Your Competitors are Redesigning
Refresh cycles, recognizing competition blindspots, and design strategy for brands
This is a post about brand design — for CMOs, CBOs, agency principals, and anyone responsible for a brand and its influence on a business’ bottom line. I’ve seen patterns of design system stagnation emerge and then repeat over and over from my agency perspective, especially in the tech/B2B space. You’ve probably seen this too. The decisions you make around how your brand is brought to life, especially within a constantly changing competitor landscape, are key to ongoing and expanding business success.
Your Brand, Designed
Your brand’s expression through design is constantly judged in overt and subconscious ways. It’s judged both for what it has come to represent to your prospective customer, but also for how it resonates when compared side by side with your direct competition.
CMOs can exert direct influence over their brand in certain ways — primarily through their internal and external branding and communication efforts. Trying to get ‘branding’ right is a nuanced and long term lift, and it takes teams of very smart and insightful people months to move the needle even just a little. But CMOs also have to keep an eye on how their brand is performing against the moves of their competitors’ brands, where they command zero influence. Those brands are scratching for the same dollars in the marketplace, and you won’t know their next move until it hits.
As a brand designer, I spend a lot of time focusing on how the brand comes to life visually, in motion, in video, through technology, in digital communities, at conferences, wherever it runs into humans. The way your brand is designed to engage with your customers is the delivery mechanism for all of your hard work defining, building, and ultimately establishing mental real estate for your brand in the minds of your customers. Design is critically important to engagement, and it’s a lot more nimble than the core brand itself (what you stand for, why you matter in the minds of your consumers, how you make their lives better). Design’s superpower is that it can evolve and improve and morph in wonderful ways, keeping your brand interactions fresh, even when those underlying strategic pillars are set in stone.
Your competitors have this same tool at their disposal. If they’ve done a good job defining their core brand (safe to assume they have), then they’re actively in the process of developing new ways to bring that brand to life through design. Whatever they’re doing now, however they’re showing up through design — there’s something new and exciting around the corner that will inject fresh energy into their brand, and its role in the lives of their (and your) customers.
Your competitors are redesigning. Their site, their visual language, their campaigns and messaging, maybe their entire brand identity. The longer it’s been since one of your competitors came out swinging with a new look, the closer that moment is to surprising you. When it does, the marketing landscape will shift, and you’ll likely take a hit. This is ultimately out of your control, but your response is in your hands, and it doesn’t have to be reactive.
Lazy Patterns. Distracted Patterns. Safe Patterns.
Marketers and their design teams (agencies or in-house) fall into operational patterns. The calendar is packed, and quarterly commitments need to be achieved. Some form of auto-pilot feels comfortable and maintainable, but it takes your brand’s design system to stagnant pretty quickly. Here’s how we’ve seen these patterns build, by way of a generic example:
Two years ago there was a design refresh when the new agency came in. It was great. The CEO & board loved it, the industry loved it, your customers loved it. It’s still pretty cool. But now it’s two years old, and your competitors have all moved on. In a retainer relationship, the monthly grind starts to take over, and that Big Bang of excitement when the last refresh was completed feels like it went dark a long time ago.
The agency is running too fast chasing short term tasks, and they aren’t given permission to keep an eye on the bigger picture (meaning, permission to spend budget on the big picture). They leave that vision to the client, they put their heads down, and they churn. This is lazy, distracted, and safe — both for the client team and the agency. It’s a common pattern, and that day to day work really IS important. The big box was already checked, and nobody’s bold enough to rock the boat (internally with the C-suite or within the agency) to suggest that this work needs to be revisited. It’s only been two years… We see this everywhere we look, including, admittedly, across a few of the clients on our own roster.
When? Now. Or, last quarter.
If it’s been more than a year since you shook up the design theme that characterizes your brand, you’re likely about to see one of your competitors unleash something awesome. You’ll be back on you heels, you’ll realize you’ve been stagnant for too long, and it’ll be too late to respond in any reasonable amount of time. You’ll be waiting for your design team to make new magic, while you watch the marketplace swoon around the other guy.
You had, and continue to have, a blind spot for what your competitors are up to behind the curtain. In tech/B2B, where our agency does a lot of work, there are typically 4–6 serious competitors that fight for the same attention, at the same price point, with similar offerings. There may be 40 companies in your space, but you only have a handful that are really capable of eating your lunch. And you’re capable of eating theirs. Ongoing competitor brand/design audits are great, and you may be doing them already, but at any time, at least two of those companies are likely working on a brand refresh of some kind. It could be a big lift, like a true visual identity update — or it could be minor refinements in color palettes, photo shoots, typography, campaign-level thematic graphics that tell interesting new stories.
Someone is always making moves, and the best move for you to make in response is, well, to always be in motion.
Refresh Cycles
We see marketing leaders in tech/B2B initiate a big new branding or design effort about every 18–24 months. Usually this kicks off when they see their numbers have been sliding. The marketing (and agency) worlds are in love with the big reveal, and budgets tend to be pooled up for something extra exciting, often out of desperation. It’s a big move, but the excitement dies down within a month or two. Then there’s a whole lot of time riding the diminishing wave, even though its momentum was quickly exhausted. What does a more always-on cycle look like for the evolution of your brand’s expression through design?
We recommend quarterly or 6 month incremental updates to your design system — nothing stays still for more than 6 months, ever. Think about committing to a rolling brand refresh model that features a faster pace of strategic change, tied to ongoing competitor audits and the commitment to freshness. If this is done well as a fundamental ongoing effort, the 3 or 6 month milestone projects aren’t needed at all. And if you’ve just come through a big-reveal project (or you’re in the middle of one), build in a quarterly or rolling refresh plan right now, before the energy dies.
Budgets and billing structures are important here. If your budget (retainer or otherwise) isn’t structured to allow for and encourage ongoing innovation with the design system, none of this strategy matters. Design needs to be valued by the marketing team, and the budgets usually tell you if that’s the case or not. It’s not a bad idea to ask directly, too. “How does senior leadership feel about the value of brand design innovation?” “How important is it to stay out ahead of the competition with our creative work?” “Can we dedicate X hours/people per week/month to develop ongoing improvements to our design system?”
Quick Sidetrack on Agency One Night Stands
There are very exciting and cool design firms that JUST do the fresh stuff for the big reveal, then move on/ghost. Designers love this kind of project, but it’s short term and short lived. It also results in really wonderful creative work that often gets dropped off without an effective transition to the long term agency or in-house team that has to convert those big sexy mockups into actual branded executions that go out into the world on a daily basis. Putting the system to work effectively can be a lot harder than spinning up a brand book then hitting the road for the next.
The effective hand off of the new design system from the primary creative team to the day-to-day team, with overlap and clear communication between the two, is key to that initial work (probably with a huge budget) paying off. Both teams need to be talented, or the potency is lost. When possible, keep the same creative director on for both the initial creative work (talking about things like new logos/visual identity systems with big roll outs) as well as the longer tail construction of a team and systems that can consistently bring that work to market over a much longer time frame. Make sure the systems aren’t brittle or unrealistic. The same brainpower that designed the new brand identity should be applied to how the identity system lives and expands over the coming months. When there’s a gap in that creative energy, or a lack of skill in the long tail execution, the original project’s cracks start to show almost immediately.
For Agencies
How well are you serving your clients? Especially the long-term relationship clients, with reliable retainers, and established/solid relationships. You’re the closest you’ll ever be to a true ‘partner’ to a client in those relationships — are you leading and protecting their brand’s position in the marketplace? Does your client empower you to lead? If not, can you get them to give you the chance to show that you’re able to take on the mental load of foresight and keep them ahead of the pack? Can you be more than an order filler? Can you be the competitive advantage they need, but didn’t realize you could provide? You should speak up, and the best clients will be eager to listen.
For Brand Leaders
You can plan for what’s in front of you now, or you can anticipate what’s coming — which is something unknown but exciting from your competitors, real soon. You can commit to putting yourself in a position to never go stale. Give your agencies the power to lead you in the right direction. Set expectations, define roles. Set them up to wield their expertise for the benefit of your brand without having to wait for you to tell them it’s go time for some new creative. Audit your competitors often. Audit your own design planning. Is ongoing refreshed creative development included anywhere? Your agencies want to be tasked with this work, and you’re in good hands if you set them free to manage this for you.
