Beautiful Design isn't Necessarily Good
Design. Good Design is Smart.
December 15, 2020
We know marketing is all about shaping or influencing people’s perception. You can pour millions of dollars into content production and media buying in order to do so. But this level of investment is impossible for most small to mid-sized business. In terms of this layer of business, they have to come up with smart ideas to create successful marketing with moderate budget.
It’s like a film produced by the best CG can’t outperform a film created by camcorders, and it really happens. That means there are always opportunities for small to mid-sized business if they communicate and engage with their customers well by thinking cleverly.
Having good communication with your customers doesn’t mean you can fill customers’ mind with whatever creative ideas you like. The first thing you should think about is how to become different. Defining your own differences is the prerequisite of attention-grabbing marketing and the essential step of developing key messages.
There are a few questions you should ask yourself before you define your differences.
- • Who are your target audience?
- • Do people know the differences between you and your competitors easily and clearly?
- • Are the differences your advantages? Do they convince your customers?
- • Do they create a want that people are willing to know more about your products/brand?
These questions will help you develop efficient communication between you and your customers. Because your budget is limited, you can’t focus too much on those ideas which are just designated for enhancing perception experience. You need to choose your ideas prudently and apply your budget to the parts that has the greatest likelihood of return.
After you decide the key messages you want to convey, the next step is about your creative output. A stunning visual isn’t a necessity for memorable creatives. From our perspective, the nature of creative works is about depicting marketing messages. Being a good depicter isn’t equivalent with adding a strong visual to your campaigns. The essence of depiction is building attachment between brands and their customers. It’s about how you design this depiction including the use of language, graphics, storytelling, emotions, humor, interaction, incentives and more. If you find out a smart concept, you don’t have to rely on huge investment in content production.
Sometimes what you need is a simple but smart idea for your customers to engage. For example, if you want to promote a cookie with sweet and salty flavors, you can launch a voting contest - Which Flavor do You Think is the Best Flavor? Sweet or Salty? And the side with more numbers of votes will win the flavor they like. With this idea, you don’t need big budget for content production and media buying, and people will automatically become your marketers.
This is how you develop smart design of depiction which boosts your results with lower budget. A clever idea really helps you a lot.
