A Spotlight on Perception
I am currently working on a site to feature my own personal design separately from my work with Form Creative . Despite just feeling a little better when I have a current and fully developed portfolio ready to go, I am going to be targeting businesses that are frightened off by the perceived cost of hiring an agency. It is a bit of a strange phenomenon, actually, and one that stuck in my mind as a great example how creative alone can be such a powerful force in marketing in any medium.
When we started Form Creative, our goal was to create a different kind of agency. A virtual agency that had embraced 21st century technology and leveraged it to bring together some really smart people at strategic thinking and tactical execution while skipping the big agency fees. This was in 2001 and at that time, that idea was not such a cliche’. We laid out our strategy and developed our materials, including our web site, to fulfill our strategy. In short order, we had grabbed some big business, at least in the context of our little agency.
Not terribly long after that, the virtual model really caught on industry-wide and we found ourselves competing with a slew of other very talented people and our new business opportunities began to diminish. We retained the lion’s share of clients that we had acquired but it was becoming harder and harder to win new business. There are multiple reasons for this (as any entrepreneur will tell you) but one of the consistent messages we heard was:
“We can’t afford to go with a big firm on this. We just don’t have the dough…”
At first we were all a little taken aback. What were these people talking about? Did they not read our materials? We are practically the champions of little guy! Bringing agency quality thinking and execution without the huge agency fees!!
Then we started to poll people. We started asking prospects their impressions of our materials. For the prospects that had passed us over in favor of another firm, the overwhelming and consistent response was:
“Oh we didn’t even go through your Web site. We all sat around my computer and hit your home page and realized we couldn’t afford you”
Certain people in our organization were elated at this, of course, as it’s a huge compliment to those who created the site. But we as the groups leadership, realized that we had missed our mark and that our own talents had outstripped our strategy. We had deployed the best graphic design we could to showcase our abilities in an attempt to illustrate that we were indeed as good as the larger agencies and in doing so, positioned the perception of our little slice of the web squarely in the big agency space. And we did it all with the creative - both the design and the copy. Won a few awards for it too, but had to redo it. The design was too slick. The copy overladen with industry catch phrases that made perfect sense to us, but scared off our prospective clients.
The Lesson for Creatives
Think hard about target audience and what message is being broadcast and how that message needs to be perceived . Apply the correct creative solution to the strategy. Favor ‘problem solving’ over ‘award winning’ and both may occur.
Could I design and develop a site that is fully Flash enabled with all of the slick animations and visually dynamic interface elements? Sure. But what problem does that solve? What is the perception that such a site would impart on the consumers of my material? It would certainly help me catch the eye of the designers and art directors that I am competing against but is it going to leave the targeted audience with the same impression? In 95% of the cases it is going to alienate them and distract them from why they sought me out in the first place - to solve their business problem.
The Lesson for Marketers
Great design is not measured by aesthetic value alone. It is measured by its ability to communicate a message using tactics that appeal to an aesthetic. When hiring a creative professional, be it a freelancer or mega agency, evaluate their commitment to purpose first, only then their tactical execution skills. Insist that they take the time to understand and work to fulfill your strategy. Don’t let them go off on creative tangents that do not solve your business problem or worse, leave your prospects with an erroneous perception of your business. Work perception into your strategy and stick to the strategic focus that you know is right for your business.
