Is Your Marketing Working Hard Enough for You?

In most companies, marketing is one of the critical elements necessary for marketplace success. There are many elements that make up a marketing plan. In most cases, most of those elements interact with potential customers. As such, they are on the front line of the battle with competitors to win customers’ purchases.

In this battle, marketing graphic design plays a critical role. The clarity of communication and images that you communicate through these designs is either going to help you win some of these battles or lose the battles to competitors who have better designs.

Here are some of the things you should consider when evaluating the strength of your marketing graphic designs.

When you share with potential customers your designs and the designs of your competitors, what feedback do you get? Here are some of the key answers you want to look for. What designs are preferred overall? Which products would they be most likely to buy? What design elements are working for competitors? Your brand? What conclusions do you draw or about weaknesses you need to fix and strengths that you can leverage more than you currently are?

When you understand these answers, you want to carefully choose the right graphic design services to help you. You want services where the management understands marketing in the real world of competition versus strong competitors. You want management of the services to be committed to creating designs that when versus the competition, with the result being increased sales for your business. Behind the management team, you want designers who understand the objective is to win in the marketplace and not to win awards among your peers.

When you then have new designs, make sure that you replicate the research you did previously. It is important to see if you went from not being as good as competitors in some cases to have competitive advantages. You want these competitive advantages to be meaningful enough that customers would buy your product instead of competitive products.

Do You Have a Design Need?

Companies often have designs for their product and brand that they have had for years and even decades. When this happens, it is evidence that a company is taking for granted that effective designs from the past could be as effective today. This is a very risky way of thinking about what can be the "crown jewels" of your product, especially if it is a consumer product sitting on retail shelves.

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

How long has it been since you have updated or made major improvements in your designs? If it is more than three years, it can be a potentially serious concern.

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.

Is your current package design communicating the essence of your product and competitive advantages? If not, then it is not doing a good job of selling your product.

How do consumers rank your product as compared to your primary competitors? This can be determined easily and at a low cost via online customer research. You want to be tuned into the overall ranking as well as internal rankings on quality and effectiveness.

Graphic design can be a capability that consistently delivers competitive advantages versus all of your competition. You utilize the learnings from the checklist above to assess where you are today. You then build on these understandings with where you want to go in the future and how you can establish enduring competitive advantages.  Be sure to choose a graphic design company that appreciates opportunity to use package design as a path to creating competitive advantages. Just as you use research to evaluate the past, you will want to use similar research to determine if your new designs actually do create competitive advantages versus some or all of your competition.

Creating a Winning Design Partnership.

Companies do not win in the marketplace by themselves. Companies win by partnering with the right wide range of suppliers who supplement their internal capabilities to create the winning formulas for marketplace success. These partnerships are only formed after long and careful consideration. Forming these partnerships through a trial and error process can only create far more errors and far too little success. The wisdom of winning companies is choose your partners carefully.

One of the most valuable partnerships that you can choose is your graphic design partnership. One of the reasons that this partnership is so important and potentially valuable is that their work it is very customer facing. Put another way, their work is what your current and potential customers see as they are considering whether they should buy your product or not. That consideration includes a comparison of your graphic design to that of your competitors.

A major focus of this partnership is often new package design. This can be new designs for existing products or a first-ever design for a new product that is being introduced. Both of these kinds of projects are exceptionally important and can make a huge difference in your marketplace success. The marketing world is littered with examples of companies that change their package design only to find out that they confused their existing customers, which resulted in lost sales and profits. For example, Tropicana's move to an all-white package in the orange juice business was a major failure. Fortunately, the company was nimble enough to recognize the mistake and return to a more acceptable design and begin the long process of winning back lost customers.

In forming a partnership, put together a detailed plan for due diligence. You not only want to understand a partners design capabilities but also understand their design results in the real world. All too many design candidates are not well-equipped to answer this critically important question.

Winning Strategy – Create a Winning Brand.

All too often companies significantly underestimate the value of a brand. A marketing platform that includes a strong and respected brand has the potential for long-term growth.

Brand loyalty is one of the most valuable assets any company can have. When you have consumers who recommend not just a generic product but a specific brand to their friends and neighbors, you know that you have an exceptionally valuable asset.

Building a brand requires many elements. At its heart, the brand and product need to deliver highly meaningful benefits that meet customer needs better than some, most, or all of the competition. These benefits need to be continually updated to keep the product relevant and competitive.

At the heart of building a strong brand is focusing on brand graphic design.  In addition to delivering product benefits, the product needs an identity. This is where great graphic design can help you. The look needs to be relevant to the product category and needs to be better than competitive designs.

Achieving these goals it is not easy. You need graphic design services that deeply and fully understand brand identity. Here are. Some things to consider when choosing the right partner.

1. Physical package: the package that your product is in is a great opportunity to achieve graphic design distinctiveness and advantages. The physical package can deliver functional benefits that provide you with competitive advantages. A physical package also provides the "canvas" for the colors and design elements.

2. Colors: colors have communication equity. For example, red often signifies hot while blue often signifies cool. You want to choose the right colors that help support the benefits of your product in the image you want for your brand.

3. Design elements: shapes and their relationship to each other can make a big difference. In many ways, the ideal design elements are simple, powerful, in support the image you want to project.

These suggestions can help you create a winning brand strategy.

Graphic Design – The Path to New and Improved.

One of the simplest and most powerful ways of revitalizing a brand is to create a new package design for your products.  It is amazing to see many products go through years and even decades of not updating the look of their products. What were winning package designs years ago are today losing package designs when compared to your competition.

A new package design is a great way to get customers to look again at your products and consider them for purchase. Updating to more relevant colors and design elements can lead to many of your customers saying, "This must be a new product that I should take a closer look at."

As beneficial as a new package design can be, you want to choose the right graphic design company to do the work. You need to be careful – different is not always better. In choosing the right and best graphic design company for your products you will want to consider some of the following elements.

1. Before and after: does the company show work that they have done for a client including the design before they worked on it and the design after they worked on it. Working with an existing design and making it better can be one of the more challenging and risky design changes you make. Being able to evaluate our company has done this for other clients can be a good indicator of whether you think they are a good partner for you.

2. How current are they: look at their complete portfolio and use your own judgment as to whether their designs are relevant for the last few years or are still stuck in the previous decade or decades. Sometimes graphic design companies develop a "look." They will stubbornly stick to that look even though the world moves beyond what was a relevant look to an entirely new one.

Search for the right graphic design company that can help you get customers to look at your product for the first time ever for the first time in many years.

Choosing the Right Graphic Design Partner.

Graphic design is one of the most powerful but often the least understood path to gaining competitive advantages. Carefully choosing the right graphic design firm should be a top priority for any company.

Many graphic design companies proudly show their work on their websites and brochures. Many of these companies also talk about the awards that they have received for their designs. While this pride is understandable, often their priorities can be focused more on their own benefits and achievements instead of their clients’ benefits and achievements.

You want to work with a graphic design firm that is dedicated to creating competitive advantages for your company and helping you win in the marketplace. There are only a few of the best graphic design firms that brag about how their clients have won with their graphic designs.

Here are some tips on finding the right and best graphic design firms.

1. Competition focused: when you talk to them, they certainly want to know about your business but they also want to know about your competitors. They want to look at competitors graphic designs along with yours to determine the degree of challenge and opportunity.

2. Record of winning: the best graphic design firms talk about how their clients have won, not about how they have won awards from their peers for their graphic designs. Ask this key question, "show me the designs that have won for your clients by taking business away from their competitors." If they look at you with a blank look, this may be an indication that this is not one of the best graphic design firms.

Performing quality due diligence can make the big difference between choosing a graphic design firm that cost a lot of money but does not result in marketplace wins or choosing the company that becomes a long term partner in helping you consistently win in the marketplace.