Unpopular opinion: Brand needs to be a joint effort between design & marketing again

I know I’m going to get flack for this. I can already visualise the comments as I write this …brand is a joint effort. Get your head out of the sand, …what would you know? You’ve never worked in a marketing agency, …this isn’t Emily in Paris. This is an unpopular opinion after all, but hear me out and picture this.

I’m a designer, sitting in a room listening to multiple panels at a digital conference (ahem, look closely above). Being the brand nerd that I am, I’m particularly looking forward to the panels on brand. The speakers come and speak, and I’m patiently waiting for the opinion of the designer, but it doesn’t come. Did I just imagine that or were all the brand panels made up of marketers? Where was the opinion of the designer? The maker of the visual elements of the brand. Do their opinions no longer matter or are they just a cog in the wheel of the marketer’s campaign?

I’ve probably lost you at this point. Look at the whiny designer complaining about missing out, wah-wah, and yes I am a designer and I probably am a tad biased. But I also have a love and appreciation for marketing too. I have since my early days as a junior designer, where I would advise small businesses and clients on how to get their business online and what ‘SEO’ and social media were. I’ve enrolled in and completed courses on marketing. I’m not completely clueless. The battle of the brands is starting to feel like one big pissing contest reduced to a battle of egos between designers and marketers and who can do brand better. My honest thoughts? Neither of us can unless we do it together.

There’s a loss in collaboration, and it shows.

Current campaigns

Of late, the lack of good, thoughtful, daring brands has felt sparse. Whether it’s the rise of anxiety around the consequences of one wrong move on social media, political correctness, or even from the very beginning with the way we teach brand, it’s all felt a bit meh minus a few exceptions. (If you haven’t seen the work Netflix has done with promoting Wednesday, you should check it out.)

To me, a great brand is one that starts with research and strategy, built then on a seamless visual perception, clever messaging and copy that is on-point and that resonates. The campaigns are memorable, they’re daring and they’re consistent in their values. Your target audiences can’t wait to tell all their friends and family about you. Influencers want to work with you and be the first to try your new product or service. You retain loyalty but you’re also not afraid to try new things to stay relevant and bring in new audiences.

Now tell me, how many brands came to mind when you read the above? 2? No more than 4?

Same old, same old

Ever seen a car commercial? Since the early 90s, it’s become impossible to tell the difference between companies. A wide open road, glorious hills in the background, a bird’s eye view of the car winding through the hills with a catchy song playing. Then a close-up of the car with a light illuminating the many features of the dark interior, maybe followed by a shot of a man or family jumping into the car and then driving off in it. Then the end — a catchphrase that you will then see plastered all over the company marketing material. Do agencies have a template for this kinda thing or are they all just reading each other’s minds?

Now if that wasn’t enough to convince you, how about we journey back to 2020 at the beginning of this pandemic when we were all on lockdown, unsure of what was going to happen and what our world would look like if we were ever allowed outside again? Remember the ads? Those low exposure, sombre piano music, we’re all family and here for you ads? Don’t believe me that they’re all the same? Someone actually went and compiled them all together and they fit seamlessly. When does one ad end and the next one begin? One of my favourite comments on the video: ‘It’s like watching television designed by an algorithm.’

Why one cannot succeed without the other

You’re probably wondering what this has to do with brand becoming a unified force between marketers and designers. A lot actually. There are strengths and weaknesses to both professions. Ever heard that teams should be made up of a number of different personalities, from diverse cultures and backgrounds, to drive the best ideas? Well, the same sentiment applies here. There are strengths that are unique to marketers that are lost on designers and vice versa. One cannot truly succeed without the other. What are these strengths you ask? Well hold on to your horses, I’m about to touch on a few.

Inclusive Design

Accessibility and inclusion has never been more important for brands. There are literally millions of dollars worth of untapped potential for brands from target audiences that aren’t catered for. The most obvious accessibility checks that go over the heads of marketers, but are ingrained in designers are colour contrast ratios and typography hierarchies. Think that yellow on white logo is a good idea? Think again. Think your size 12 body copy that matches the size of your title copy is a good idea for your over 50s target audience? Let’s see how that goes for your sales targets.

The number of logos, brand assets, or even social media assets that I’ve seen that don’t even pass minimum contrast ratios is obscene, and it’s not just the small companies either. Multi-million dollar companies with in-house marketing teams, why are you not using the designers at your disposal? Is it ego? Resources? Fight for that collaboration time! All of you win if you do. Especially if you’re a global company operating in a number of different locations with different cultural backgrounds. Each culture is unique and has its own way of conducting business, even its own cultural meaning around the psychology of colour. You’ll need a differently designed website for each location after having conducted your own market research.

Campaigns

Ever been able to tell if a campaign was designed and deployed solely by a designer? Try asking them what their short-term AND long-term strategies are and how they relate to the multiple campaigns they’re running at the same time. What products are they promoting? Who are they targeting? If their answers are to 1. sell more, 2. raise profits, and 3. all the products, and everyone — you need to get yourself a marketer on your team. Marketers study brand equity, they do their research with focus groups, and they’ve got long and short-term strategies, not just pretty pictures and a few nice reels for engagement. If you want your campaigns to have specific outcomes based on the products being promoted, you need a marketer too.

Graphics

Where were marketers before Canva came along, am I right? I know a few marketing friends who were trying to work their way around Adobe products like a mouse in a maze before Canva came along. For reading this far in this article you get another unpopular opinion from me: Canva is actually pretty great for the people it’s made for. It’s not here to put designers out of business or to do the job of one so that a company can save on hiring costs (You read that right, Execs, I’m looking at you). There are so many small businesses, not-for-profits or even school students who have benefited so much from products like Canva. But in saying that, just because you’re using a rather seamless design tool, does not mean your graphics are guaranteed to be good. I have also seen my fair share of social media graphics, flyers, and even business cards made by marketers that should never see the light of day, let alone promote an organisation. Budget for a designer on your team and collaborate with them, you won’t regret it.

Websites

Again for all or any of the Execs reading this, please, for the love of all things holy, stop asking marketers to design websites. They’re not UX/UI designers, nor have they studied user experience or have knowledge of design principles like designers do. For all the marketers reading, I’m sorry, but you need to take your designer’s advice seriously. Those slideshows and banners you want front and centre, don’t always work and you’re using up valuable real estate that could otherwise be used for something else that serves the message you’re trying to send. Try. Something. Different. Collaborate together. Sit down with each other and sketch out wireframes to prioritise content sections on a page. Does the copy fit and work? Is your messaging clear or has your site suddenly become an essay without any design principles for improved readability or to break up content? Try something out there and read what the analytics tell you. Isn’t marketing all a game of trying this and trying that to find the winning solution anyway? Your audiences are growing and opinions are changing, so shouldn’t your strategies be changing too?

Wordsmithing and tone of voice

It is very rare to meet a designer who is also a wordsmith. User experience designers will have suggestions based on research and their years of experience, likely for titles and/or buttons to direct flows, stemming from their experience with interactive elements and actions. Engaging a UX writer for web copy, as well as helping to write the tone of voice for a brand, can mean the difference between a successful brand and one that is not.

A brand’s tone of voice, values and personality are just as important as the brand’s visual perception. Composing the brand values, personality and writing for campaigns? It’s a great marketer’s bread and butter and one of their times to shine. What is the point of a beautiful-looking campaign if the messaging is lacklustre and forgettable? I want you to write to me like you’re the Black Pearl and I’m Jack Sparrow. Get my attention, make us inseparable, and have me coming back to you time and time again.

Art direction

I will argue that some marketers do have a keen eye for art direction and are trusted to keep the direction of the brand assets consistent, but the initial art direction of a brand should be the designer’s responsibility. Don’t get me wrong, there should first be collaborative brainstorming sessions, ensuring that both parties are on the same page with the direction, but the experimenting, the research, the trial and error, the logo, typography, colours, treatment of imagery and other designed assets should be trusted to the designer. This is their time to shine. They will take all the information in front of them, the prior collaboration discussions and research and they will design a top-notch, killer brand but only if you let them. Many a brilliant art direction for a brand has been sacrificed to the ‘trash can gods’ because of one CEO, Senior Exec or Marketer’s opinion. Believe in your designer. Push back where necessary but let them have their moment to shine and trust the process.

These strengths and weaknesses are just the tip of the iceberg, and I’m sure someone with a sole marketing background could add a few more that I haven’t covered here, but the point remains the same. Brands need to be competitive, especially with the prominence of social media. They need to be perfect to succeed and shine, but to be perfect they need to be built from a collaborative pairing of marketers and designers.

But where do we start?

It’s all in our processes and perspective. Scheduling adequate time for all workshops, activities, conception and assigning tasks to the relevant strength. Designers and marketers should work together in unison, as well as autonomously on their assigned tasks before realigning at regular intervals. Even better, do it over coffee. Get a feel for how each other works, divide responsibilities and remember to leave your egos at the door.

That sounds like a lot of wordy stuff you already do, right? But is one person calling the shots? Is there true collaboration and brainstorming? Or is it a call from the higher-ups that departments remain independent? Building business cases for profit and loss can be helpful for that obstacle. Talk that special Exec language and back up your predictions with evidence. The marketer can bring the research and the designer can bring the pizazz. Oh and remember to make the company logo really big. Or better yet, make it big enough that you can see it, but small enough that one of the execs will comment on it and that will be the only ‘suggestion’ they make about what you need to change before signing off on your collaboration quest.

Soooo does this mean we can collaborate again now?

So have I changed your mind? Have I reinforced what you were already thinking? Will we now see some boundary-pushing, memorable brands that will be referred back to in 20 years’ time? (Does anyone remember that Great Wall of China ad? To keep the rabbits out?) Will we see an influx of open positions at marketing and design agencies or will we see (arguably more) ridiculous job adverts with companies seeking the impossible unicorn that can do both marketing and designing on stupidly low salaries?

If nothing else in 2023 I wish to see work produced from collaboration. I want to see campaigns that are made just for the fun of it again. I want to see brands that are accessible and have well-thought-out art direction. To VMLY&R who recently won the tender for the brand of the Olympics in Brisbane in 2032, please I beg you, rock my socks and blow me away. Without sounding too creepy, I’m watching you.

Let’s make brand a joint designer and marketer effort again, and take regular old nothings, and turn them into somethings.

Agree? Disagree? Have some suggestions on how collaboration can improve? Or have you experienced some unmoving hurdles that have blocked your attempts at collaboration? Let us hear them! Consider this the beginning of your introduction to collaboration.