ChangeOrder

Is Your Company's Brand a DogCatCow?

The good old metaphor of the blind men and the elephant works in a pinch, but I think it's played out. With the advent of social media, we're sharing enough information about crappy brand experiences that you can see the whole elephant, and you know what? It's not an elephant. Elephants are big, hungry, fast-roaming, vegetarian, and kind of cute. It's more likely a DogCatCow. Today's poorly maintained brands are made of expressive mishmashes of competing behaviors that hide the true wonkiness within confused corporations. If your company barks like a dog, eats like a cow, and scratches at you mercilessly like a cat... then you know something is really wrong.

Apples, Oranges, & Other Measures of Success

Those who are more formal about their marketing research methods may quibble that comparing online site usage metrics with telephone customer satisfaction metrics like I explored in my previous post are difficult to correlate. Apples to oranges. Somewhat reductive.

To that, I say: you don't need reams of data to make an improvement in customer experience. In most cases, there are so many interdependencies for improving a customer experiences that it helps to get a little reductive and start poking at each element individually, improving them as you go and seeing how their effects cascade down the chain.

With that in mind, I put forth the following hypothesis: managing your customer experience is like running a produce stand. I don't think it sounds too silly, if you consider the way a produce stand operates.

Each thing you sell in the stand has to look good to customers if they're going to consider making a purchase.

People generally have to be enticed into sampling your wares (trial) in order to make a purchase -- their propensity to buy increases.

There must be a consistency of quality from visit to visit. Otherwise, why would you shop there?

Upon making a purchase, the produce must hold up on the trip home and satisfy your appetite with the experience you expected. Spoilage = bad.

And, most importantly, your customers need to be continually educated about what they'll enjoy most, at the peak time of each season. In essence, this type of education reduces choice, and less choice is better customer experience -- unless you have mechanisms to help manage your options.

In short, limiting what you sell, minding the store at all times, and having a point of view that has the customer's interest in heart seem to be the three guiding principles behind most killer customer experiences. Everything else is dressing on the windows.

Imagine a world where, instead of being provided a bajillion options, you're guided through those options to what will be proper and extraordinary purchases. When queried, you need to have an opinion about what's best for customers to purchase from season to season, not that everything is always great all the time.

This may sound quasi-Communist, but really great brands create bold natural boundaries around their offerings, and with a reduced measure of choice, continue to make their customers very happy. Apple Computer, anyone?

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 6

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

Now that we've worked through some of the key approaches to formulating business, marketing, and tactical strategies for your clients -- and how those form the frame around your creative strategy -- I thought it would be valuable to include a few points about how to distill your marketing insights into compelling creative communications.

Think outside the box, but inside the strategy.

As a designer, there's nothing I love more than launching into space after reading a creative brief, brainstorming solutions for the client's needs. But that brainstorm should never go off into deep space, never to return. I know it's bad etiquette to edit during brainstorms, so I try to let every idea have its due... at first. But when you're culling those ideas down to what will become solid concepts to put in front of the client, you have to be ruthless. Anything that doesn't fit the strategy and the key insight the client approved in the brief, or modifies that insight into something completely fresh and new, needs to be placed in the parking lot and saved for future use. (Unless your brief was wrong in the first place, which means you should back up a few paces and make sure you landed the right insight to back up your creative work.)

Firmly fix your concepts on a properly told story.

You know they want your vacuum cleaner because it has a sexy design, it lives at a slightly lower price point than the competition, and the HEPA filter makes it easy to clean up dog hair. Yawn. Don't tell me the details. Show me how it's going to change my life. Find a story that communicates this seed feeling to me. Then hammer on it mercilessly. Again, if you don't have a story that matches your key insight, you need to step back and rethink where you're at.

Don't move away from a key insight or position too quickly. You might piss off your clients and your audience.

As you develop creative concepts in a series, don't be too hasty to bring in something new. There's a major piss-off factor that happens when you iterate insights about your brand too quickly. It usually just means that you landed on the wrong insight, which is a kind of weakness that consumers can smell on the wind.

You won't lose a client because your key insight over a year or two doesn't continue to hold. Audience behavior shifts over time, based on a number of factors that corporations and designers can't easily control. But you will lose a client straight out of the gate if your key insight fails to hold up. It means that the foundations of your house were faulty to begin with, and somewhere along the way, due diligence wasn't exercised. So be sure that if you are going to make a client recommendation, the tires have been kicked enough times that you don't have to fear running out of air as you pull onto the highway.

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Now that you understand your client's business logic, their overall marketing needs, and what tactics you're going to employ based on your audience behavior, you're ready to create properly positioned creative concepts. At this point, it may seem like your work is going to be bulletproof, but we're only halfway home. You've got to execute an effective piece of marketing communications! Thankfully, that's the lion's share of what we get paid for, and in many ways, what we'll always need to do best to retain our clients.

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 5

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy. Let's talk about how you apply your marketing strategy and your audience insights to generate tactics that sing.

Based on how you answered your top three questions in Part 4 of this series, you have the answers that you need to select your tactics. So, let's flip those questions around and use them as the proper guide to discuss the thinking that should help shape your tactical marketing approach.

Tell your audience what they want to hear, based on how they feel.

You've determined some key understandings about your audience base. Now distill that material into one key insight that will make them pay attention. Ideally, you have to be able to say this in one sentence (or less) to succeed in selling your client and your shareholders.

In the realm of financial services, think about MasterCard: "Priceless." Or Citi: "Live Richly." Or way back when Washington Mutual knew what they were doing: "More Human Interest." Each of those key insights was an embodiment of how they understood their audience needs. They are all ways of making a dull, droll, somewhat cutthroat industry foster a human connection with their audience. (Reading that previous sentence over again, I'm sounding pretty jaded.)

I'm not saying you always need to come up with some catchy phrase for your client. You just need to know what human insight drives your tactics. Some clients can hand the appropriate insight to you on a platter, and save you plenty of work. If you have a less sophisticated client, or you're being hired to generate this insight, you will need to include this key insight in the brief, or you're taking a big risk.

Talk to your audience where they'll pay the most attention.

Once you have the insight nailed, you go back to your research about where your audience lives and breathes.

If they're business travelers, you could hit them in the taxi, in the airport, on business television, on those little coffee cup sleeves.

If they're consumers, you may recommend redesigning their packaging based on behavioral research and focus groups.

If your audience likes to spend a ton of time online, you could develop a seeding strategy for bloggers, fostering two-way communication between your corporation and your customer base.

Of course, all of these thoughts will dovetail with previous efforts your client has made, and the statistics about how they have performed.

In the good old days, we used to talk about "above the line" communications (a.k.a. television, print, and other high-profile awareness-generating mediums) and "below the line communications" (direct mail, in-store sales, training, anything focused on fostering sales). Nowadays, there is no line. Since we're talking about fostering great customer experiences that lead to long-term relationships with brands, every single customer interaction could lead to a positive or negative impression of a company and its products and services. If a client comes to you saying they want to sell 100,000 more bags of chips a month, you can't just say to run some ads and call it a day. Your approach needs to be multilayered and more sophisticated, taking into account both traditional one-way media communications (such as advertising, collateral, branding) and two-way media communications (such as compelling interactive, social networking, blogging, thought leadership, in-person dialogue).

So while it's easy to tell a company that they need to get in front of 1 million eyeballs to generate 10,000 sales, it's not the appropriate answer anymore. I can't imagine walking into a client's office and advocating that kind of solution without being roundly laughed at. As consumers, we expect dialogue with brands. We know we're in control of the game and have a real voice in the marketplace. Online, your voice can carry just as much weight as 100,000 impressions of a banner advertisement, or more.

Assume the audience won't hear it the first time. Or the second. Or...

Another attribute of your audience research should be focused on how you can craft your communication strategy to surround the right people at the right point in the sales process with the right message. It's no longer "one size fits all" communications that can accomplish every single goal with one swing of the hammer. Be smart about how each touch fosters progress through your sales process, while at the same time, being aware that your customers may only get message 2, 4, and 7 out of your grand media scheme -- meaning that each creative communication should always hit home the key insight and provide some of the support necessary to foster the right kind of experience and prompt some level of future interaction.

Test, test, test. And then test some more.

Return on investment should dictate every move you make in the marketplace. Don't ever put a tactic on the table, such as a long run of television spots, or a grandiose series of online ads, without factoring iteration and improvement into the process. Due to up-to-the-second metrics on interactive properties, clients expect adjustment on the fly. And be prepared to kill a buy midstream or shift media or money to other channels if they don't perform at the right cost per acquisition. Unless your goals include some measure of thought leadership or more favored brand presence, don't think about pouring more cash into "love bombs" or other forms of sheer goodwill without the research to back up the long-term ramifications of your actions.

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In the final part of this series, I'll share some broad guidelines to help your marketing insights take the appropriate form in compelling marketing communications.

Continue on to Part 6 >>

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 4

Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy. In this post, I'm going to detail the key questions that comprise the guts of a high-level marketing strategy and the seeds of both your creative strategy and marketing tactics.

Marketing Strategy at a Glance

Based on our business needs, what actions should we take in the market to better sell our products or services? From the corporation's point of view, this often boils down to bottom-line impact, moving the needle by a point or two. For designers, this business need must be clothed in a human insight to have any lasting effect on the market.

When embarking on a marketing plan, the following questions need to be addressed and always in this order. Otherwise, you're throwing tactics at the wall like spaghetti.

1. What does the audience want to hear from this company? Is what the company wants also what the audience wants? Before you can propose a strategy, you need to know that the audience is receptive to such messaging. And if they aren't, you need to come back to the client with solid research to indicate the direction they should take.

2. Where does the audience want to hear it? Where does the audience live, breathe, and communicate? Where they live, work, and seek distraction, as well as online destinations where they congregate -- and how much time they spend in those different locations -- are all fair game.

3. What customer problem does this approach solve? Where's the real customer pain you're addressing? If you're creating a pain and then solving it for a customer, then you're going to have a harder row than stepping into your audience's view with something fresh that fulfills a tangible need.

It's important to note that these questions are the core of both your marketing plan and your creative brief. And often all the answers can be found through informal research.

The Importance of (In)Formal Behavioral Research

The questions above can be answered in a number of ways, but most often it requires some level of research. And by research, I'm not talking about 50,000 surveys and heavy focus groups over a period of months around the United States. I'm describing observing your audience in their domain, either through spending some time where they congregate, or doing some anthropology by easing your way into their work environment to gauge how things appear from their point of view. This can be accomplished by engaging with a formal research partner, but in the case of most projects, there isn't time or budget to do so.

So, in lieu of hiring a professional, I do the following.

Spend time in retail environments with the customers. I go out to stores where my client's products are sold and watch every little detail: how people make choices between multiple products, what they may say aloud, whether they interact with salespeople and the quality of their interactions. Designers nowadays are asked to address the overall experience of engaging with a brand, and the sum of these interactions can often give an indication for why people aren't acting in a manner that the corporation would like. The audience is always in control. My rule of thumb is that if I see a behavior repeated 4 to 5 times across multiple stores, it's probably an indication of a much larger concern -- especially if those behaviors are happening across multiple geographies.

Spend time watching how your customers behave online, and if they complain about their on- and off-line experiences. If you can get metrics from your client, combine them with how customers are reacting on wikis, blogs, forums, Facebook, and Twitter. Marry up trends in your Web site statistics, such as fall-off in transactional processes, with real quotes about actual problems that can be solved. Treat every complaint like gold from heaven. If your customers aren't complaining, they probably aren't giving you strong insights.

Do a task analysis. Task analysis allows you to step into the environment of your key audience members and observe how their specific needs can be fulfilled by a the features of a product or service. Ideally, you'd work this kind of research into your agency fee, and a task analysis can help bolster and refine your general behavioral research while also contributing to the development of, say, a complex Web system.

Listen very closely to the client's point of view about their audience. I always read the client's provided research and mine it for insight before going into the world to validate. Even if your client provides you with all the answers, I think it's our responsibility to see if there are any areas in the margin that we can scribble in a little more insight. Designers are intuitive thinkers that can sense the emotional undercurrent of a person's dialogue about, say, a bar of soap. Teasing out those details provide the shape of how our audience is behaving at this moment in time, and what they expect out of any kind of corporate communication. Sometimes your audience is moving so quickly that how they felt six months ago isn't an accurate snapshot of where they are now -- and where they are headed tomorrow.

The following is a gut check that I always apply at the end of research.

See what can and can't be controlled in the sales process. Ever been asked to sell more product when the product really isn't very good, or when you can't control the customer's experience in the store? When doing research, you need to be aware of what you can actually accomplish. You may need to share with the client that their goals are unreasonable, and propose a sturdier, more realistic course of action.

Until They Pay, Keep Your Research Close to Your Chest

Keep in mind that working through this kind of research, especially before you've been paid a fee, is something that you should parcel out to the client very carefully. Depending on the scale of the project, this kind of research and analysis can take a good number of days, and time is money for any design professional.

I recommend that you determine the depth of your research in advance of agreeing to respond to the client proposal or request, and try to keep it to a budget. When I aim for a major piece of business, I dive hard into the research and try to come up with a strong insight before determining any course of action. If the project is at a much smaller scale, those insights may have to wait until they've signed the work order and we've started in on the creative brief.

Once you've collected this information, and you have distilled it into the key themes or trends that indicate a strong support to the business problem, you're ready to talk about marketing tactics, which will follow in our next installment.

Continue on to Part 5 >>

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 3

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy -- or a sales strategy, or a need to retool existing products or services due to customer feedback, etc.

To forge the right approach, quantify the business problem, qualify the competition, and distill what you've learned to show understanding of their need. This post talks about qualifying the competition and distilling what you've learned.

Qualify the Competition and How It Shapes the Problem

After the client presents the business problem and you ask necessary questions to understand its context, look at everything you can find that frames the problem from the competitor's point of view.

Clear business strategy is crucial for us designers in presenting proposals or participating in a pitch, where clients may intentionally refrain from disclosing key information to see how much you can glean and intuit from the scraps scattered across the media and the Internet.

You need to sniff out the business reasons for specific marketing initiatives through client interviews and research in order to ensure that you're making the most appropriate strategic decisions to solve their business problem.

You also need to show that you understand the world that your client lives in, understanding the trends that shape their industry.

This is different from traditional market research, which would live in your marketing strategy.

This is knowing which competitors are privately held, and sometimes more nimble, versus publicly traded. Which products in their industry are selling the best, and why. What the analysts from Forrester and other trending firms are saying about your industry category. What the Wall Street Journal noted in their most recent column on your corporate outlook. What is going on locally and globally on a cultural level that could have an impact on your business.

All these elements shape the world view that your client holds. Being able to present this kind of information, peppered through your ongoing communication, lets your client know that you appreciate where they're coming from -- and helps to support your creative strategy from a business perspective.

Distill What You've Learned to Show Understanding

The best trust-building exercise with a new client is reflecting back to them what they said, in an intelligent manner, with a few key learnings that they may not be aware of.

Whenever you write a proposal for a new project, you should begin the document with a narrative articulation of the client's business case and current strategy. This shows to the client that you understand their business needs at a high level, and any marketing recommendations that may follow are derived directly from their needs.

Always try to simply answer Who? What? When? Where? and Why? The How? is always proposed through what follows the business strategy: our marketing strategy.

As you craft this paragraph or two, be aware of your audience. As such, I make it as simple and quick to understand as possible. I always pretend, as I'm writing, that the CEO of the company could get their hands on this document. Besides, don't you want the CEO signing off on the dotted line and handing you that nice big project?

Continue on to Part 4 >>

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 2

See Part 1 here.

Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy -- or a sales strategy, or a need to retool existing products or services due to customer feedback, etc.

To forge the right approach, quantify the business problem, qualify the competition, and distill what you've learned to show understanding of their need. Let's talk about quantifying the business problem in this post.

Quantify the Business Problem(s)

New clients can articulate a wide range of business needs, but most often, their business requires short-term sales generation and stable, long-term growth in revenue that leads to profit.

Short-term sales are contingent on tactical marketing decisions. Long-term sales require a holistic view of all marketing communications and a full awareness of the client's brand equity and its increase in value over time. Solving a long-term business problem often requires making large assumptions, and since they are often not in your direct control, your marketing solutions will require some measure of flexibility.

Even if a client walks in the door requesting an awareness-generation campaign that has no sales metrics, it's inevitable that in the long-term view, they need to make money from selling their soda or flat-panel TVs.

With this in mind, I try to strip away the tangibles from a client request -- we need a new identity, help us improve our advertising -- and work backward into what business need is driving their request. I always try to understand how they arrived at this decision, and what needs to happen after the decision in the short and long term to ensure it has an impact.

Here's how some of these client requests can be translated from tactical requests into business needs, and then attacked as creative challenges.

If it's a short-term problem (1-3 months): I need to sell 5,000 loaves of bread by May 31st.

Why? Because I am $100,000 short on revenue this quarter and I need to fulfill our budget objectives to maintain our profit margin.

Why is this valuable to know? It allows us to determine if there are more creative approaches to bringing in the million dollars in revenue. Could we sell more pastries and dinner rolls along with the loaves of bread? Creative thinkers are good at thinking around business challenges to find these novel approaches.

If it's a long-term problem (4-12 months): I want to launch three new MP3 players over the next year and gain a 6% share of the MP3 market in sales, while raising our brand equity by 10%.

Why? We've lost 20,000 customers to our largest competitor in this space and our research has shown that our brand equity has decreased by 4 points due to our competitor's behavior. If this continues, we will take a net loss that may require selling off this portion of our business.

Why is this valuable to know? Knowing the reasons behind their request creates an opportunity to do due diligence. Can their business problem be solved with marketing alone? Over the long-term, what activities from both a business and a marketing perspective would be necessary to forge a clear plan of attack?

Remember to be respectful in how you ask clients for this information. Often, they are in trouble when they ask for your help, and want you to approach their request as an opportunity (a positive challenge), not as a problem.

Continue on to Part 3 >>

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 1

This is the era of design as more than just a strategic business initiative -- it's a way of life and a method of bringing creative thinking to rational, left-brained business professionals.

With the current shift from design as a decorative function to design as a business requirement, designers have been forced to equip an arsenal of tools that go beyond what we'd traditionally call design. As such, we designers have been appending the word "strategy" to everything that we do, perhaps in the belief that it creates a higher-level business orientation to our often intuitive decision-making process. Brand strategy. Content strategy. Design strategy. Interaction strategy. Media strategy. We've developed a strategic nomenclature that is like peeling back the layers of an onion. The list goes on and on and on.

But design within marketing as a core business function only has three fundamental strategies. These are what our clients recognize as indispensable foundations for any creative project, though they aren't all "creative" in the traditional sense. And design strategy can't exist without them.

1. Business Strategy

This is big picture thinking that encompasses the most important questions for any corporation: cash flow, product creation and distribution, and overall operations. Marketing strategy and tactical strategy fall out of overall business strategy and support the overall business needs.

To make a bold generalization: this is the area that designers often impact the most, with the least desire of input by the business principals. After all, we have BFAs, not MBAs.

2. Overall Marketing Strategy

Based on our business needs -- which may be informed by marketing -- what actions should we take in the market to better sell our products or services?

This is an aggregate view of tactics that can be taken and their intended reactions in the market at large, concerning long-term brand equity and value as well as short-term sales gains. Most designers want to own this space, as they can predict and control each project that they engage.

3. Tactical Marketing Strategy

What is the approach that governs each individual action that we need to take, and in what channel(s)? This is where we get to do the tangible design work, and reap the rewards of implementing a project properly. Without the proper tactics, you won't have creative that makes an impact.

Over the coming weeks, I'm going to outline a taxonomy of how our creative strategies, as designers, can be properly forged by these three fundamental marketing strategies. I'm also going to outline some baseline rules that can govern what creative strategies you choose, what you outsource to partners, and what you decline to include in your core set of capabilities that you share with your clients.

Continue on to Part 2 >>

While You're At It, Microsoft, Buy Quark

There's been two metric tons of press regarding the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo merger -- henceforth referred to as Microhoo -- so I won't mention it here again... much. But while Microsoft's throwing about vast piles of cash for non-complementary technology that bolsters its market share by reducing choice, why don't they integrate their Expression Suite with the once-mighty QuarkXPress?

As long as Google owns search, they own the Internet. So why not focus on the low-hanging fruit in other markets?

Since the Great Quark Migration of 2003, the customer base and global support for the Quark organization and its suite of page-layout products have been bleeding away like water out of a punctured balloon. In America, especially, the major reductions in customer support and the decline of a rabid, thoughtful user base have completely cannibalized their market capitalization.

Ten years ago, when InDesign was a twinkle in Adobe's eye, this wasn't an issue. If you told me that a program was going to come along and take me out of Quark 3.1, I was going to say, "No, never! This program is amazing!" Of course, today I say the same thing about Adobe CS3. The tables turned so swiftly due to Quark's extraordinarily slow development cycle and lack of clean integration with Adobe's core product set. Add a very high cost of upgrading -- both in terms of time and money -- and people leapt for a program that was bundled with the indispensable Photoshop and Illustrator.

The only hurdle standing in Microsoft's way? That Quark's file foundation is in the Postscript language, licensed from Adobe, Microsoft's arch-nemesis. To that I say: So what? Strip out Quark's web development tools, whose functionality are a mere shadow of what is necessary to pull off an enterprise-level site. Fork over the necessary moolah to Adobe to keep the program running. Discover ways to extend Quark's core functionality into integrating and translating Postscript to XAML and back.

Until Microhoo squares off against the Googlenet, this seems like a surefire way to keep the troops busy and integrate a pretty good product into their design software portfolio. We shall keep our eyes peeled if it comes to pass.

And remember, Microsoft: you always have the option of buying Corel, too...

A Creative Brief Should Be... Brief

See the title of this post.

A brief is digested, in all senses of the word -- a condensation of thought that indicates a clear strategic direction. Killer creative thinking comes from focus. You need a bull's eye to aim at, not a dartboard.

In my experience, there is an inverse correlation between the length of a creative brief and the quality of thought that goes into it. I have fond memories, as I'm sure we all do, of reviewing a brief in abject fear, realizing that the client is requesting work that communicates three or four different ideas within one piece. Many of them can be contradictory.

This is when you need to work with your client to narrow their strategy to the right key message -- one that is easily communicated and makes sound business sense.

The creative process can be easily co-opted for the express purpose of focusing the client's marketing or branding strategy in the work itself. This is a waste of time and money for the client and the designer, and no way to run a profitable business.

Ideally, a brief should never run longer than 2 pages. Everything else is just incidental detail. Do all those facts and figures and charts need to be in the brief? Can you communicate them in another way or provide them as supporting material? When I see a thicket of details in the brief, they are often secondary to the goal of the project. Everyone needs to share the goal before the details can fit.

The real litmus test to a compelling brief is when you polish up your designs, board them, meet your clients in the conference room, and introduce your work by sharing one to two succinct sentences that summarize the entire strategic direction of the project. At this point, their heads should be nodding expectantly, as they wait for you to reveal how you've clothed their business needs in compelling artistry.

The Designer as an Agent of Change

The future of design is not design. The future of design is embracing change.

To take it further: I see design's real opportunity in this coming decade is to step up and acknowledge that design has always been an agent of change. It just took this long for interactive, as a communication medium, to mature enough to make that change visible to the eye.

There. I said it. And while we're at it...

Down with the tyranny of the professional designer! Down with their superiority complex in the face of a world full of 1 billion dreadfully designed web pages! Down with their PMS swatch books, organized by hue on their desks! Down with their eloquent pronounciation of obscure typeface names from minute foundries run by hotshot typographers in their late twenties who insist on spending at least a year on each Bodoni revival to ensure its legibility at 4 points!

I could go on, but I think you get the point. (And the sarcasm. I'm still working on my Bodoni revival as well...)

Design is a professional practice and a business discipline. It requires an enormous breadth of knowledge in aesthetics and an gigantic amount of thought to fulfill well. It requires an awareness of psychology and visual poetry. It thrives off foresight and insight as well as the willpower necessary to weather the stormy seas that come with large, challenging projects. That's all apparent to us, there on the front lines.

We've developed a fairly exclusive lingo and professional language to talk about design. However, the tools that we use are becoming increasingly democratic. We can't rest on our Photoshop and our Illustrator skillz anymore. Our discipline needs to evolve out of our tools and into the effect of our thinking.

In twenty years, I expect that most people will have on their desktop computer the kind of affordable access to the tools necessary to render, print, publish, upload, or animate the necessary materials to do good design work without a professional designer at arm's reach. Eventually, the so-called ivory tower where design theory is housed will be rocked by its inability to function in a business context. And hasn't this always been the struggle?

I've worked at too many agencies where students straight out of school come into meetings with extraordinary ideas and compelling thinking that have no relationship whatsoever to the business problems at hand. I was one of those kids at one point (though I got an English degree with a focus in design and art history, not a design BFA), and I have fond memories of being doe-eyed in the midst of a crew of hunters busy polishing their guns before they set off to find some conceptual game to take down, slaughter, and present -- freshly cooked in layout stew -- to their hungry clients.

Design school today, in my mind's eye, is a tall building manufactured in the Bauhaus period, with perfectly placed windows that conform to a densely spaced grid, creating a pleasing sense of order. Within said building, each room is bursting with all sorts of ideas, pictures, words, images, and theories just yearning to shake the world to its bones. Some of my happiest days I was knee deep in collage clippings, huffing rubber cement, designing typefaces made of fruit I photocopied and hand-colored lovingly on posterboard.

Then reality happens. We intern and apprentice and learn the ropes and that idealism gets smacked out of us by reality. Business meetings happen. Clients ask us what we do. We have to codify what we do, put ourselves in a box, show the power of design in the work but be professional in the interim. We stumble over how to sell ourselves without sounding too visionary:

We solve business problems. We're passionate. We create implementations of ideas. We create influence, belief, understanding, results. We have a proprietary process. We ensures your success. We inspire decisions. We change behavior. Anyone can come up with an idea -- we just come up with better ideas. We create compelling brands. Brand experiences. Brand propositions. Meaningful brands. Increase brand value. We create meaningful experiences. Design can be a powerful force of change.

Does any of this sound familiar? I just went and looked at some agency websites and typed in phrases that I saw on their "About Us" pages. We're specialists in differentiation, right? Then why do our descriptions of what we do say the same thing, over and over and over again?

It seems like we always latch onto the most recent buzzwords and trends (experiential branding! Web 2.0!) instead of looking inward, at what design really excels at in a business context. It's not creating influence or belief or understanding. It's creating change. It always boils down to change. None of this wussy "design can be a powerful force of change" that I saw on a leading design firm's Web site. Design is the force of change. We can own it, today. Interactive has the ability to spread ideas like a gasoline leak that's caught fire. With social media in play, it only takes hours, if not minutes, to get a meme rolling. We can watch the bloom of it, organically -- observe the change happening in real time. The old guard still doesn't quite understand this, but when they do, we're so in business. Whole battles of opinion will play out like watching the Wimbledon tournament compressed into two minutes flat.

I have fond memories of the early to mid-90s, when it became standard business practice for businesses to realize that they absolutely needed a Web site. Your design firm would declare a competency in Web design and people would beat down your door to give you their business. I worked at agencies where we had no portfolio in Web site design and clients would be practically throwing projects at us. On the fly, we'd be creating code and learning Flash and generally falling all over the place, trying to learn what the heck we were doing. We were all tyros. There wasn't much need to differentiate ourselves. We were all in it together.

Accelerate. Five years later, everyone knows the technology. Now the best thinking wins the work. You fall out of the game or you try harder.

Another few years pass, along with a number of influential publications on the 360-degree brand. Experiential branding becomes the rage (agencies love it because it makes it easier to sell more services bundled within one company). Then social media/Web 2.0 strikes the market like a meteor. Oh wait, now we don't just sell ideas... we need to prove that we know how to speak to people online, in the car, on billboards, in the bathroom, in direct mail. The traditional communications disciplines of sales, marketing, public relations, etc. are converging on themselves like a reversal of the big bang.

This trend is not going to stop, as interactive has become the big bad beast that's overwhelmed all other disciplines. It will become the hub of the wheel, and all other disciplines will become the spokes radiating from it.

This puts us in a new space with our clients. In the past, clients came to us understanding what they wanted to change, and we would use design to try to make that happen. As we continue to mature design as a discipline, bolstering it with our learnings in research, anthropology, economics, psychology, sociology, and so on, companies will retain us to promote change separate of projects.

We will manage the brand experience, come up with tactical ideas and strategies to ensure their sales numbers were met, but first and foremost, we will be agents of change. Awareness, understanding, belief, action, reaction, sales, all rolled into one. We will not answer RFPs for tactical campaign work. We will be hired across all disciplines (not just advertising and traditional marketing) to effect change enterprise-wide across organizations. We will speak up regarding business process, customer service, inter-office dynamics -- you name it, it influences the brand, so it falls within our domain. Tactical marketing will always be in our arsenal but we'll be digging way deeper into our toolbox than sending out postcards.

I don't imagine this like the current retainer relationships major agencies have as agency of record. We would be tasked to serve the customer first and the company second -- since, if you think about it, the customer owns the company anyways.

We will differentiate ourselves from the dilettantes and homebodies because we will be bringing value to our client relationships as mavens of change. We will differentiate our agencies by creating our own methods of fostering change. There isn't just one way to do it right. The market will always prove that out.

We will have evolved our discipline enough to be trusted to take initiative when necessary. Ideally, we will function within companies as in-house groups and orbiting consultancies that provide the drive necessary to keep business growth happening (looking good to shareholders) and creating meaningful relationships with customers (fostering the love of customers).

Are designers really equipped to take on this challenge? No way. We will likely have to huddle together and gain the resources to pay it off in the long term. This is consistent with every other growth spurt in the design community -- we seem to hoover up whatever we need from any other discipline when it suits our needs. But the large agencies will get there quickly and stand on the vanguard until we all catch up. Our agency staff won't be designers and production artists and developers and account people. Start seeing a huge diversity of people that you'd never think would pass through the halls of a creative agency.

In ten years, we won't discover we're out of work because of 50DollarLogos.com. We'll be busy as hell. It's just that we won't be creating logos and websites and videos. We'll be creating change. We will be hired to be agents of change. The logos just happen as a result of that.

And I can't wait for that day to arrive.

Good Marketing is Business Psychotherapy

"Finding a new creative agency can be like finding a new therapist. Why would you want to tell your story all over again to a new agency?"

One of my esteemed colleagues, Kara Costa, said the above quote in a meeting about how agencies are marketed. And she's completely right.

At agencies, we listen to our clients very closely. We provide them proper perspective. We unravel existing stories about their products, their brands, and how their companies functions. We help them forge new stories about themselves founded on the truths inherent in their brands. If things are dire, we write a prescription and make sure it gets filled.

As a result, client relationships improve with their customers. The agency, the company, and their audience relate on a deeper, more human level. Often, great marketing and strategic work from an agency can have an impact on how the company functions as a complete organism, making it healthier beyond the immediate deliverables at hand. A strong agency-client relationship can elevate an agency to be the company's therapist, easing them into the necessary efforts to create positive change.

There's a cost, though. Obtaining great design work can require as much introspection and effort as therapy. There is an emotional investment from both parties that creates a strong bond -- or painful friction, if the process isn't managed well.

Of course, friction is an essential part of any marketing work. A good therapist will challenge you in both direct and indirect ways, working to discern the best method to bring out your true nature. Without friction, there isn't change or growth. A good therapist won't just come out and say, "You should do this or you'll be sorry." They help bring you to an understanding contained within your own story.

And just like therapists, it can often seem like designers are only making observations about things already inherent in the client. This isn't devaluing the designer's role, only underscoring the intuitive nature of the designer and the quality of their insight. That's what we get paid for: active listening and reactive envisioning.

It's precisely for this reason that when strong client contacts depart for other companies, they have a predisposition to maintain their preferred agency relationships. I feel like this is part of the reason that agencies are constantly buffeted by the storms of agency reviews. People want to work with agencies that have a proven track record of listening closely to their needs.

You don't go to see a therapist for a few months, thank them for the hard work and effort, and then move on to start all over again. Wouldn't you hate it if you looked up and saw that your therapist was asleep while you were talking to him? Or that he didn't remember that in the third grade, you were taunted by your peers, which led you to lock yourself in the bathroom for a week and cry?

A ten-year client relationship, serviced by consistently excellent work, can evaporate in mere months without the shared experience that comes from working through business problems over time. That experience is the bedrock that keeps the relationship strong through turbulent business conditions. Companies don't get a chance to settle down into a comfortable, challenging relationship when people are flying in and out of their account. Without institutional memory, usually in the form of people and processes, trust evaporates.

What would happen if you treated all of your clients more like a therapist would: with deep respect, compassion, and focused attention on listening to exactly what their needs are. Would that give you the necessary edge to retain them?

The Rise of Eco and Indie Luxury

Designers asked to work with a luxury brand know the general rule of thumb: make it look twice as valuable with half the budget and a fraction of the tangible materials.

Designers also know the dirty, dark secret of marketing luxury goods: quality of design can trump quality of materials. Quantities may run low and costs-per-piece high, since you have a limited audience and a limited quantity. Products may be outsourced to factories overseas and only cost incrementally more than their regular brand cousins. The product always includes a premium markup, to create an aura of value.

And that aura of value is morphing into something new.

The idea of Old Luxury (high fashion, high quality, high touch, high price) has fractured over the past ten years into a number of new and surprising categories that make it even harder to market a product as Old Luxury, but even easier to draw an audience into considering a purchase at a higher price point.

With the coming recession, there is going to be a shift from the New Luxury or "masstige" market into Eco and Indie Luxury:

Old Luxury will never take a major hit, because people who purchase Old Luxury products have enough wealth to support their lifestyle even if their portfolio drops 50%.

But people who consider New Luxury products as part of their lifestyle will seek a greater meaning for their purchases. The new categories that I've noted, Eco and Indie Luxury, provide that meaning above and beyond what an Old or New Luxury brand can provide.

The old thinking went like this: If you want to simplify your life -- if you really want to do more with less and own things that no one else owns -- then be prepared to spend a premium, have fewer options to choose from, and defend your piece of ground with the (limited) members of your tribe. Go to Wal-Mart if you want to get the most for the least. Never mind that the same factory may have made your fancy Coach bag and those Wal-Mart briefs.

The new thinking is much more complex. And exciting.

Eco Luxury

I recently found myself fingering a Jil Sander wool jacket at Barneys Co-op that I could easily see myself wearing. Ten minutes later, a very similar jacket was at Banana Republic for one-tenth of the JS jacket "sale price". Old Navy around the corner, another similar jacket that was one-sixty of the BR price.

The major difference between the three, other than a slight difference in percentage of wool and the cut? The Jil Sander jacket had no label inside it and was the simplest, most minimal design.

This seems pretty obvious to a New York fashionista--they'd know the jacket was Jil Sander when they saw it because of its styling and notch it in their little mental black book. And when you're in that kind of community, you're part of a semi-closed circle that amplifies the value of your lifestyle choices (or devalues them, depending who you run with).

But then I walked over to the Nau store. Welcome to Eco Luxury. Their black jacket that costs the same as the jacket at Banana Republic was made through sustainable practices. It looks sleek and different from all those other jackets. (Full disclosure: I drool regularly over their clothes but have not made a purchase... yet. I also critique them regularly because it's hard to be play luxury and sustainability at the same time...)

This single piece of clothing brings up all sorts of considerations I didn't have when I was shopping at Williams-Sonoma or Tiffany's. Do I want a high-end necklace that's biodegradeable? A high-heat spatula that's recyclable? It doesn't sound so far-fetched in 2008. In 2018 it'll be an assumed part of the buying decision.

In clothing, travel, and a host of other markets, Eco Luxury is poised in the wings to infiltrate and overtake the New Luxury category. In ten years, it's likely that Eco Luxury won't exist as its own category anymore and will be absorbed wholesale into New Luxury -- only because it can be factory produced and has the potential to be marketed on a mass scale. Call it New Eco Luxury, which hopefully will never go out of style.

Indie Luxury

Generate your own fashion. Design your own products. Take it open source. Generate a global audience in a matter of days. It's all possible and it's happening every day. Products can be priced for their scarcity, originality, and impact, and sold within a community that's outside of the traditional purview of corporations insistent on controlling their brands.

A mere decade year ago, the context of the store environment created the tangible value--that was the only place you could get the product. Is that Jil Sander jacket less valuable if I buy it on eBay? Er... what's eBay? Nowadays, sites like eBay and Bag, Borrow or Steal are hammering down the value of Old Luxury and New Luxury brands in mid-size retailers like Nordstrom and Tiffany's.

The old thinking here:

The story I tell about how and where I purchased the product creates the tangible value. Especially if the product is on parity with others in its market. The tribe protects the brand value. Luxury marketers dictate the rules of the game. The cost of entry is the cost of the product. Don't play the game if you aren't serious about being vocal to protect your "investment." Cults and communities online and in the real world defend or destroy the brand value. This happens quickly in the fashion community as different houses veer into and out of style.

The new thinking:

But for the rest of us, the unwashed, the cost of entry can be seen as a psychological barrier, a badge of your inclusion in the tribe, and the only perceived result of the purchase in the physical store.

The purchase is also influenced by economic and social factors. Right now, there's a buzz in the air as banks and investment firms take multi-billion dollar hits to their bottom line from underestimating the risk of sub-prime investment. Why would I blow $5k on a jacket when everyone is suffering?

The Internet has created many more opportunities to access and purchase luxury goods, but also the seeds of their destruction. As more people create online communities around their favorite brands, these communities will communicate about "online deals" as well and further dilute your product value. These communities will also start producing the luxury goods themselves.

I'm paying more attention to this category than Eco Luxury, because it brings the thinking of the long tail into an industry that's always been tight-lipped and inaccessible. And there are people that are doing sustainable work in this area to go head to head with people like Nau, which is exciting.

Of course, companies will try to monetize Indie Luxury by generating communities that ease fulfillment and promotion of product sales. But Indie Luxury as a category will always resist being under a corporate thumb and will generate its own communities and spin-off products that trickle up into the mainstream.

On Saying No

The only major failure you should face in the business of design? The failure to recognize that a client project is something you should decline.

Why is saying no always so difficult?

Because you aren't that busy. It's just a quick little project in an area that you don't specialize in, but you might as well take it so when the next big project arrives, you'll have an even stronger client relationship.

Often, we end up in these situations as designers because we've not properly communicated what we want out of our clients. There need to proper boundaries, and if they aren't described or enforced, then the client often doesn't understand who you are and what services you offer.

These kinds of situations often occur with our clients:

The client thinks you want it, no matter what. This is the beauty of having strong client relationships -- they trust you with their life, their brand, and every project that could benefit from your magic touch. They like working with you. They genuinely care about your success. They just don't realize that what they're throwing your way is not the best fit. This happens often in seeking new clients: right client, wrong project. It's a subtle art to decline a client and still keep the door open for future business.

The client knows you need it. Yes, the studio has been quiet. The client's been aware of your increased focus and attention their business, throwing in bells and whistles whenever possible. The risk of this type of overdelivering is that clients begin to expect more for their money. They also expect that you'll drop anything to help. Smart and savvy businesspeople know this is when they can negotiate hardest on their own behalf.

The client doesn't know that you lack competency in an area. "Yes, I designed your logo and business papers, and I'll be happy to talk with you about building a database for your website." Designers don't like to admit weakness in a specific area, but you'll actually gain respect by bringing in the right professional or agency to support you and/or wholly take on a project you don't have a competency in.

The client wants you to do work that's part of their job role. Most often, designers are hired to do things that are outside the core expertise of their clients. But sometimes jobs come along that are part of a client's everyday work responsibilities, and you don't recognize it until it's too late. The risk with these kinds of projects is that you usually don't get to follow your standard agency process and have to work through the same politics as your client to have work approved. This can be a burn on your time and resources and make your project unprofitable.

The client feels entitled to your help. If you say no, there are plenty of other agencies yearning to get started on this project. And this threat is always halfway true. But if a client threatens to take the work to another agency, they're taking this tack because they want something from you: your participation, your investment, your attention. They know you'll do it better than that other agency. It actually proves that you have more leverage than you think and should talk more deeply with them about their needs.

Often, it's not up to the client. It's a problem that you're dealing with on your end that bleeds into your working client relationships:

You really do need the money. Yes, you need to pay rent. Yes, this work is not beneath you. Yes, the work will hopefully lead to better things. Yes, the Print Regional Annual doesn't accept PowerPoint templates as a category. Sorry. You have staff you need to keep busy. It'll be over quick and then you'll be on to better things. It is a fundamental truth that projects stroll through the studio that are purely money-makers and never peek their head up in your portfolio. But if word gets around that you're really, really good at the things you don't want to specialize in, you'll risk landing those projects over and over again. Like the old adage says, "Be careful what you're good at." Can you afford to promote yourself as an expert in one area and end up spending your time working in another?

And lastly, the most dangerous reason that you don't decline work:

You don't realize what they're really asking for and plan to figure it out while you work on the project. Disaster comes in many flavors, and this is one you never want to inflict on a paying client. Example: You design their identity. They're offering you some motion graphics work to animate it for a video. You've never used AfterEffects or Flash. Now isn't the time to crack the manual and dive in. Too high a risk of failure. Bring in a specialist. Mark up their time. Get it right.

Today's designers are business partners with their clients -- real strategists -- and you're continually thrown opportunities you don't really need or have the depth of knowledge to fulfill well. Be sure to let your clients know upfront what kinds of work you really want. The work that's really going to shine.

If that's not what a client has to offer for you, then be prepared to walk away gracefully. Make a reference to someone in your network who can fulfill their needs and return the referral in the future.

The Dot of Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is something you can't escape when you sell a product or service. You're telling other people to focus their attention on a single element of a complicated product or service, all the while attempting to differentiate your client from their peers. When you look at your marketing message in this way, I think it becomes evident why it's so hard for companies to market charitable initiatives, present themselves as socially responsible, or demonstrate true concern about environmental change. You're asking people to look you in the eye and perhaps smile while you're talking, but they can't help but focus on the spot of blood on your cheek.

The challenge of marketing any product or service that includes a social responsibility message requires you to confront what I like to call "the dot of hypocrisy." Your message won't be effective unless you focus on one idea in each communication. If that one idea is a naked social responsibility message, however, you're in big trouble.

If you lead with a marketing claim that is solely based in a social responsibility message, your audience will pick it apart. This is something that I'll be exploring more in-depth in some other posts, but the short argument is this:

Product claims may seem logical to marketers, but they are emotional in nature to an audience and tied up in a mess of factors that include your brand perception and your product position, value, and quality. You can try to control your brand and your product, but you can't control how people perceive the value of your charitable giving or social responsibility. People nowadays say that they think it's critical for companies to be good global citizens, but that single claim isn't enough to get them to act. Social responsibility has to align with people's purchasing factors to make a dent in the dot of hypocrisy.

Sometimes minimizing the dot of hypocrisy is this simple:

Can you think of any examples of companies that have diminished the dot of hypocrisy in an elegant way?

Great Blog on Economics and Design

Pop on over to the Illinois Institute of Technology's (IIT) Economics of Design blog site and read the 11 things you should have learned in “Economics and Design.” It's a great overview of many things that designers learn the hard way during their careers. The blog also has an introduction to design planning, an aspect of most designer's lives that usually takes a backseat to the actual execution of design work.

A few quotes from the piece:

"We rarely, if ever, consider how to apply an incentive strategy along with our new design, or how our new design may work/not work with an existing incentive strategy. Design of incentives is a powerful new frontier for our profession, and should be integrated into our everyday work."

The design of incentives is a classy term for bringing direct response thinking into other disciplines. In plain language, it's not enough to change people's minds. Incentives make people act, and without more people acting, you won't create results. Even when you're working on an experiential project with tons of moving parts, there should be an incentive strategy in place to reward your audience for wanting to interact with your brand.

"We can’t assume that markets and products will work the same other places as the do here (in North America), we need to design these markets, interactions, and offerings to and for each market."

Some popular examples that come to mind are the Chevy Nova that wouldn't go in Mexico or the much ballyhoo'd and perhaps not true "Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Dead."

"As designers, we should pay close attention to this convergence of psychology and economics; it can provide insight into the adoption and use of our offerings."

This is crucial in today's marketing landscape. It's especially painful to watch how purchasing psychology can destroy brand equity.

Many brands sacrifice their longevity of their product offerings in order to make a quick sale, thinking that customers will make a rational choice when confronted with a compelling incentive or campaign. This only holds true in the short term--what Marty Neumeier had termed a "disloyalty program" in the book Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands. If you train your customers to focus on price, your offerings lose value.

A recent example that comes to mind of a "disloyalty program" is the ongoing marketing by Comcast. Their "It's Comcastic!" campaign has had a lot of interesting creative, but it's been dogged by inconsistent messaging across different markets and mediums, as well as "blanket the market with offers" tactics that makes me think the only reason I should switch from Qwest is because they're cheaper, not better. Television or DSL can be almost like a drug--why treat it like a commodity? Couldn't they bring something to the mix that makes them truly different?

A great market position that fulfills this promise is the recent brand launch by Credo Mobile (formerly Working Assets Wireless). At first, I completely disliked the creative for this piece, but after having it sink in over a few weeks in the Seattle market, it's totally spun my head.

The cell phone market full of intense competition. Most of this competition is over selling phones unique to your carrier and competing tit-for-tat over pricing and minutes in 2-year contracts. Credo Mobile changed the rules of the game by making it not about phones or costs, but about how by using their service, they will make donations to lefty causes from their profits. Now that's a position that runs contrary to all the big dogs, and gives Credo a chance to scissor off more progressive, NPR-loving, very well-off customers. (And it doesn't really matter that their phones aren't very good... who cares when you're providing hunger relief in Darfur?)

"...the most potentially devastating risks a company faces (changes in customer preference, market forces, and technological change) can all be managed within the scope of a design project. We need to shift our position from creating risk to managing it.... Designers should be obsessed with creating value; this frame of reference should guide everything we do."

This may be hard for some designers to swallow, but it's true: designers need to hold just as much responsibility as the client when a major design initiative doesn't take future market forces and shifting audience perceptions into account. Design communications depend too much on context to allow lack of forethought. This is most important in technology marketing, where the landscape seems to shift hourly. If you keep the client in business, the client will keep you in business.

"...in order to continue to remain in business, [design] firms have had to shift the bulk of their billings to strategy work, which requires less “horsepower”, and more knowledge and domain expertise."

The flip side of this shift in the marketing landscape: designers don't come equipped with the tools to provide strategy separate of their design education. Designers need to develop methodologies to become strategic partners in business if they want to survive.

Most designers usually gain these methods by working within larger, stable companies that have proven processes. They absorb this thinking and bring it into their own practice when the move onward. It is not actively taught unless it is sought through small programs like the one at IIT or absorbed through reading through as much popular business-thinking as possible -- something that most designers would rather not do. It's very difficult to be a competent commercial artist and a business thinker. When a project requires an even higher level of strategic insight, I know I lean hard on my artistic intuition and then work backward from it to try to find a strategic ground to stand on. It's hard to think that designers will ever find it easy to be strategic partners--but that's part of the fun of the challenge.

The thing that I do love about this shift in the design profession is that designers will, in the future, be seen as the visionaries, providing ideas that propel major change in business. These intangible ideas don't need to be couched as "design work" anymore.

Design will be increasingly viewed as a thought industry that takes ideas and uses stories across different media to create meaning for an audience. We are empowering these tribes to participate in a community with their hearts, minds, and pocketbooks towards a shared goal. Whether that goal is buying a cup of coffee or creating world peace, their actions have to have some kind of meaning. Designers will help shape the paths of people's lives, tangibly and intangibly, by helping align those actions.

The First Point of Failure

The brochure cover design and rough layout were easily approved, you've proceeded to layout and typeset beautiful copy written by a freelance writer, €”and the client hates the copy. It's all wrong.

The changes that he described to you over the phone require the writer to create a new draft. Then you'll need to replace the copy through the brochure with a new content structure that requires redesigning the inside completely. And based on the copywriter "missing the mark," which you don't quite agree with, now the client's thinking the overall concept for the cover may need to change as well. And of course, they don't want to pay for the changes outside of your current estimate...

"But I told him that he needed to read and approve the copy before I'd go to full layout. He said he was too busy / on vacation / (insert client excuse here) and that he trusted me / my staff / my freelancer to do great work..."

More often than not, there is always a first point of failure in a project where an issue like this comes to light. It could be a late approval that influences your delivery date, a round of concepts that the client dislikes, or a misjudgment of exactly how many hours you'll need to deliver that killer Flash advertisement.

These points of failure can be traced back to concerns that rest outside the traditional "design process." Failure is an important and inevitable part of the creative process, often leading to truly breakthrough design solutions. But when major failures occur during the business processes of a project, you can get knocked right out of business.

In this above scenario, the first point of failure was the desire to please a client, no matter what the cost. Wearing your account management hat at the expense of your project process can trump the controls you keep in place to ensure that you don't have to work over your time estimate. While it's tempting to mold your progress to your client's availability, there's always a point of diminishing return (and profit) for the graphic designer. This becomes even more risky in a creative agency setting, where thousands of dollars in staff time can go out the window without client approval at key milestones.

Other common points of failure occur when:

• The creative agency or designer isn't able to enforce boundaries around each phase of a design project. This usually emerges from entering into a project outside their area of expertise without having lived through what it would really take to fulfill the job profitably. In smaller projects in print and online, missteps can result in rework and added time and labor. In large-scale web design and video projects, a lack of boundaries can lead to absolute failure and huge costs amassed to start projects over again.
• The client doesn't want to work within the project boundaries. This can happen because the client didn't disclose there were multiple stakeholders within their company that had to approve each round. If the designer or agency doesn't ask the client about the need for multiple rounds of approvals and changes, they may feel uncomfortable penalizing the client by asking for more money. And like above, the client can feel like they are a hinderance if they aren't available during important approval rounds and want to keep the project moving towards an absolute deadline. There's an endless list here of reasons why the client can strain against an agency's process, and if the designer or agency doesn't stand firm, there's usually no going back.
• The client doesn't understand what they're asking for. They may have never handled a project in the discipline they've been asked to manage. The process you've been tasked to take them through baffles them (branding and web design being the usual suspects). Questions about their business strategy, business process, brand positioning, and sales methodology percolate out of your design work and open new areas they haven't grappled with fully. The design brief may become invalid partially through a project and require scrapping progress and starting over--something every client loves to hear.

While these kinds of situations often seem an inevitable part of a designer's life, they can be eased by making sure that you do the following:

• You have properly researched and digested the business problem in the creative brief. And by digested, I mean that you've thought through, validated, and proposed focused solutions for the client's business problem in advance of any design work. Without the proper context and frame around the business problem, your design won't hold as much weight in the client's mind. In advance of writing the brief, you may need the client to fill out an intake questionnaire that fully examines the kinds of things clients may not have thought through (such as brand positioning and sales process methodologies).
• You devise and keep to a workflow during your entire project--and make your client continually aware of the schedule and their ongoing responsibilities. If the client doesn't know they're on the hook and accountable through the entire creative project, you have no authority to make demands when things go sideways, both in pushing schedules out and in asking for more money. On the flip side, if you haven't properly planned your project out and uncover all the unknown variables, you're on the hook if it impacts your bottom line.
• You keep within the boundaries of the proposal. I have fond memories of developing elaborate pitches at big agencies to try and land projects ($20K time investment). Then, when the work actually came in, we'd show five concepts instead of three at the first round, and then produce an extra brochure design or two if we were feeling nice ($5K). Most smaller creative agencies and solo designers can't afford to throw this kind of money out the window, and it trains clients to have expectations of their design firms that exceed the boundaries of profitability and professionalism.

Strangely, the larger the project, the more that the actual process of designing almost seems to be a mere fraction of the work necessary to make clients happy.

What are points of failure you've had in your design projects? What did you discover in the process that made you a better designer and a better businessperson?