What companies overlook every day, and it is hurting their business
Friday, November 16th, 2007I see it all too often, and I hate the excuses for it. Too many start up companies, or even well established companies cut corners on a critical aspect of their business. I hate to be simplistic, but perception is reality. There are probably thousands of topics that would fit into the “you have to do this” mold, but today I am talking about design.
Graphic Push has an excellent blog post observing the common “do it yourself” style approach of marketing materials, even when it comes to multi billion dollar companies. He further goes on to talk about the companies that do integrate good design into their marketing do better on the stock market than those that traditionally don’t. Food for thought.
You might think that a simple flier done by your secretary using a template gets the message you want to convey across. It does, only a different message than you actually think. Your message changes to “I don’t care about my brand, I don’t care about this flier, and I don’t care about winning your business.”
The frustrating thing is that it doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming if you don’t want it too. To have a marketing company tack on a few rigid word templates and font requirements for fliers, proposals, packets, folders, etc is usually very affordable and will last you years to come.
Even if you go to a stock graphic website and download a few publisher templates and drop your logo and company font into it you are much better off than the “secretary center aligning and using comic sans or script” flier that you are likely to have otherwise.
In todays day and age perception and aesthetics are becoming increasingly important. People are willing to pay more for the “matte black macBook”, and the clothing companies with sexy luring ads like cK1 have always out performed the long time generic JC Penny’s ad campaigns.
Pay attention to design, don’t ignore it.
