It's not all about the owner...

It has been brought to my attention on a couple of occasions recently that some small business owners are missing a trick when designing visual marketing material because they forget who they are designing it for. The conversation with clients when taking an initial brief tends to go something along the lines of –

Me – So have you thought about the colour scheme?

Client – Yes, we have decided to go with pink and purple

Me – Ok, what’s the reason behind those colours?

Client – Well I really like pink and purple

This is where the problem lies, I can appreciate that business owners want their business to reflect what they like but at the end of the day they are not trying to attract themselves to buy, they are actually trying to get the outside world to buy.

Often their target audience may not be attracted to the colour choice of the owners or it may reflect the wrong values, after all if your target market is males over the age of 65 then pink and purple are not going to give of the right image even if the owner loves them!

Colours have different perceptions behind them and people associate different traits to different colours, for example recent surveys suggest black to be associated with luxury and exclusivity where as blue is thought to be related to loyalty and trust. You therefore need to think about how you want to be perceived and more importantly what your prospective clients are looking for.

What I am trying to get at is you should be thinking from the customers perspective at all times when dealing with the visual image of your business, remember it’s not about what you like, its about what your target audience will be interested in, this goes for not only colours but also with images, fonts, content, style and more.

Design - a cost or an investment?

Here we are again, it's been a couple of weeks since my first attempt at blogging and I wanted to return with a connected subject matter. The subject of leaflets also happily sits alongside the half price offer we have this month (that was the only shameless plug!!).


If you have a tax problem you go to your accountant, if you have a legal issue you see a solicitor, so why if you want to produce some marketing do you do it yourselves?

Selling design is not easy, people often don't see the value in others time and for some reason (thanks to the easy accessibility of free 'design' programmes - if i had a pound for every 'designed' publisher doc I get asked to print...) everyone thinks they are a designer. But what is design? I don't have the exact answer but I know it is not the art of making things look pretty.

Like business cards I come across a high number of leaflets both in business and at home, unfortunately many of them make too many common mistakes that can be easily ironed out with a bit of professional advice. It is often the case that too many people see design as a cost and not as an investment, a couple of examples of recent stories below to highlight the fact -

- At home we received a locally based pizza menu, it had obviously had some level of design as it was not overly offensive to the eye but (and this is a big but) the content was just awful, actually scrap the word awful and replace with hilarious, it had no less than 11 spelling mistakes (some repeated a number of times) my favourite was 'See Food Pizza' (honestly you couldn't write this stuff!) they had also managed to spell the name of the village they were based in incorrectly! A simple bit of proof reading would have eliminated these errors and then maybe I would have considered eating there.

- Again at home (why is it always business to consumer people who don't believe in image?) I received a flyer (not actually sure it should be classified as a flyer), this time it was for home maintenance. It had obviously been done in word (not a good start), had a number of the generic clip art images and clearly it had started life as an A4 sheet but in a stroke of genius they had trimmed it down to a wonky A6 with what must have been a blunt pair of scissors! Again a grasp of basic English was lacking, of the 20 words that were on it there was 7 spelling mistakes including diging and cleanning (as you can see there wasn't even a consistency in spelling!).

Am I, or others, going to buy on the basis of what was received? I very much doubt it, the chances are they have either paid someone to distribute these or indeed done it themselves, so in essence they have wasted time / money. As I said in my previous post if you can’t be bothered with your own marketing then people will assume you won’t be bothered in providing a good product / service.

From these and other examples my thought is that some people don't see the real value in design, arguably a poorly designed piece of marketing can in fact do more harm than a well designed piece can do good! By just investing a bit of time and money you can take a simple leaflet to the next level without breaking the bank. My ethos is that we don't design to make things look pretty; we design things to make them actually work!