a while, it surely backfires at great cost for many. No project is truly the same as the next, and in an age where people are yearning for authenticity and truth, it is increasingly vital that design thinking and a thoroughly strategic form of design process be applied to solving real-world business problems.

There are numerous online design contest sites that offer fast and cheap solutions, but businesses don’t often consider the fact that the work submitted to those sites are often recycled work from other sources, often even used previous in various incarnations. The designers who contribute to these sites are not being paid well enough to make sure their solutions are well-research and unique enough to be owned by the company who buys them. And that can—and has—led to expensive legal fees later when they grow and try to register or trademark their company or product logo or get sued for using artwork originally paid for by someone else. And where’s your designer then?

Our focus is on solutions. Due diligence has been applied to make sure that a solution is indeed actually a solution and perhaps more importantly, is actually original. We try not to be swayed by “pretty” graphics and focus on gaining insights into what our clients’ audience really thinks, feels and wants and create design solutions aimed at them. This takes conversations, thinking, experimentation, testing, and lots of time. And in the end our design efforts result in empowering our clients with a toolkit they own and control themselves, whereas with cheaper freelance designers, companies often get trapped into ongoing relationships, held hostage by a designer lacking the skills, experience or resources to service clients properly, or worse, who simply refuses to release working files because the clients haven’t remunerated them adequately.

Trust comes when there are indicators of quality, predictability, and reliability. And relationships with designers where trust isn’t present are doomed from the start. When a client knows their designer’s goal is their business success, and works hard to make that happen, there is a peace of mind know that a fair price is being paid so they can focus intently on the task at hand, not distracted by the chaos that comes with scrambling to service a whole bunch of clients simultaneously in order to eke out a living.”

What do you think? Please send us any comments or feedback!

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.

The theme of “Vancouver” was a rather broad topic sure to result in a myriad of typical landmarks and icons. We wanted to do something a bit different, but equally memorable. We began to ponder on the luxury of food and the seeming lack of awareness about the problems of hunger lurking in our gleaming city. Then it hit us…

From the cheeky begging bandits of Stanley Park to the alley-roving nocturnal gangs scouring through our refuse bins, the rascally raccoon is as much Vancouver as our mountains, water and shimmering glass towers. The urban raccoon could easily be considered Vancouver’s unofficial mascot. Unbelievably, these critters often eat better than some of the humans in our city. For many people in this city the source of a meal is not certain and definitely not guaranteed.

Our involvement in Canstruction is about working together to ensure fresh food and sustenance for the human population of Vancouver. Canstruction is just one part of that, and ultimately, if more of us eat well, our raccoons will too!

Perhaps appropriately, our sculpture won the Graphic Design Award this year. While not the top prize, to us, it seems like everyone’s a winner.

Check out our various Canstruction sculptures over the years.

People want Twitter followers, but how many of them really know you, engage with you, or see 98% of what you write?

The numbers game is easy to fall prey to, especially for small companies, who can get consumed with the numbers. Every time you court a new fan or customer, or try to get someone to ‘like’ you, you are missing out on marketing to the people who already like you (whether on Facebook or otherwise).

Our advice here is two-fold. One, concentrate on properly servicing your current fan base. This paves the way for more efficient and trustworthy marketing (which is known in the old school world as word-of-mouth recommendations). And two, concentrate on offering a product or service that you are good at providing. If you do this, you will grow your business, no matter the number of likes or followers.

Facebook has tried to recreate word-of-mouth marketing with its like feature, but actually seeing that someone online has “liked” a business – does that impact an individual’s decision to support or hire that company? Pressing the like button takes very little time or effort, and everyone knows that, so there isn’t much credibility in it.

Business owners’ time might be better spent focusing on how customers are treated offline, because there is new emphasis on user-generated review sites like Yelp.com and Google Reviews. Those affect your business more because people feel they have an outlet for their opinions. It’s more interactive in people’s minds.

To engage followers, be sure you are sending them the right kind of information at the right time, and engage with them at least twice a week. Keep it brief. The better the content, the more people will want to engage with you and your brand. Focus on your story, and keep it simple. Sometimes more isn’t better.

That said, Facebook’s new Timeline for businesses has some great features. This new format brings a greater ability to better personalize the page (with the new cover photo approach). There are new ways to highlight, and give prominence to, posts. There is more real estate for photos and video (to make your page more aesthetically pleasing) and new admin tools for quick access to page performance and to highlight consumers looking for a response.

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.

Continue Reading “Clients Aren’t Really Our Clients…”

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.

3) Simpler Times – looking to the future by grabbing ideas from the past

Working out of Eindhoven, Italian designers Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin of Formafantasma explore materials – like compostable bowls made out of flour – that speak to a simpler time. Their Botanica vases are borne of a collaboration with Italian plastic innovator Plart, and are made of natural polymers that existed before the discovery of oil.

4) One Millionth Tower – landscape and other ideas to make living spaces more “live-able”

The ideas expressed in One Millionth Tower take their inspiration from the Tower Renewal project in Toronto, and include examples of ways in which residents would like to make their homes happier, whether through planting vegetable gardens, connecting buildings separated by parking lots with inventive landscape designs, and adding pop-up structures for use as entertainment venues, hair salons, and even prayer hubs.

5) The Occupy Movement

The Occupy Movement spread from city to city, capturing the world’s imagination with the slogan – “We are the 99%” – that lives on. Before being forced out of the parks, it reclaimed public property for public protest and transformed these parks into anarchic settlements with a sanitary department, lending library, kitchen and other communal functions. Whether you liked it or not, it had an impact.

6) The (European) shows must go on – design fairs have big plans for 2012 despite rough economy

The biggest design fairs – IMM and Orgatec in Cologne, Heimtextil in Frankfurt, Maison et Objet in Paris and, the biggest of them all, the Salone del Mobile in Milan – are planning big events this year to prove that innovation holds the key to economic prosperity.

7) Spruce Street, New York

Frank Gehry’s first skyscraper is a knockout. At 76 storeys, it is home to 903 rental apartments, a public school and a luminous stainless steel exterior that ripples like waves – an asymmetric feature that works its way into the interiors. Besides offering renters spectacular views of the Brooklyn Bridge, 8 Spruce Street is a testament to the firm’s commitment to pushing the envelope (so to speak) in computer modeling software. The tower cost $875 million, which is not much more than the non-descript luxury residential towers going up everywhere else.

8) The Weekender – a very useful web-only map of New York’s subway system

Redesigned by Massimo Vignelli, it shows which trains are running (and more importantly which ones aren’t running) on weekends. The goal is to help commuters plan their trips into the city with up-to-the-minute news on service changes due to the chronic slowdowns caused by construction and maintenance. Flashing dots identify stations that aren’t in full service. It’s a clever gadget that is actually helpful.

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.

2: Which companies inspire you?
Who in your industry is doing a great job that you aspire to be like? It could be their service and product offerings, the way they market themselves, or their reputation for being an amazing company to work for. Who outside your business inspires you and why? Many companies aspire to have brands as powerful as Apple, IBM, and Virgin for example, but start by asking what it is about what they sell and the way they operate that you might model, and if that is a realistic goal for your business.

3: Who will be your decision maker?
Once you have retained our services, we get started with an initial meeting to set the foundation for our knowledge about your business, the challenges you face, your desired goals and other specific details. This is where business meets design so to speak. Will the decision maker be limited to the partners and directors of the company, or do you want to strategically involve other key people in the company? The choice over who and how many people from the company to include in the team leading this stage of the project should be a strategic one as well as practical. Most importantly though, is to capture top-level management and the key decision maker(s) to ensure a smooth process.

4: How do we position our relationship with Industrial Brand?
Our goal is to learn and understand as much as possible about you and your business from the start. We will be asking you a lot of questions; interviewing your board of directors, staff, customers and vendors to gain insights into your business. The presence of outside consultants at a company has the potential to cause anxiety amongst staff and others, especially if there are extenuating circumstances or events that have brought us to you. Consider how you want to position your relationship with Industrial Brand.

5: Who will represent you?
To uncover real insights, we want to hear the good and the bad. Who would you like Industrial Brand to interview so we may talk to the broadest cross section of clients, vendors and staff? We have found that our interviewing process and style encourages people to be honest with their answers, uncovering real brand insights through what others ‘really’ think about the company. Even though some of this information may be hard to hear, this depth of information is the foundation for positive change.

6: Allocating enough time.
On average you should allow between four to eight months for a complete branding process that includes research, creation of brand essence and filters, new brand identity and application to a new website and marketing and collateral materials such as stationery.

7: Who is your audience?
We will be learning all about who you sell to (or want to sell to) as we complete client interviews, but the more initial intelligence you can provide about them, the better understanding we will have of their priorities and preferences. This goes deeper than demographic information such as age and sex and into habits, desires, work status, social media skills, buying behaviour and more.

8: Who do you compete against?
Who are the companies you regularly win work from and loose work to? What criteria do you judge them as your competition and how do you measure up against them based on this criteria (and how do you want to measure up in the future)? What are they doing well that you admire? What do you do uniquely well and what differentiates you from them in your industry and market?

9: Where do you currently stand?
Are you tracking visitors to your website? If you do not have Google Analytics, we suggest setting it up for your website immediately. This will allow us to integrate an understanding of your online presence into our research, giving us a better view of your website visitors and their online behaviors.

All companies have many items that will need to be redesigned to reflect the new brand look and feel. We are going to need a list of every brand touchpoint (anything that has your logo on it or represents the company). This will help give us an idea of the scope and scale of the project, and a starting point from which to base recommendations. In addition, samples of branded items, or photographs in the case of signage and immobile items, are very useful for initial and ongoing evaluation.

10: Evaluating your current team
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While you are taking an inventory of physical items to include in the brand audit, make a list of your staff resources. This includes those people and their time available for writing, social media content creation and publication and design. This is easy when you have designated in-house design and writing resources, but more complicated when these tasks are to be added to someone’s job scope who may need to be assessed for these skill sets and aptitudes.

Ultimately, in order to do our best work, we need to understand your company and business as well as you do. The level of preparation, materials and briefing we receive will determine how much time it takes to immerse ourselves in your unique situation. Hopefully this article has given you some ideas on what you can do to prepare to work with Industrial Brand, and hit the ground running.

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.

Continue Reading “Design School Didn’t Tell You…”

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.

How Is Pinterest Being Used?
Perhaps the most powerful business application is the ability to post images of your company’s products or services on your Pinterest board and link them back to your website. Think of it as a social media virtual catalog. If you simply display images of your products without contributing other content or sharing other users’ pins, you’ll likely find that people don’t pay much attention.

Pinterest already is driving buyers to some websites. Retail sites are experiencing increases in web traffic from Pinterest and sales resulting from those visits have increased. I learned about BeyondTheRack.com based on seeing cool clothes on my friend’s pinboards, and I wanted to know where they came from. I have since acquired an entire Spring wardrobe from Beyond The Rack as a result of one particular eye-catching pin.

Is Pinterest Right for Your Business or Brand?
If you are a retailer, sure. If your product or service isn’t particularly visual, however, your images may not tie directly back to your brand. Pinterest also doesn’t offer business-oriented features, and the search function prioritizes pin and board subjects ahead of “people,” the category that brands would fall into.

You can create a new board of your products and services, and add descriptions, prices, etc. One thing is clear: whether you’re on Pinterest for personal or business reasons, the best images (be they funny, beautiful or thought provoking) attract the most attention and the most followers. As a business, your best images might be proprietary –stuff you are not comfortable pinning.

What do you need to know before you start “pinning” like a maniac?
There is very little that can be done to avoid infringing copyright if you are on Pinterest. The only way to pin pictures without violating the site’s terms of service (and the picture owner’s copyright) is to only pin pictures that you’ve taken yourself. Once you pin it, it’s becomes fair game. You can get permission to post others’ pictures, but that is a process which takes away the whole idea of quickly putting up pictures you like. Now it’s just become work. And perhaps more importantly, you could be exposing yourself to a possible legal risk. You can read more about that ongoing issue here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/03/15/pinterest-napster-for-housewives-or-wake-up-call-for-copyright/

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.

Social media marketing done right earns the brand what is known as social currency. The biggest banks delivering social currency are Facebook and Twitter, each with hundreds of millions of users. Both Facebook and Twitter present captive audiences for your messages and offer great potential for your brand through sharing content within their networks. YouTube is underutilized as a potential marketing tool, and LinkedIn provides many opportunities for marketers to engage the right audience in a compelling, professional way. And let’s not ignore Pinterest either.

Trend #3: Location-based Marketing

Location-based marketing is defined as when Smartphone and location-based social networks connect, allowing users to interact at specific physical locations. When marketers know where subscribers are at any given point in time, many opportunities arise to market goods and services based on that location. It’s all happening in real-time (known as QR or Quick response) and requires that users are already prepared to be engaged. Marketers need to strike while the iron is hot. You can now find appropriate messages and offers on a ski chair lift, in the middle of a mountain, allowing you to follow the brand or company on Twitter by scanning a bar code from a sticker on the chair. It’s relatively easy, and can be very effective.

Trend #4: Shopper Insight

Shopper Insight is defined as getting an in-depth sense of how your customers shop, across all channels and formats, and using that information to create mutually beneficial programs and incentives. Unilever defines Shopper Insight as a “focus on the process that takes place between that first thought the consumer has about purchasing an item, all the way through the selection of that item.” Shopper Insight is completely integrated, and should not be underestimated in its marketing power. As a result, it is critical that your message be the same every time your customer is exposed to your brand.

Trend #5: The Power of the Millenial Generation

Characterized as skeptical, altruistic, diverse, frugal, green, candid and successful multitaskers, Millenials are those born between 1981 and 2000. They are at the cutting edge of technology use and are not opposed to connecting with brands, but do so only when there is an exchange of value and, as most of us know, when it is on their terms.

Millenials pose a problem for companies and brands in that they do not trust traditional marketing tactics, preferring to rely instead on friends, family or even strangers in the form of online reviews. What appeals to them is authenticity. Recent research suggests that 93% of this clan spends regular and extended periods of time online. The Web has become their primary source of information, news, entertainment and a significant source of social interaction. 75% of this group has a social media profile. In fact, they spend at least 50 percent more time social networking than any other major age group. 88% text regularly. Well over half visit a social network at least once a day. Most have smart phones and less than half have a landline telephone. They are the first to complain online when things don’t go their way. You can’t ignore this crew. They are too powerful.