Building a Brand with a Point of View

by | May 18, 2009 | Design Philosophy

One-on-one speech is the easiest and most common form of communication. Without it, all you have left to communicate are images and words. Pretty simple when you break it down. But what happens when you’re not fully utilizing your opportunity to be heard, to be understood and sold?

With consumer attention spans getting shorter than ever these days, one of the most common ways to cut through a lot of this “noise” is to develop a concentrated point of view. You can do this by knowing your audience, understanding their needs and trends, and more importantly, realizing their expectations and delivering a promise which will gain their loyalty.

It all starts with a simple message, which is at the core of any successful brand. And to do this, you have to know who your audience is. Are you speaking their language, and directly to their needs, desires and emotions? If you’re doing this and focusing on exactly what your product is, what it does and how it can improve your customer’s lifestyle, you’re on your way to building a strong brand, loyalty to it, and most importantly–sales.

Of course through all of this you need to maintain focus on aesthetics and design, which is becoming increasingly important to consumers. It might even help to think of design as a philosophy since opinions around “good” design can be so subjective.

Impactful design is how you, as a company, can evoke and speak directly to the needs of your customers, in their language. Companies today must begin to “think” differently. In many markets, the notion that Advertising Sells is still valid. Now, with the invention of social marketing and growing dependence on consumer reviews, the traditional models are becoming less popular. The need to cut through the noise is increasing as consumers are becoming more educated. We have come full circle to a place where we need to actually start building a better, more efficient product and speak directly to our audience. It’s the consumers who have made us all more conscious of our surroundings and become better producers.

This lesson will reign true every time you return to a store looking to replicate your last shopping experience with a certain sales associate: A focused message, look and feel, and customer experience is what will make your brand the one that consumers will seek out time and time again.