Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Jake Cooper

5 Design Hangups Holding Back Your Success

Many business owners are confused when it comes to design. They don’t know the costs, the timeframes, the outcomes, or when it’s the right time to hire a designer. These design hangups convince them that design isn’t worth the risk or the expense.

But is it, really?

The Design Value Index charts how well design-based companies performed against the natural performance of the S&P 500

In my last article I talked about how investing in my client’s branding tripled her income. That’s not a one-in-a-lifetime example — the top businesses in the world all tout design as an integral function of their company. But still, business owners convince themselves that design isn’t what they need.

Well if now’s not the time to start getting paid what your worth, then when?

I understand how these fears hold people up. They’re a self-defense mechanism born out of passion, attempting to protect the business you truly care about. But make no mistake, these fears are holding you back from customers and profit.

Design Hangup: “It isn’t Important”

Design is more important than ever. Attracting the right customers is key to your business growth, and design directly influences how attractive you are to customers. Design isn’t just about how you look, it serves as the medium through which people experience and connect with your product. It’s the delightful experience that’s designed to convey your values and goals that converts people into customers.

Attracting the Right Audience

The design of your materials communicates what types of people your product is best suited for. A well-positioned (targeted) brand appearance can drastically change your favorability with certain audiences. Old Spice, Target, McDonald’s, and Burberry all dodged bankruptcy and became heavy-hitters in their market by rebranding themselves to a more specific, more receptive audience.

You can’t deny the Old Spice man…

This logic applies at all scales. If you feel that targeting a specific audience and growing your revenue is important, you’re actually advocating the importance of design.

Competing for Customers

Your branding doesn’t exclusively communicate who your product is for. Great design conveys how you get the job done, and why you’re the right choice. Without this clarity you risk being ignored for a product that customers can better understand.

In his book, Zag, Brand expert, and bestseller on the subject, Marty Neumeier feels that customers are the real competitors when it comes to business:

“Businesses don’t decide which brands live and die, it’s customers who do.”

Time and attention is the most precious resource around, and the marketplace is cluttered with options all trying to offer the same thing. Without a brand that is deserving of your customer’s attention, you limit the potential for your business to reach its customers.

Audience Behavior is Complex

It’s a mistake to think that people buy things based solely on how well their purchase solves their problem. Customer behavior is more complex than that. We all buy things for a multitude of reasons, one of the biggest being how what we buy will represent ourselves.

“I buy, therefore I am”.

The things we buy, and the brands we buy into, are an outward expression of what we really care about. We wear brands on our clothes and place labels on our cars as a means to showcase the “tribes” we belong to. Without a compelling brand story that communicates the your altruistic goals and the problems you help them solve, customers will only see your product as a generic utility.

Design Hangup: “It’s Too Expensive”

Compared to other services, design can seem expensive. But a designer is not a technician that comes in to perform a task and leave once it’s done.

A designer’s job is to diagnose brand-related business problems and create solutions that help your company grow (aka make money). A designer requires years of training and experience to become effective at what they do. They need to perform evaluative research and develop a reactive process that fits your specific needs. No job is cut an dry. No job is a single task. Designers aren’t musicians, they’re composers.

Designers are priced to reflect both the customization required for each individual project as well as the cost of training and experience that is required to complete jobs effectively.

Pablo Picasso Sticker Shock

Sticker shock is all too common in the design world. I’ve heard the excuses before: “my kid can do that”, “I would never pay that much”, “but it’ll only take you an hour”. Excuses like these only demonstrate a false equivalency of time and value — speed over quality.

There’s a famous story of Pablo Picasso being asked by a Sunday stroller to do a quick sketch while in the park. He agrees, and after five minutes he hands over the drawing to the “client”. She loves it. She asks him how much he’d charge her for the sketch. He replies, “$10,000”. Stunned, she asks how he can demand $10,000 for five minutes of work. Picasso explains it wasn’t five minutes, it’s taken him his whole life to be able to do great work that fast.

Perhaps a $10,000 sketch by Pablo Picasso

Picasso didn’t charge that much because his rate was arbitrarily high. He wasn’t just baking in the cost of years of practice and study. He created something his “client” loved, something that an art gallery would surely love to add to their collection at the price he gave. It didn’t matter that the sketch was done in five minutes, the sketch was valuable because it was a quality piece of art. If the piece was done in 10 hours instead of five minute it’d be no more or less valuable, but because we assume things of great value have to take a long time to finish, we lose sight of what’s right in front of us.

Scaling the Budget to the Problem

My lesson for celeb-sighting park walkers and business owners alike is to consider the value of your solution before reacting to the price.

Some people can’t fathom spending $100,000 on a website when you can get Squarespace for $20/month. Yet many companies pay that price happily, not because they have money to blow, but because that $100,000 solution will solve a $1,000,000 problem. It’s not that the agency is inherently too expensive, you just don’t have $1,000,000 problems like their customers do.

There will always be designers charging what seem like insane price, both insanely cheap and insanely expensive. What get’s businesses into trouble is they misjudge the severity of their design problems and then assume a cheap designer can solve their expensive problem. In those situations, business owners complain that the design project they paid for didn’t work, when really the proverbial Band-Aid was too small. This vicious cycle perpetuates the idea that “design isn’t worth it”, when really it’s “cheap design” holding everything back.

Your design budget should scale to the size of your problem. Even if your company doesn’t make a ton of money, there will always be designers and resources that can work for your budget. The challenge is to accurately gauge the expense of leaving your design problems untreated. From there you’ll have a better sense of what budget you have to invest in design.

Design Hangup: “We Don’t Have the Time Right Now”

Typically, most design projects only need a minimal time commitment from stakeholders — maybe a few hours a week. Designers make great effort to avoid overwhelming their clients, and often will make clear time commitments and schedules to manage everyone’s expectations.

Often people believe creative projects are more exhaustive than they really are, because they misunderstand the design process. Working with a designer is a collaboration of two unique skill sets: the client and their knowledge of the business operations, strategy, and goals; and the designer with their knowledge of connecting with specific audiences through visual communication.

Clients don’t need to learn design basics when working with designers. When reviewing creative work, they should always assess from a business perspective. Clients should gauge the success of the project based on the solution’s ability to solve a business problem. Personal taste should be left out of the review process in favor of the taste of the target customer.

Even though it’s not a huge commitment, it’s important for your business to make time for design. Brand recognition and brand advocacy doesn’t happen overnight — it’s worth it to invest sooner and start the clock now to avoid scrambling later.

Design Hangup: “We’re Not Ready Yet” / “It’s Too Early”

Some people feel like design is added at the end of a project, once everything else has been figured out — this couldn’t be further from the truth.

The best time to include a designer in your project is at the beginning. Designers help focus your efforts on the audiences and materials with the most impact. Having a clear strategy from the get-go will not only make you more efficient, but it will allow for more deliberate choices when developing the story being told throughout your customer’s brand experience.

The worst-case scenario, for designers and business owners, is having to blow your budget reworking pieces that you’ve already spent time and money on. By working with a designer early on, you better navigate the work to be done and avoid wasteful spending.

The reason people think design goes at the end of a project is they misunderstand what designers actually do. Some people assume designers are just the “graphics guys”, and wait to employ them until graphics are needed. But in reality designers do so much more than graphics: they craft strategy, assess your brand, discover hidden goals and opportunities, devise concepts, and tailor your user’s experience.

Designers need to be brought into a project when there are still problems to be solved, not just when all that’s left is to carry out the solution.

Design Hangup: “We’re Too Small to Have a Design Budget”

Small is the perfect size for your design to knock out your competition. In his book David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell asks whether it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond or vice versa.

The results may have covered the performance rates of college students, but the message is just as applicable to business world: owning the small-scale is better than trying to be big-scale. The key to succeeding at a smaller size is to stand out from everyone else at your level.

You won’t be able to compete with large-scale businesses, but if you can focus on being the only one at your price that does what you do, you can easily outpace your peers. Using our pond analogy, you don’t have to be the “big fish” to be the prize, being the “one of a kind” fish is just as valuable.

Big Fish vs One-of-a-Kind Fish

Design is key to small-scale businesses because effective communication and professionalism is so important when shedding the “side-project” or “amateur” labels. To be taken seriously you’re going to need to be just as (if not more) presentable as your customer’s other options, and the right designer can help you own that placement.

That’s not to say you have to break the bank — there are plenty of options available at different price points. Be sure to invest what you can to edge out your competition with a brand story that connects with your customers.

Tell-Tale Signs You Need a Designer

False design hangups aside, some will still find a way to brush off hiring a designer. Below I’ve listed some objective signs that diagnose if you’re suffering from a poor brand message or experience. If any of these apply to you, it’s a sign you’re ready for a designer’s help:

1. People don’t understand what you do

Your communication is misleading or unclear, leaving your customers confused. Designing a clear and consistent message will repair that damaged connection.

2. People don’t understand your price / think it’s too high

Your customers don’t understand the value you’re offering. Creating a more engaging experience that communicates both the problem and how you’re solving it will help customers understand what you’re worth.

3. People don’t know if they’re who your product is for

Your value may be clear, but customers don’t know if they want your brand representing them. By better understanding the language and style of your customers, a designer can create an attractive brand appearance that resonates with your customers.

4. People don’t recognize you even though your ads are everywhere

You may not know it, but your brand is inconsistent. Creating a brand identity system that harmonizes all your marketing materials will make it easier for customers to identify your brand. Your message needs to be consistent as well. Ensure that all your marketing is driving the same point home, or your customers won’t know what you’re trying to do.

5. People don’t think you look ‘professional’

Your brand appearance isn’t measuring up to your audience expectations. By assessing the brands your customers already buy you can position yourself against them with a unique identity that raises the bar. Design hangups.

6. People don’t trust you

Trust is established by consistency and shared interests. Every brand needs a story that backs up why they’re in business in the first place. Communicating what you stand for and delivering on those promises will breed contagious trust. Working with a designer will help you tell that story effectively without customers feeling “preached to”.

Taking stock in your brand

Design can be the differentiator between failure and success. Investing the time and money into refining your brand doesn’t need to be exhausting or expensive. There are tools and resources out there at all price points, scaled to fit the size of your design problems.

Take the time to assess the strength of your brand, and reveal the blindspots that may be holding you back. I created my Brand Assessment Worksheet for my newsletter subscribers to make understanding your brand a bit easier. Use the signup form below to get your download (it’s free) and discover how to start putting your brand to work for you.

Brand Assessment Worksheet * Jake Cooper Design

Of course, if you’re ready to start working with a designer, please reach out to jake Cooper Design. I’d be happy to chat about how I can help you grow your audience through design.

5 Design Hangups Holding You Back From Success was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

5 Design Hangups Holding You Back From Success

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