Step by Step to Great Graphic Design.

Package design is a critical part of any plan to be successful in graphic design is the most important capability for optimizing package design.

Since most companies do not work frequently with a graphic designer, here are some easy to follow tips on how to optimize that experience.

Before you start working on package design, you need to develop a very, very clear understanding of the need. Is your package design clearly inferior to one or more competitors? Complete a strengths and weaknesses assessment of your current package design. To make sure that this assessment is accurate, strongly consider using accurate quantitative research instead of lower quality qualitative research.

Develop a very clear statement of what you need when you communicate with your graphic design company. Wherever possible, illustrate this statement with examples of good and great design that you see other products using. Sometimes it can just be elements of some great designs that you think might be appropriate for your business. Be open to contributions from the graphic designer. When design becomes collaborative around common insights and needs, the likelihood of great design goes up dramatically.

When reviewing the first round of work of package design, be aware of your first reactions, especially for what you like. Be sure to involve others who have a good understanding of customer values and beliefs. Take at least 24 hours before communicating your feedback. Organize your feedback in clear, simple statements focusing on the most important elements. Again, supplement that feedback with visual examples wherever appropriate.

Continue this process through subsequent rounds of work. The goal is to use graphic design as a way of achieving competitive advantage and package design.  You should settle for nothing less.

You Can Avoid Bad Graphic Design.

For the most part, using graphic design to create superior package design is successful to varying degrees. Companies typically use graphic design to refresh a package design keeps it modern and relevant. These relatively modest changes can be helpful but seldom upset the competitive dynamics.

Occasionally in an effort to be highly innovative and dramatic, major companies will create a revolutionary graphic design. In almost all situations, this involves significant risk. Current customers are usually buying the product, especially if it is a retail product on a shelf, primarily based upon the visual "signature" the product has. For example, if you're shopping in the laundry detergent section for Tide, you are looking for the orange bottle, which is the brands visual signature. Interestingly, after decades of being in the orange bottle, Tide introduced a product variation in a white bottle. They were able to survive this jolting change primarily because the white bottle was shelved with a whole bunch of orange bottles bearing the same brand name.

Major graphic design changes to your packaging pose some risks that you need to be aware of. If the design change that you are making is a big one, like major changes in colors and graphics, you may want to consider a proven method to mitigate risk. One of the most proven ways it is to have two design changes to get to the final design. The first of those two designs is one that is halfway between the old design and the new design. This first design introduces some elements while retaining key visual elements.

So how do you avoid these disasters? First, recognize your visual signature. Second, if you want a revolutionary design, make sure that you identify the couple of critical visual elements associated with your product that customers use when making a purchase decision. Before you engage in this arduous and risky journey, make sure that you have done quality quantitative research with customers to be sure that they really, really prefer the new package.

Always be mindful of your visual signature your package design makes and use graphic design to help maintain the integrity of this work.

Be Smart. Know What It Takes for Great Graphic Design.

The ultimate goal of great graphic design that delivers great package design is to win and be better than your competition.

How can you learn if you're winning or not?

Simple – talk to customers. If you're in a retail store where your products are sold and there are customers looking at your types of products, go talk to them. Here are some questions you can ask them.

Which product first caught your eye? You want to know what designs are best at grabbing customers’ attention.

What about that product caught your eye? Was it the color? Was it the shape of the package? Was it a graphic design element on the package?

What product did you decide to buy? If it wasn't the product that first got there, why did they buy this other product? What do they like and dislike about the package design for the product they bought?

Wildcard question – of all the products of any kind that you buy in the store, which product do you think has the very best design? The one that you immediately look for. What do you like about it? What's the number one thing you notice about this package?

As good as these qualitative methods can be, coming to a conclusion about how competitive your graphic design is probably warrants an investment in quantitative consumer research. When conducted by a professional, what you learn is statistically representative of all of your consumers.

Better package design requires graphic design. You need to find people who do graphic design with the intent of creating solutions that are better than your competition. Work for a graphic design company that can bring both marketing and package design expertise. If not, keep looking for a graphic design service whose work is better than competition and they say it is their mission to create competitively superior package design through world-class graphic design.

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.

How to Get Great Graphic Design in the year 2019

Package design is a critical part of any plan to be successful in graphic design is the most important capability for optimizing package design.

Since most companies do not work frequently with a graphic designer, here are some easy to follow tips on how to optimize that experience.

Before you start working on package design, you need to develop a very, very clear understanding of the need. Is your package design clearly inferior to one or more competitors? Complete a strengths and weaknesses assessment of your current package design. You will want to make sure the strengths are somehow incorporated into a new design. Whenever possible make sure that you use quantitative research to make these determinations.

Develop a very clear statement of what you need when you communicate with your graphic design company. Wherever possible, illustrate this statement with examples of good and great design that you see other products using. Sometimes it can just be elements of some great designs that you think might be appropriate for your business. Be open to contributions from the graphic designer. At the conclusion, make sure that you mutually agree on the direction that promises great work.

When reviewing the first round of work of package design, be aware of your first reactions, especially for what you like. Be sure to involve others who have a good understanding of customer values and beliefs. Take at least 24 hours before communicating your feedback. Organize your feedback in clear, simple statements focusing on the most important elements. Again, supplement that feedback with visual examples wherever appropriate.

Continue this process through subsequent rounds of work. The goal is to use graphic design as a way of achieving competitive advantage and package design.  You should settle for nothing less.

How to Avoid Making Critical Graphic Design Mistakes.

For the most part, using graphic design to create superior package design is successful to varying degrees. Companies typically use graphic design to refresh a package design keeps it modern and relevant. These relatively modest changes can be helpful but seldom upset the competitive dynamics.

Occasionally in an effort to be highly innovative and dramatic, major companies will create a revolutionary graphic design. In almost all situations, this involves significant risk. Current customers are usually buying the product, especially if it is a retail product on a shelf, primarily based upon the visual "signature" the product has. For example, if you're shopping in the laundry detergent section for Tide, you are looking for the orange bottle, which is the brands visual signature. Interestingly, after decades of being in the orange bottle, Tide introduced a product variation in a white bottle. They were able to survive this jolting change primarily because the white bottle was shelved with a whole bunch of orange bottles bearing the same brand name.

Probably the biggest disaster was when Tropicana orange juice converted to an all white bottle. I remember seeing this package design and shaking my head, knowing it was headed for trouble. Tropicana completely lost its visual image of being orange in color – the orange juice in a clear bottle.  The marketplace spoke immediately and sales declined immediately. Even when companies respond quickly, and most do not, there was always some degree of both short and long-term her to their business.

So how do you avoid these disasters? First, recognize your visual signature. Second, if you want a revolutionary design, make sure that you identify the couple of critical visual elements associated with your product that customers use when making a purchase decision. Before you engage in this arduous and risky journey, make sure that you have done quality quantitative research with customers to be sure that they really, really prefer the new package.

Always be mindful of your visual signature your package design makes and use graphic design to help maintain the integrity of this work.

Understand What and How Great Graphic Design and Package Design Help Your Business Win in the Marketplace.

The ultimate goal of great graphic design that delivers great package design is to win and be better than your competition.

How can you learn if you're winning or not?

Simple – talk to customers. If you're in a retail store where your products are sold and there are customers looking at your types of products, go talk to them. Here are some questions you can ask them.

Which product first caught your eye? You want to know what designs are best at grabbing customers’ attention.

What about that product caught your eye? Was it the color? Was it the shape of the package? Was it a graphic design element on the package?

What product did you decide to buy? If it wasn't the product that first got there, why did they buy this other product? What do they like and dislike about the package design for the product they bought?

Wildcard question – of all the products of any kind that you buy in the store, which product do you think has the very best design? The one that you immediately look for. What do you like about it? What's the number one thing you notice about this package?

As valuable as this approach can be, it can be misleading if you do not conduct professional customer research. Professional customer research provides results that accurately represent your total customer base, not just a few folks that may also include biased family members.

Better package design requires graphic design. You need to find people who do graphic design with the intent of creating solutions that are better than your competition. Work for a graphic design company that can bring both marketing and package design expertise. If not, keep looking for a graphic design service whose work is better than competition and they say it is their mission to create competitively superior package design through world-class graphic design.

Winning Graphic Design Can Be Easy.

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.

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 in 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 your product – it reliably does what you promise it's going to do and it is very high-quality.

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.

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.

How To Choose The Right Graphic Design Company

Whether you are launching an e-commerce site, re-branding your retail outlets or wanting to use graphic design to create your competitive advantage, you need the help of professionals for graphic design. It would be a huge risk to use a freelancer or an amateur graphic designer. Since you will also want effective marketing materials for reaching out directly to the audience, choosing a reliable graphic design company should be your top priority.

Before going out on the quest to find the right company, you should also set your objectives loud and clear. What results do you expect from a graphic design? What is the sales target you wish to achieve from the change? Keep these in mind, it will be helpful.

We have compiled a list of useful tips to help in your way to find the best graphic design services.

1. Request for samples. Definitely, it’s more than what meets the eye. You should trust the work of a designer who has a knack of paying attention to detail, especially preserving the visual integrity and stylistic point of view. The samples will give a first-hand account of their working style. A company’s web site is a good place to start looking.

2. Look for versatility. Uniformity remains a big concern in marketing. The design company should be able to develop a versatile concept for utilization across various digital platforms and media. This will further bolster your brand’s image as a reliable entity in the world.

3. Make your ideas heard. Do you have any reference sketches or illustrations for conveying your ideas? Are their design for other products that you like? You should make your ideas heard and clarify what you need and what you don’t. Their team of designers must listen and cater the services accordingly.

4. Cost considerations. The come-what-may attitude isn’t right for cost considerations. Unless you discuss your needs, expectations, and budget, a design company won’t be able to provide a foolproof plan. At the same time, they must acknowledge the problems you currently face with respect to the budget. Mutual understanding is a must between you and the design company.

Winning Brands Don't Just Happen.

Some people would have you believe that the age of strong brands no longer exists. They point to the dramatic growth of generic products – private labels for example. They point to the lack of differentiation between products in many categories.

To some extent, all of this is true. Having said that, you can point to brands that have been around for over a century to those that have been around for a decade or less and recognize that brands are very much alive and well. The soft drink category, for example, has a very small percentage of its business in generic and private-label products. Brand names like Coca-Cola continue to be winners. You have new brand names like Tesla and the iPhone. These have already captured customers’ imagination, interest and loyalty.

So how do you create a strong brand for your business? You start by recognizing that brand graphic design plays a pivotal role in establishing the longevity and integrity of a brand.  Brands tend to stand out in very positive ways. For example, in the detergent aisle the Tide orange bottle stands out distinctively and prominently from all the other brands.

Creating a brand graphic design for your product requires developing a design direction that deeply understands the customers you seek in the competitors you want to beat. This requires a blend of art and science. Typically, consumer research combined with years of marketplace experience can help develop this kind of direction.

Having the design, you want to review the best graphic design firms. You want to look for designers who love to win versus competition. You want management that has a keen eye for marketing and the value of brands.  You want to start your exploration by looking at the work that the firms have previously developed. You want to follow that up with in-depth discussions to make sure that the firm you choose not only has great designers but management that understands marketing and branding.

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.