How Do You Know If You Need Better Graphic Design?

We need to do so much to successfully run a business. Unfortunately, many business leaders do not fully appreciate how important it is to have better graphic design solutions than your competition.

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.

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?

Graphic Design Can Be Your Most Cost-Efficient Way of Building Your Business.

If you are in consumer products, how long is it been since you have updated your package graphic designs? Many companies only make minor changes every 5 – 10 years. Making sure that your most important "face" to your customers is current and relevant, is one of the best expenditures you can make. It is far more cost-efficient than doing product improvements which can impact the entire supply chain and involve significant cost that does not pay out. 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.