In Marketing Design, Consistency = Doom

Why do a few companies have wonderful marketing design, while others, most others in fact, despite having very talented people, just don’t seem to get it right? There are many factors that play into it, but let’s glimpse one in particular through a little story.

Let’s say there is an online software company called BarFoo Inc. Over the last five years, they’ve commanded a huge lead in the market they play in. In fact, they practically invented that whole market. Part of the company’s success has been their very effective and well-received marketing and design. Because of this success, and the high cost of overhauling the company’s marketing and design language, BarFoo Inc.’s leadership has been leery of making any changes in those domains. After all, “why fix something that ain’t broke?” But things aren’t all peachy. In the last 24 months, new players in the market have started cutting into BarFoo Inc.’s revenues. These new-comers are increasingly using design and creative marketing to differentiate themselves. As a result, BarFoo is beginning to look dated and old world, in the very market they helped create.

As revenues continue to slip, BarFoo’s leadership mandates a complete design overhaul to freshen up the company’s image, software, and marketing. So, at immense cost, a team of designers who have done nothing but re-arrange the same design pieces in different formats for the last five years, set off to create the new look and feel of BarFoo Inc. The goal is to get everything, software, marketing collateral, website, and everything else updated within the next six months. Around twelve months later, most everything is updated, except for a couple of documents here, an e-mail template there, and a couple of less-frequented pages here and there on the site.

With palpable excitement, the leadership reveals the new look and feel to the customers for the first time. The CEO, in his ardor publishes a letter to the customers and community. In it, he explains the nature of the changes, and how everything will be so great thanks to these big changes.

Within two hours, the backlash begins. By 24 hours, the whole company is getting very nervous. By the end of the month, many of the changes are being rolled back piece by piece. By the end of the year, BarFoo loses its lead in the market to the competitors. BarFoo Inc.’s marketing and design language, like many companies today, has grown increasingly ineffective, but also impossible to change. It’s in that situation because of stagnation and complacency.

In truth, most organizations are afflicted with a tremendous bias towards hyper-consistency when it comes to design. For some things, like usability in software, this bias can be useful. But for something like marketing design, an endeavor whose prime role is to capture and transfer potential customer’s attention, a consistency bias can be deadly. When your marketing design gets updated once every 3–5 years in one grand reveal, a couple of things happen. Over those 3–5 years, your existing marketing fades progressively into the background. People get habituated to and bored with the same set of stimuli over and over again. It’s human nature. That means your marketing grows progressively less effective from the moment you launch it.

Meanwhile, the designers in the organization lose morale. They’re unable to flex their creativity while they’re stuck rearranging their past work into slightly different and increasingly tired configurations. They get used to the status quo. And so do your customers. Thus no one, within the organization or outside of it, is prepared for change even if that change may be desperately needed. The company ends up in the worst place imaginable, summed up with the phrase, “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

So how can you get out of this dangerous situation? Surprisingly, the solution is ancient. It’s time-tested, with a 3.8 billion year track record for success. And yet this ancient wisdom is underused. A man named Charles Darwin best described it, and it’s called evolution. We’ll call it evolutionary marketing design. The principle works something like this: instead of overhauling your company’s design language at artificial milestones, make smaller, lower-risk changes to your design language all the time.

For example, some companies create a new logo with strict standards for how it should be used, and stick to it for ten years before overhauling the entire logo. With evolutionary design, your approach is less strict and more open to making small changes to the logo or how it’s displayed. Tweak the typeface, reconsider proportions, colors, arrangement, piece by piece rather than all at once. Each incremental change is a test. So as you make these incremental changes and surface them to your customers, you learn what works, what doesn’t work, and add them to a library of design knowledge. You let go of this idea of being super consistent and embrace learning and knowledge. These changes should be small enough that they are just noticeable. Enough to make some of your customers think, “hmmmm, something is different!” But not enough to make them think you’re an entirely different company. These small, just noticeable changes get you, your organization, and your customers comfortable with change.

Given how rapid and continuous changes in the business environment are, this change-oriented approach to marketing design is far more reflective of environmental reality than the more traditional consistency-biased approach to design. The environment around you changes, so should you. By practicing change, you and your organization become better prepared to make changes if and when large-scale changes become necessary. You can even break big changes down into a series of smaller incremental changes that will get you to your end goal.

Even better, these small-scale changes, by being just-noticeable give your audience a continual stream of new and interesting stimuli to pay attention to, which in turn counters the effects of habituation. Maybe best of all, though, opening up the dams to small changes means that design teams will have a continual supply of design challenges that will keep them excited and foster creativity. Because the changes being made are small and incremental, you can afford to delegate them across the levels of your teams. A small disliked change is unlikely to bring about the end of your company. Such delegation helps empower the members of your organization, and the science shows that empowered teams do better work and produce better results.

So what if the BarFoo company from above had actually had an evolutionary approach to their marketing design? Well, chances are they probably wouldn’t have fallen that far behind to begin with. And even if they still wanted to do an overhaul, their teams and their customers would have been more prepared for the changes.

If you enjoyed this article, check out my latest book The Articulate Marketing Designer, which is filled with tips, research, and information to help you become a more effective marketing designer.