Graphic Clinic

Tag: brand

  • Judging a book by its cover

    Note: This blog article was written for our client Nucleus Financials “Illuminate” campaign. It is due to be published in the autumn of 2015.

    Picture the scene: you’ve got a day jammed full of meetings with new and existing clients alike. Your paraplanner and administrator have already left your a stack of post-it notes on your desk asking you for various decisions, and your 10 o’clock (a possible new client) is late. That’s okay because you can deal with those questions and contact your Platforms CRM to release a new fund for another client. But they’re still late.

    30 minutes after their appointment time a mid-20s, unshaven man, with several piercings and a tattoo poking out of the top of his v-neck t-shirt arrives at the office to meet you. Already disappointed at their lack of punctuality you begin your usual preamble about your adviser firm when his phone goes off. Quite unexpectedly he takes the call, meanwhile you seethe. You’re already thinking this person is going to be a very bad client; lots of work and probably a small income to invest. You’ll no doubt hand him off to a junior member of staff to handle once you get through this meeting.

    We all love to think that we’re intelligent enough not to take people at face value. Not to make assumptions before they’ve opened their mouth, nor to assume the way they dress, or that week-old five o’clock shadow, defines who they are. But subconsciously we do, and then spend the rest of the time fighting those opinions.

    It could turn out our gentleman above is a professional footballer with a £200,000 a week salary or heir to a family fortune.

    But when it comes to the image of a business you really cannot get away with such a lack of care and attention. For as we judge individuals by their ‘cover’, so too do we judge companies. And when we judge them we are much less forgiving. How many times have you searched online for a product or service, selected the first link and arrived on a website that looked like it was created in Word? Or one with a confusing page layout and unclear descriptions? Your reaction? Close the page and try the second link in your search.

    Cover: judged.

    The value of spending due care and attention on your businesses look is, alas, an unquantifiable one. For no two logos should be alike. What works for one business will not work for another, and so on. But the UK Design Council estimates through its research that businesses who invest in design get a 15% return on their investment and that 50% of businesses make their investment back within a year.

    When every customer is judging your book by it’s cover, can you afford to cut corners? It could very well be the difference between growth and stagnation.

  • Why you (as a small business) shouldn’t be scared of the word “Brand”

    For the last two decades, at least, the big worldwide marketing and design groups – like Ogilvy, Interbrand and WPP – have been espousing the virtues and powers of the brand and charging handsomely for their wisdom. The list of multi-million pound rebrands is as endless and the figures quoted for the work. The resulting feeling amongst the rest of the business world (outside the FTSE250) is that branding is big bucks stuff. That your marketing budget needs to be as bloated as Mr Creosote to even consider uttering that fabled 5 letter word. You can almost feel the vibrations when marketing directors and business owners across the country shudder in fear when their new designer asks them for a copy of their “brand guidelines”. How could they ever afford to have such a weighty tome prepared for them? Surely to do so would require a grovelling trip to the bank manager with an embarrassing retreat as they are laughed from the building?

    I’m here to tell you that that fear is a load of tosh. The fact is that branding shouldn’t cost the equivalent of an African dictators golf buggy. It is affordable, surprisingly affordable.

    Here’s why. Brand strategists work hand in hand with graphic designers to build a brand. They do much of the initial thinking and the designer does the rest. He or she is then the one that pulls together these biblical “guidelines” documents. They are the ones who work on the colour relationships, the typefaces, the tonal variations, the uses in varying territories, the image style banks and so on. As such they become strategists themselves, able to advise the client in the absence of their colleague on a whole host of related issues. But these minds don’t always stay at the big firms forever, the get restless and move on, or better still – set up on their own.

    Of course there is a reason the big agencies can charge such high fee’s. It’s because getting a brand right and applying it well across all customer channels can add noughts onto a companies bottom line. Coca-Cola, for example, through consistently excellent application of it’s brand to it’s product has grown to have a brand value of £70.4bn (src: Interbrand “Best Global Brands Report 2010). That’s some serious numbers!

    So here’s the tip. Seek out a graphic designer who has experience dealing with big “brands” but who now works for a small firm, or themselves. Then you can get all the big thinking for an affordable price. And remember, don’t fear the word; embrace it and your company will be much better off for the investment.