3 Reasons Good Design is Crucial To Marketing Success

What’s the first thing people interact with when they get to know your brand? It’s not your core values, your mission statement, or your value proposition. It’s your brand’s design.

People may eventually get around to learning all about what you do and who you are as a brand, but the first path to communicating that is through the image you present.

1. Humans Aren’t Hardwired for Text

Our brains are built to process images and they do it much more efficiently than processing written language. The human brain can process an image about 60,000 times faster than it can process text .

As humans, we are visual creatures. Our brains innately have the capacity to interpret images as a tool for survival. Which is why our brains dedicate so much more bandwidth to images.

When designing, you should be concise. Make sure your words and images communicate your message as efficiently as you can while keeping an emphasis on the visual part of the medium.

That’s why your design has to communicate your brand identity. The message your design should connote is one tailored specifically toward your target customer about who you are as a brand and the value of your product or service. 

All of this can seem pretty abstract, but think of what different elements of your design say about you as a brand. Something as simple as the colors you choose can have a profound effect on the customer experiencing your brand.

2. It Makes Your Brand Stand Out

People are bombarded with content daily. There’s no inherent reason yours would stand out unless you successfully designed it to.

Take this 2014 study done by Media Dynamics, for example. Audiences can only recall so much of what they’ve seen throughout the day. While the population for this study was exposed to over 350 ads per day, they were only truly engaged with much less than half that number.

All of this can seem pretty abstract, but think of what different elements of your design say about you as a brand. Something as simple as the colors you choose can have a profound effect on the customer experiencing your brand.

It’s been parroted around that the human attention span lies somewhere around eight seconds, while others reckon it to be 10-20 minutes. However, most experts would agree that attention is a highly task-dependent subject. 

People spend an average of 3 hours and 16 minutes on their phones, picking up their device around 215 times a day. That leaves us around 55 seconds an interaction.

How do you grab someone’s attention in that short period of time? Even better, how do you do it when there are hundreds (if not thousands) of other brands, content, and outside stimuli competing for that same person’s attention? 

No one said this is easy. Your brand needs to be consistent, powerful, and authentic. Most of all, you need to differentiate yourself to resonate with your audience. This needs to be represented in your design aesthetic as well. 

3. It Builds Trust

Good design can impact how your customers perceive your brand. From their first impression to when they receive your product and put it to use, good design can create brand loyalty. 

From your logo to your custom packaging, every element needs to be well thought out and contribute positively to the customer experience. You can contact Arka for premium custom packaging options. They offer custom boxes for any niche; if you need custom gift boxes or even soap boxes, Arka can help!

For instance, let’s say we have a direct-to-consumer (D2C) make-up brand with a lip kit that has the potential to be really successful in the market. You envision it being a luxury product with a price point that reflects that. It’s a quality product that produces the best results and you communicate that flawlessly throughout the customer journey. 

You launch and the orders begin to flood in. You’re on your way to making your brand successful.  

However, R&D was expensive, so you decide that a plain box will suffice. It may seem a bit dull, but you tell yourself “the product will speak for itself”. It’s not completely on-brand. So what? It’s just a box.

Orders start to arrive and while people are generally happy with the quality of the product, they begin to post reviews and unboxing videos online that show obvious dismay with the shoddy packaging.

The damage to your brand’s reputation is done. If you had aspirations of being seen as a luxury brand, the bar has been set a little higher now because of this setback. It may affect the ability of your brand to justify your price point as well.

Consider this simple thought experiment in developing an end-to-end vision for your brand design. And make sure it communicates that vision.

Guest Post by Hawke Media

Hawke Media is an award-winning marketing consultancy based in Los Angeles, California. It offers custom, data-driven marketing strategies to businesses of all sizes, offering its services on a month-to-month, a la carte basis. Founded in 2014, it continues to be the fastest-growing marketing consultancy in the nation and has serviced such clients as Verizon, Red Bull, Tamara Mellon, and more.