In a world where all cars are designed in the same wind tunnel, it’s the little things that make a world of design difference between two brands. As we learn in Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Steve Jobs, he was obsessed with design, with the curve of the iPod, with everything to do with how things looked and felt. This came from his passion for calligraphy and the sense of detail, shape and space that goes with that. Design has stepped up the marketing league table, not least because of Apple.
Designing a world of change
Designers were like engineers at one time, back-room boys who were craftsmen not to be trusted near executives. A series of geniuses including Michael Peters, Rodney Fitch and design companies such as Pentagram have changed everything. Now designers are, as a retail CEO put it, ‘the first people I’d put in the lifeboat’. Companies such as JKR, The Partners, Coley Porter Bell and Sedley Place are at the centre – not the periphery – of building desire.
How design really works
Tom Peters said, ‘Design is it!’ By this he meant it was the key differentiating skill a company possessed in turning its functional products into sexy brands. It’s what makes Tom love his Stanley hammer. It’s what Steve Jobs was talking about when he said ‘the keys on the new Mac keyboard look so good you want to lick them’.
However good the marketing may be, if the product or service doesn’t look great you will always struggle. That’s why Absolut Vodka is such a marketing gift. What a bottle. Ditto the Boeing Dreamliner. Design makes a big marketing difference … it makes things desirable.
Think about the little things and all the details that make a design ‘look right’.
Imagine, if you can, the Microsoft iPad as opposed to the Apple iPad. Imagine Phil Green being let loose on Selfridges. Imagine most town planners being given free licence to develop Bath. Imagine what generations of brand managers would have done to Heinz Baked Beans packaging if designers hadn’t stopped them. Design makes things desirable and keeps them consistent … it also makes executives in businesses actually think about how the way things look, feel, smell and sound will affect consumers. And especially it makes people realise it’s a lot of apparently little things that combine to make up a symphony.
Why ‘I’ll know it when I see it’ isn’t enough of a design brief
The brief is the tool that allows us to wrestle with the challenge, which in turn leads to innovation. It’s innovation that is at the heart of brilliance in design, marketing and business.
If you aren’t trying to innovate you won’t be brilliant in design, marketing or business.
The perfect product brief and packaging brief
Product
- What do I want my product to do that’s different from what’s on the market?
- How do I want the consumer to feel about this product?
- How modern or how traditional do I want it to seem?
- Do I want it to be multifunctional or focused on one key asset?
- How do I achieve a worried ‘Oh no’ from my competitors?
- How much simpler can we make it?
- Is there an irritating issue the consumer feels about products in this sector?
Packaging
- How visible does it need to be? Line up all competitive packs. (For a breakthrough example look at Yellow Tail outer packs for real stand-out design).
- How can I ‘own’ colour? The Heinz ‘turquoise’ is protected by trademark.
- How can I clarify the copy on the pack? By deciding:
- what must be on there
- what would be helpful to have on there
- what would be nice to have on there.
- Let’s remember that packaging is about more than function. It is the ‘face’ a consumer or customer sees first (and as we know, first impressions count).
- Research shows as much as 75 per cent of purchases are made on impulse. (I actually doubt that statistic, but why run the risk?) So let’s be brighter, more interesting and sharper on display. Whatever else, let’s not be eclipsed by our competitors.
- For help contact the Design Council (www.designcouncil.org.uk), read Design Week, (www.designweek.co.uk) and talk to people who’ve had design teams working with them, so you can get a feel for who’s hot or not. And if you need a low-cost local operation (very often they’ll be excellent), look up ‘Design Consultants’, ‘Design – Advertising and Graphic’, ‘Design – Product’ under www.yell.com. There are 160 listed, for instance, in Brighton. Look to see what they’ve done and what you like. Create a shortlist and ask to see more of their work and listen to them talk. If you like what you hear and you like the work, talk to their clients to see what they think.
- Best of all, talk to people in business to get a few pointers. The desire to promote people good at anything is the best quality filter I know.
What has changed?
We’ve realised that how good we make things look, from the appearance to the pack design to the ambience in which we buy the product, actually makes a difference to sales. In the past, many people in marketing had slunk past the design issue but no longer. How things look, feel and smell are all critical because design differentiates.
John Deere is the most stolen tractor in the UK. Villains are queuing up to nick the green and yellow darlings. Ask them why and they’ll tell you, ‘It’s the bleeding design, son, innit?’ John Deere has the same charisma as Porsche and Bang and Olufsen. All of them exclusive but desirable and definitely not excluding. Henry Dreyfuss, the great American designer – he made everyday things look good, easy to use and unobtrusive, appears in the John Deere ads, where they have this great line about him:
‘Say the name and every industrial designer in the world genuflects.’
Design is the amazing component in marketing.
Ask people why they buy Nike … or Apple … or Sony … or Prada. Ask why that Amazon package that arrives in the post looks so great. Or the Dorset Cereal box. Or the Selfridges carrier bag.
Sit and look at them. Look really hard. I’ll give you a few tips:
- Font
- Colours
- Authenticity of handwriting
- Product descriptors
- Simplicity
- And a sense of knowing who they are.
Design can make you fall in love
It does that to women with shoes and handbags all the time. It’s design that does it (it sure isn’t comfort). In the City of London young bankers have been seen with designer watches so heavy one of their arms is longer than the other.
Some people ‘get’ design, and some don’t, but just for a moment reflect on the unutterable joy a ‘just-right’ design gives.
The Mazda MX-5 borrowed from the old sports-car character of the MG and other classic British sports cars and translated this into the late 20th century.
Virtually everything Dyson does, such as the Airblade hand dryer and the Bladeless Fan, looks great and works brilliantly.
Englishman Keith McNally has done it with the Balthazar Restaurant in New York, with its great atmosphere, food and, most of all, design.
Montblanc is the ultimate in pens. Very black, very shiny and they feel good in the hand.
We are talking beauty here, something elusive and out of reach. Albrecht Dürer said that ‘there lives on earth no one beautiful person who could not be more beautiful’.
Brilliant design gets nearest to perfection.
To survive in modern marketing you must stand apart and get people to notice you.
What great design does is fizz. It stands you apart from other stuff. It does half the marketing job just by being what it is. In their super book about design, A Smile in the Mind, Beryl McAlhone and David Stuart argue that graphics are made memorable by using witty thinking. What’s more, they say, ideas that happen in the mind, stay in the mind. And I love this thought.
The story of the naughty chair
Managing director of design agency Sedley Place, Mick Nash, was asked by a teacher friend if he could solve a problem that was driving him and his colleagues crazy … children leaning back on their chairs at school and spilling over backwards, often with injurious results. Mick said he could and did by designing a chair where the centre of gravity was located forwards, making backward-tipping a thing of the past. ‘Ah,’ said his friend, ‘I should have mentioned the catch. They have to cost less than £20 a chair.’
‘That,’ said Mick, ‘is not the problem. That is the brief.’
Good design is beautiful but it is also pragmatic and functionally focused. That’s why it is so important in our lives.
‘What you need to know about a problem only becomes apparent as you are trying to solve it.’
(Richard McCormack of RJM Design)
Design is now centre stage
If you think about the most successful products, how they look is often key to their success, but increasingly what is happening is a rejection of over-design, especially when it comes to packaging.
From being a peripheral discipline, design has leapt to the centre of the marketing stage. A TV is not just a machine on which to look at programmes. It’s an important focal point in a living room. It’s a piece of furniture. A car (unless you are Jeremy Clarkson) is not a virility symbol or high-performance machine but a statement about the new you. Look at the design of the Mercedes A6 or the Toyota Prius.
‘Give the client what he never dreamed he wanted.’
(Designer DewysLasdon)
Then take another look at Apple. Talk about love affairs because, like Stanley, this is what that brand’s design inspires. And in the very dead of night you’ll hear a John Deere starting up in deepest Essex, hopefully to the declamation, ‘You’re nicked, son.’
Design has leapt to the centre of the marketing stage.
And it’s getting better.
What is absolutely clear is there’s no excuse, with all the design talent around, for bad, ugly, cheap-looking design. The council tower blocks of the ’70s were a disgrace. All the evidence is whoever you are and however much you earn, great design belongs to you too and can make you feel better and more valued.
Be like Marc Newsom, the brilliant Australian designer, who said we can always work to make design better.