When clients don’t get branding

We’re working with an in-house agency helping them implement design processes and set up a design unit cost centre. They’re a type of franchise business where every franchisee has a separate brand, so the founders decided they needed an in-house branding agency.

Problem is, they didn’t understand branding. This is not to be critical of them; most clients (even some brand managers) don’t truly understand brand and design.

My contention is a startup doesn’t have a brand — they can have a unique, well designed identity but they need time to build a company brand. That said, it is possible to develop a personal brand for them.

The Creative Director has tried to educate the founders, with little success. Here’s a few of the ways we’ve suggested: all are based on looking at branding as a business building tool.

Internal capability development

Every business owners wants to develop their team so they can deliver more value.

This business has two ‘internal capabilities’: the franchisor business and the franchisee business.

The franchisor has an identity but as a startup their brand is still being developed.
The franchisee’s are usually a one or two person startup businesses, so the same applies to them.

Design has a major role to play evolving identity’s into brands. Human centred design activities such as customer journey mapping and empathy mapping will help them understand themselves and their customers. This will help define their brand and guide its development.

This brand development activity should be staged over a few years as the startup finds their feet; their personality, their voice.

The franchisor runs sales training for the franchisees. There is a place for human centred design in the sales training; showing the franchisee how to understand their clients and their clients’ clients.

Speed to market

Every client knows the value of getting their product or service into the market as quickly as possible.

Design is critical to get a product or service to market quickly. As a startup, the franchisor needs to sign up franchisees as quickly as possible. Similarly, franchisees need to sign up as many clients as possible, as quickly as possible.

This is where a design system is invaluable. By developing an overarching design system, and replicable design systems for franchisees, the design team can quickly scale up for both the founders and franchisees.

Having a system allows the designers a clear cut path for each identity. Making this system scalable ensures a brand will grow.

Market reach

Every client wants to increase their market reach as easily and quickly as possible.

A detailed discovery session with each franchisee helps identify obvious markets but it should also define immediate market expansion and future market extensions. This requires an in-depth understanding of the current and future users of the franchisee’s services.

Design is more than interesting UI elements and bright colors — it’s about how a product ensures user success.

This is where design for accessibility comes into play. And this is how to explain it to clients. The typography must be readable. The size should be large enough for people to see along with a font that promotes readability. Color choices need to have strong contrast so the words do not blend in with their background. Images should have alt text descriptions that go along with them for those who are visually impaired. When users with different abilities are fully involved it creates inclusivity and a brand that stands out from others.

Beyond general accessibility standards, design needs to help the user. Cues should be used to direct users to certain tasks with microinteractions. Seemingly small interactions make the user experience enjoyable and productive to drive conversions and increase market reach.

Engagement and loyalty

Clients want engagement with their customers and wants their ongoing loyalty.

Good design engages the audience and builds loyalty. Designers achieve this through the design process.

For example designers work with iterative practices to make sure everyone is on the same page about user needs. Iterative practice is the process of refining a product or service and is a fundamental practice in the design process to ensure you target user expectations. Businesses implement this in their design process through usability testing. User testing can be done by observing users’ interactions with a product or service through interviews or specific usability tests.

Visionary transformation

Our design maturity research showed a clear example of this.

We analysed  design being used in an aged care provider. They were the largest in the country and had a CEO who believed in the ability of design to help their clients. The board was required to read books on design thinking so they understood what the CEO was trying to achieve.

They introduced a large number of designed activities that resulted in positive changes for people in aged care. Design thinking was used to analyse the administration of the business resulting in less staff churn.

This only came about because the CEO had a vision for how design could transform their brand.

The moral

Business owners all want to build internal capability, increase speed to market with deeper market reach while building loyalty and trust.

By explaining how branding can improve those aspects we help business owners understand the true role of design and branding.