Why and how Design can “save” Advertising, or make it more efficient at the very least.
A world of complexity and the quest for value
In a marketing world of clutter, fragmentation, commoditization, reduced attention span, ad blockers, privacy and media investments saturation, it is increasingly difficult for brands to stand out, differentiate or at best, be noticed and recalled.
While the concepts of customer-centricity and value creation have been credos for some years, few brands have truly embraced this philosophy and many organizations remain product-focused and sale-centric.
Whether introducing a new usage, delivering a service or an experience or communicating relevantly with your audience, the creation of customer value aims to make a brand proposition meaningful to consumers and different from your competitors. And in the process of creating value, every single action and step count.
Over my 20+ years of working in communication strategy, I have explored ways and developed tools to help my clients become truly customer-centric and walk the talk of value creation. And I found that design is a field that offers principles that are truly generative in this journey.
The value of design
If the purpose of design is to solve problems, this means that successful design must deliver some sort of value for those one it is designed for. Value is thus the benefit one can extract from using a product or a service. In other words, value-centered design is good design, with value being the variable to be defined.
German industrial designer Dieter Rams established a list of 10 principles that make design, good design. According to Rams, good design must be simple and understandable, useful and non-obtrusive, innovative and aesthetic, honest and thorough and finally, durable and environmentally friendly. As we entered the digital age, the design’s scope expanded in to a whole new interactive dimension i.e. the design of digital interfaces. From there, 3 designers — Jill Butler, Kritina Holden and William Lidwell — compiled in a book called The universal principles of design, 150 — sometime very tactical or field-specific — principles. Each principle is an individual rule aimed at delivering a better product, service or experience whether physical or digital. And by better, I mean, more engaging and more efficient in usage i.e. more end-user centric.
Communication planning X design
So, in the quest for value experienced by companies and marketers, what if we applied these universal design principles to marketing? What if we translated these rules one by one and see how they could realistically be implemented in advertising and communication planning? This is an experiment I meticulously ran, studying one by one each of these 150 principles and evaluating their “marketing potential”. A fascinating exercise that made me revisit marketing through the lens of design and provided me with two major outcomes:
1. A truly customer-centric perspective: Design acts as a filter to delivering a solution that is proven to be useful and usable to customers.
2. A trigger for innovative thinking: Design offers a different perspective and thought process thus helps unlock new opportunities and ideas.
Now let’s pick 3 of these universal design principles to illustrate this within a simple framework: Definition, Examples, Translation.
1. Affordance
Definition: The physical characteristics of an object influence its function and use. When affordances are good, engagement is higher and things perform efficiently and are more intuitive to use.
Examples: Wheels afford rolling, and negatively afford being stationary, buttons afford pushing, and negatively afford pulling. A “push” sign on a door with a handle conflicts with the “pull” affordance of the handle. By replacing the handle with a flat plate, the conflict is eliminated.
Translation: If we were to consider advertising as an “object”, then its main 3 characteristics would be Content (the message delivered), Contact (the medium or vehicle utilized to connect with the audience) and Context (the time, phase in the journey as well as the environment in which the message is distributed). This basically means that, delivering the “right” message, with the “right” media channel, at the “right” time and within the “right” environment will maximize affordances which in return is likely to increase engagement and perform more efficiently. In other words, contextual relevance, as a whole, is to advertising what affordance is to design.
2. 80/20
Definition: Also known as the Pareto principle, a high percentage of effects in any large system is caused by a low percentage of variables.
Examples: 80% of wealth is possessed by 20”% of people. 80% of a product usage involves 20% of its features. But also, 80% of a product bugs are caused by 20% of its components.
Translation: The 80/20 rule can be applied in a number of marketing areas; For example, focusing the allocation of financial resources to the critical 20% e.g. 80% of marketing $ invested in top 20% customers or top 5 markets, 80% of the media investment with top 10 media partners or key channels. It can also be used for portfolio management, to prioritize and fund products that are more likely to boost revenue or margin and halo into the rest of the portfolio. In summary, using the 80/20 rule can help focus resources more strategically instead of spreading them too thin across a number of things. In 3 words, Fewer, Better, Bigger.
3. Confirmation and selection biases
Definition: A tendency to favor information that confirms pre-existing views or to collect evidences that confirm conclusions. Recognition of these biases is the best antidote to discovering new insights and generate new ideas.
Examples: A person who believes the moon landing was faked, seeks out information that confirms this beliefs and ignores evidence to the contrary. Global warming doesn’t show on a 20 year scale but it does on a 150 year scale.
Translation: The best way to challenge the status quo is to seek out and collect new data as well as read information with open-mindedness. Expanding a research to other markets or a survey to additional audience segments is likely to unveil unexpected insights. Interpreting data from a different angle may also unlock new opportunities; e.g. if 75% of tablets usage is occurring at home, why not developing a value proposition that focuses on the 25% of “on the go” usage to differentiate?
A versatile tool at the service of marketing and advertising
These are 3 examples but there are many more: the hick’s law and the paradox of choice, horror vacui and our perception of value or the concept of control and the need for customization based on users expertise level to name a few, are all applicable. And I have found them to be effective while taking a customer-centric approach to marketing when working with my clients in various industries — technology, financial services or luxury.
The bottom line is, design can truly impact both strategic and executional tasks within the marketing spectrum. Whether applied to research, portfolio management, go to market operations, messaging and content strategy or communication and media planning, I believe that design has the potential to solve the value challenge and help deliver better customer-led outcomes in the advertising arena.
