Sales come from being top of mind for your customer. That means you’ve paid for a small part of their brain to remember you.
Think Lurpak butter man and his trumpet or the honey monster or central heating for kids. It’s amazing when you start to ask people about adverts they remember from the 80’s that they all come up with the same ones.
Try it in your office!
Why does this happen? Because those designs were bold & brave and those are the designs that claim that space in your mind.
How then do we find so many bland & boring designs hitting the market when history teaches us that’s not the way to play it?
Fear.
Bold & brave design takes guts. More than that, it takes a decision-maker out of their comfort zone and into a relationship of trust with the designer. That relationship is floored from the start by a clash of culture between pretty & profit.
What if we evidenced the bold & brave instead? We’ve been testing the process of design and now know that when the evidence is clear, based on real-world audiences the bold & brave design gets more real estate in the mind of the customer without adding fear in the mind of the CEO.
Bold & Brave design is about being unapologetically YOU based on your values and brand. It is the story and the connection you create with your audience that makes them value you over any price difference, fancy bonus or well-put-together sales pitch.
Unless your brand is built around being off the wall and quirky, we are not asking for anything crazy here. Simply that you are the most-bold and most-brave you. That makes people talk. That makes you top of mind. That makes people buy. The link between pretty & profit becomes much easier to see when the design is doing what it should.
Most CEOs have scaled back the original designs or scaled down the potential risk of a design. Unfortunately, this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. The scaled-back design fails to make the impact that was intended, it fails to show a direct correlation between the design and the profit increase.
So next time a budget is set for design there is less willingness to spend based on the historic poor performance. Financially that’s the smart move. No impact equals no investment. And then comes the rut.
Poor budgets follow poor design follow poor budgets and none of that leads to strong sales. In fact, it becomes an endemic part of why all other sales and marketing efforts are one big uphill struggle. Imagine how hard you must work on claiming that memory space when all you have to stand out is some bonus or feature of the product that can be instantly compared online with your competitors. Imagine how much extra you have to put into your sales and marketing budget to compensate.
And now for something completely different.
If Monty Python didn’t pop in your head then, off to YouTube and enjoy a new world of entertainment then head back over here. The very fact that a small sentence or any other trigger can recapture that space in your mind and bring Monty Python top of mind proves that something completely different, a bold and brave design works.
Visual triggers work in the same way.
They extend way beyond the logo.
The share a coke with friends’ campaign raised global sales by 1%. We’ve interviewed one of the campaign designers and that campaign stands as one of the all-time greats for one of the all–time greats of advertising.
Bold & Brave.
