Planning to Win With Graphic Design.

As a business leader, you battle with competitors every single day to win customers away from them and to keep your own customers buying your products. As much as you want to take away competitive customers, they also want to take away your customers.  What makes this so challenging is that battle with competitors is customer by customer and opportunity by opportunity.

No one ever said that business was easy. It isn't.

To make things easier you always need to start with ensuring that you have a deep and clear understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of competitive products and your product. Failing to fully appreciate and understand consumer values and behavior is the Achilles' heel of so many businesses.

This means that you need to focus on what customers see before they buy your product. First, you need to focus on what customers see as they consider buying your or a competitive product. For most products, this means you need package design that is demonstrably better than all of your competition. Retail package design needs to stand out in a very cluttered environment. In B2B your package needs to immediately communicate the benefits customers receive when they buy your product.

To win this battle for attention you need great graphic design to develop great package design.  Graphic design needs to create a package design that delivers "pay attention to me" design that is better than your competition. You cannot get this kind of graphic design from every company selling graphic design services. You need graphic design services that incorporate and help you develop both the messaging for your package and graphic expression of that message. Do they vary overtly say they design to deliver a package design that wins against competition? If not, continue your search.

Follow the same procedure for all of your marketing materials. You want marketing materials that potential customers will see that are clearly better than your competition.

Be Alert. You Probably Need Better Graphic Design Now

It can be a major business mistake to not regularly evaluate how effective your packaging and marketing materials graphic design measures up to competition. For most businesses this is the primary where you got potential customers compare your product the alternatives they have.

This makes it tough to know if you need better graphic design. That is unfortunate. Graphic design is directly involved in virtually everything potential and actual customers see. If you are a consumer product, it is your packaging. If you are a business product, it can be your trade booth, packaging, and/or marketing materials.

Great graphic design is required to make sure that every customer facing aspect of your product is the very best it can be. You want your graphic design to do a better job of persuading customers to buy your product than the job your competitive products are doing to persuade your customers. While your graphic designs may not be the only way potential customers evaluate your product when making a purchase decision, it frequently is one of the most important that they evaluate. This makes it very important if you want to build your business.

So, how can you know?

Put your customer facing designs side-by-side with all of your competition. Then go through this checklist and see where you net out.

Compare package design: evaluate them qualitatively by evaluating them in side-by-side comparisons in the same environment customers see them. What is your eye go first? What's the first message you get from all of the packages looked at individually?

Compare marketing materials: which materials have the best message that is easiest to read? Which materials suggest the highest quality and the best performance? Which materials are best telling potential customers why they should buy a product instead of any other?

The Power of Graphic Design to Build Your Business

Whatever kind of business you are in, the packaging that you use for your product typically makes up most of your real marketing budget. More importantly, this packaging often becomes the primary material that a potential customer reviews before making a purchase. While graphic design can be relatively more important in consumer products, many business-to-business companies underestimate the importance of their packaging. As a result, investing in graphic design is one of the best investments you can make.

Here is a checklist of factors that you want to use to evaluate how good your current designs are.

Are you attracting a new generation of customers? What color and design preferences does this new generation have? How can you better use this information to say, "we are a product for you.”

What have competitors done with their package design in the last several years? If they have updated it and you have not, the concern becomes even more serious.

How does your package design stack up versus your competition? Some important criteria include how unique and distinctive is your package look plus which package is the best at selling the reason to buy that particular product instead of on the other.

Beyond your customers and competitors, what thoughts do you have on how to improve your designs? Combine your thoughts with those you have from your customers and comparisons versus your competitors. In this information is the opportunity for dramatic improvement.

Graphic design is one of the quickest ways you can build sales and profits.  Package design that is better than your competition will attract competitive customers to buy your product. Many times the appeal of a new design can have more selling power than a product improvement. The much lower cost for developing a new design compared to developing a new product improvement makes a new package design a major profit winner.