by Aino @ Daily Creative | Aug 11, 2019 | Brand strategy, Branding, Human Centered Design
When you understand how branding works and what the process is, you have much easier time finding the right people to hire for the process and directing and guiding you consultant or designer. Knowing your way through the branding process can also help you save quite a bit of money because you know exactly what to ask from your consultant/designer, and you can make their work easier and quicker. The branding process itself can also be helpful in supporting or guiding your entire business strategy, so learning branding is useful whichever way you look at it.
If you’re going to hire out, you have a few options available. You can hire an agency to do the work for you. You could hire a freelance consultant to either do all the work or help you with just some aspects. Or you could DIY your branding yourself partially or entirely. During my 15+ years of experience, I’ve been involved in helping clients and individuals with each of these options, and I’ve seen the pros and cons of all of them.
The most common scenario with solopreneurs is that you hire someone to simply create your visual identity (logo, colors, fonts, etc.). Depending on your budget, you might hire someone who can build your entire identity, or you might just hire someone to design your logo. In some cases, folks buy 100% pre-made visual identity template — if they can find one that resonates with them.
The most affordable options (and therefore very popular ones) are buying a pre-made logo or hiring someone on Fiverr do make one for you. And then finishing up the rest of your visual identity yourself. While this approach is the most financially feasible, it’s also the one I hear most complaints about. Typically the complaints are about the logo not representing the business or offering in the right way. Sometimes we can even quantify why we’re not happy with the end result. We just know it doesn’t look or feel right.
Below you can find a few reasons why learning branding is so important and beneficial for your business — even if you’re going to hire someone eventually to do your visual identity for you.
1. Brand strategy supports your business strategy
Branding your business can be a process that helps you uncover and surface things about yourself and your business that weren’t on your radar before. This is something I’ve seen firsthand working in branding agencies, managing branding in the corporate world, and also working with individuals.
What happens is sometimes folks embark on the branding journey without first thinking about the building blocks that make their brand. They overlook some very critical foundational pieces that would not only guide their branding but their overall business strategy as well. This happens across the board in big businesses as well as with one person shops.
One example of this would be ignoring who your ideal customer is. Sometimes we are so eager to get our offering out there that we neglect to dig deep into who we are serving. The most common misconception is the idea that “my product/service is useful for everyone.” While this actually might be the case, everyone is not attracted to and inspired by same things. You would have very difficult time in building something that attracts everyone and anyone. And it would be equally difficult to create marketing for something that should speak for everyone.
When you build your brand strategy you deep dive into things like what is the value you bring to your customers, how you compare to your competition, and what is the unique competitive advantage you have. All these things are central not only to your brand strategy but also to your overall business strategy.
I’ve seen branding projects where the “a-ha moment” was so fundamental and groundbreaking that the business owner ended up shifting their entire business model and offering as a result. While it meant that they returned to the drawing board and it took a bit longer for them to launch their new brand, they were much happier not only with the branding but also with the business they now had.
2. Your visual identity needs to be based on something
One of the most common complaints I hear about having hired a designer to do the logo and maybe other visual identity elements as well is that “ t just doesn’t look or feel right.” This one is tough to even fix because quite often the business owner can’t clearly quantify what it is that bothers them. It just doesn’t feel like them or their business.
And the thing is, if they were able to explain what it is about the logo or visual identity that they dislike, they wouldn’t be in this pickle. If they were able to describe what bothers them and what they’d like to see instead, they would’ve been able to direct the designer to the right direction.
To me, this is a sign that they don’t know what their visual identity is based on. Do you know why Coca Cola brand color is red? Or why Nike’s tagline is “Just Do It?” They’re not accidents or co-incidences. All these decisions were based on a thorough brain work on what the brand personality is like and why? What do these elements communicate and what kind of position in the marketplace does it imply? Who are they meant to attract? And who do they speak to?
When you hash out the strategy part of your branding, the visual identity part is much easier to tackle. The strategy gives you explanation and reasoning for why the designer should use specific colors, illustration style, fonts, and so on. And it makes evaluating designs ten times easier because your brand strategy gives you a checklist you can compare the designs against: do the colors reflect the desired personality keywords, do the logo elements support the desired positioning, does the logo metaphor represent the mission, vision, or offering, and do the fonts communicate and support the brand personality.
3. Good foundation will save money in the process
When you hire a consultant or a freelance designer, you need to be able to communicate clearly what it that you’re expecting from them. The more open you leave the scope of work because you don’t have any brand strategy thought out before hand, the more expensive the project will be simply because the person you hire will have to use more time to figuring out what would be the right solution for your business.
Or they don’t use the time to figure out the right solution and instead you hate the outcome and end up hiring someone else or having the same person rework everything. And again you pay more. Knowing exactly what you’d like your visual identity to reflect and what tone of voice your copy should be makes working with consultants / designers / copywriters / etc. much easier, quicker, and cheaper.
To combat the project nightmare that comes from getting less than ideal outcome repeatedly, I suggest you draft a thorough creative brief. It’s a document that outlines some pieces in your brand strategy and project expectations and deliverables. To learn more about creative brief documentation read my blog post about the topic.
4. You need to commit to consistency
Consistent branding is critical for a successful business. When you see a businesses whose branding is all over the place, and they never use same colors twice, you know they’re having difficult time committing to their brand identity system. To me, this is a clear sign of not knowing your ideal customer well enough and not having defined the key parts of brand strategy.
Think of it this way: if you knew exactly what kind of branding and visual identity would appeal to paying customers (your ideal customer), wouldn’t you repeatedly and consistently use it? If you knew what attracts more customers to you, wouldn’t you keep doing it? When businesses don’t know what appeals to their ideal customer, when they don’t have a clear vision of their positioning in the marketplace, they end up changing the visual identity and design elements constantly with the hopes of finding something that works.
It’s also critical to remember that while we ourselves may be bored with our branding, our colors and fonts, our customers are not. We look at our marketing and communications every day, multiple times a day evaluating and rebuilding. But our customers see just a glimpse here and there. It takes the customer on average 7 interactions with your business before they make the buying decision. If each interaction looks, feels, and sounds different, they fail to reinforce the core message and the customer is quite likely to bee confused rather than wow’ed.
And while I’d like to tell you that you only have to do this branding thing once, and then you’re done for the rest of the lifecycle of your business, I can’t. Because it doesn’t work that way.Your business has different lifecycles: infancy, adolescence, maturity, and retirement. Depending on how your business grows, each of these stages may have specific branding needs.
While your business moves from adolescence to maturity, you may start to scale up. In that case, your offering may change, your positioning may change, and you may want to adjust the definition of your ideal customer — or any other part of your brand strategy for that matter. So, learning branding skills early on will benefit you and your business through all of its life cycles.
5. Know yourself, know your business
While foundational key ingredients of a brand are nearly always the same, there are many point of views and approaches to the branding process. I advocate for so called human-centered branding. It means we put a human — or in fact two humans — in the center of the branding process. The two humans I’m talking about here are: you and your ideal customer.
The process I use is specifically well-suited for solopreneur service providers, folks making things (makers and “craftpreneurs”), and anyone who wants to build a personal brand. That’s because my process starts by introspection. We take a good look at who are you, what motivates you to be in business, and why do get up every morning to serve others. From there we build towards your ideal customer, who they are, and how we can build a bridge between these two people.
The benefit of this type of process is that when you really know your motivation, when you deeply understand why you’re in the business, you can start infusing that into your brand and business strategy. It doesn’t only create an authentic branding, it also produces more satisfying business owners.
Another added benefit of approaching your branding this way is that it’s easier to commit to something that was born from you. If you stay genuine throughout the process, the result will be true to your mission and vision. And you can’t but nod in agreement every time you see your branding.
And when we define our branding through who we are, what our passion is, what our mission is, and what is the change we want to see in the world, suddenly our marketing is not “sales-y.” Even when we’re selling, we’re not “sales-y.” This is because we are speaking from the heart. And we’re reaching people who need what we’re offering, rather than desperately turning to anyone in hopes to make a sale.
So, learn some branding. Regardless of whether you’re going to hire someone else to build your business identity. It will pay back the time you used and the money you may have invested in it. With words of Rick Mulready from the podcast Art of Paid Traffic “At least make yourself dangerous — meaning have a basic understanding before you go and hire out.”
If you feel like you might be ready to take a stab your brand strategy, download my easy-to-follow 7 step brand strategy framework and start building your brand today.
P.S. If you haven’t already done so, come check out our free Facebook group DIY Brand Design & Strategy for Soulpreneurs where I teach soulpreneurs like you to build their own branding and create their own designs.
by Aino @ Daily Creative | Aug 10, 2018 | Design research, Human Centered Design
How do you know what is your friend’s favorite food? How do you find out what your significant other would like to do on Valentine’s Day? How do you know if your mom liked her Mother’s Day gift? The easiest way to find out is to just ask.
When I tell people that I specialize in human centered design, I get two types of responses. Half of the people will ask what it means, and the other half becomes slightly uncomfortable imagining and calculating how much effort I am putting into user and customer research. Human centered design gets a bad rap with cost conscious companies and individuals due to the misconception that research is expensive and time consuming. When in fact, it will save you money to know early if you’re designing the right thing — and if you’re designing it right.
Human centered design is a framework (often credited to being popularized by Ideo) used to help keeping the focus of the design process on the end user of the product. What human centered design aims to ensure is that the solutions being created are tailor made to suit the target audience’s needs. If you knew exactly what your partner wants for their birthday, wouldn’t it be much easier to get them the gift? And the success would be more guaranteed than trying to guess what they might like. So, when I work, I try to get validation from customers early on — already when I am still just sketching for concepts, or even before that.
Knowing your audience is super important when it comes to design. Designing and building a product (physical or digital) is expensive and time consuming even when you get it right. But what is really expensive is designing and building something multiple times because you did not validate to make sure your product resonates with the audience. Research can help us get our designs right early on, so that after having “measured twice” we only need to “cut once.”
Recently, I have been reading some business and brand strategy books. My three most recent have been:
1. The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
2. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
3. Lingo: Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language by Jeffrey Shaw
4. Badass Your Brand: The Impatient Entrepreneur’s Guide to Turning Expertise into Profit by Pia Silva
Each of these Amazon 4.5/5-star reviewed strategy books have their own points of view and unique approaches to solving business challenges, but they all share one very strong common thread: knowing your customer. Few repeating ideas are:
Listen to, interact with, observe, and study your customer to gain competitive advantage.
When you know who you speak to, it is more likely that they listen.
Know what pain points your customer has, so you can create a solution someone else hasn’t thought of yet. Or you can improve and existing solution so much that your customers will choose you over other offerings.
Know what your customer wants, so you don’t have to sell yourself but the customer will find you because you have what they want.
Knowledge is power, they say. And in design it indeed is. And knowing your audience isn’t limited to your design work only, or business or brand strategy for that matter. You should always consider the audience, no matter what you’re doing. Are you applying for a job? You should tailor your resume and portfolio to reflect the skills the job opening requires (and you hopefully have). Yes, you read that right. You should not only tailor your resume, but your portfolio, as well. Consider what the prospective employer is looking for and highlight those aspects of your projects on your portfolio. It is more work than just rewriting your resume, but it pays off in the end.
Are you presenting your designs to your peers or business stakeholders in the office? The audience makes a big difference here, too. When presenting to your peers, you can keep the language more design focused and dive into the details of your designs. But when you are presenting to non-designer audience, first stop to think why are they coming to this presentation, why are you presenting to them. They likely care less about how many pixels to right you have placed your icons. Maybe they want to hear where your design process is going, what implications or dependencies there are in relation to other on-going projects. Depending on the situation, it might be perfectly fine to ask the audience: what aspects of the design work they’d like to discuss. And again you have factual info on what your audience expects.
Knowing your audience is everything, and research can help you with that. There are dedicated design researchers that focus on finding out customer (and market) needs and testing the designs. But in my point of view, it is critical designers participate in the research process — even if it meant only as an observer. Often times, interviews are full of interesting conversations that won’t be as inspiring if you just read them in the research report. I’ve also witnessed many times how people interpret what they heard during interviews and/or testing completely differently. So, forming your own point of view is easier if you get first hand information.
Best thing about knowing your customer is that it is no nuclear physics — anyone can do it. This means anyone can build successful and competitive products and services. All you need is an inquisitive mind and interest to build empathy to your target audience. Yes, there is processes and methods to doing customer and user research, and some people will be better at it than others. At the same time, all these can be learned and the more you get hands on with the research the easier it becomes. I’ve written a quick guide to get you over the fear of interviewing people. If nothing else, you can start there.
Think of knowledge about your audience like switching on lights in darkness. If you’re trying to walk through a dark room, it is likely you’re going to bump into furniture. But when you turn on the lights, you know exactly where to step to walk across safely.
by Aino @ Daily Creative | Jul 5, 2018 | Design research, Human Centered Design
It should go without saying that doing research is critical for design — especially UX design, but other areas too. This might mean background research where you dig into the topic at hand and try to learn about the history or it can mean mapping out the current situation: competition, trends, etc. For UX designers, it usually also means interviewing or observing users — or customers, whichever term you prefer — to find out customer needs and pain points, validate your design concepts, and test your designs. In other words, part of your research might happen in solitude or with a small team mining books and the mighty Internet. But large part of your research work requires human contact — quite often with people you don’t know or haven’t even met before. In some cases, you might even end up soliciting interview subjects in an event walking around and approaching people who seem to have something better to do.
Some lucky design organizations and teams have dedicated researchers. These guys are an amazing asset and worth their weight in gold. If you have one, go become their best friend right now! But even in those cases, I urge designers to take an active role in the research work. There’s nothing quite like hearing the customer explain their needs with their own words, and much of the message gets interpreted along the way. Having observed user interviews or conducted the interview myself countless of times, I’ve often witnessed how everyone, who was listening the interview, hears what was said a little differently. Since I want to form a point of view on how to best solve the customer problem, I like to be able to hear their comments first hand, instead of having to rely on someone else’s interpretation.
Striking up a conversation with strangers has never been my strongest suit. Actually, if I can completely avoid talking to people I don’t know, all the better. But I still acknowledge the importance of user research, and often times I don’t have a dedicated researcher to help me. This means I have to do my own interview research. So, how do you push yourself to do something that is almost entirely out of your comfort zone and so important to get done — and get done well. There is art to forming your interview questions so that you don’t guide the interviewee and contaminate the results. And there is a whole set of guidelines for dealing with difficult interviewees (rude people, folks who don’t stay in topic, no shows, etc.). But this post won’t deal with those issues, I’ll write about them later. This post is about how to get over your fear of having to deal with strangers and pushing yourself outside your comfort zone.
1. Friend a researcher and tag along to observe
The best way I learnt about doing user research was by observing actual user researchers. A trained researcher has process they follow and they know how to get started, what kind of research methods to apply to the challenge at hand, and how to solicit research subjects. Observing and working with a researcher is, of course, not the same as getting a formal training as a researcher, but it gives you an idea of what goes into the research process.
Like anytime when you’re working with a mentor or learning from an expert, take notes, ask questions, and offer to do hands on activities. Best way is to learn by doing. Is the researcher putting together a research plan? Ask if you can read an early draft (and then subsequent drafts to see how it evolves) or even write some part(s) of it. Are they writing an interview script? Ask again if you can get hands on in the writing process. In any case, you should be actively participating in putting together the interview script because you need to know what to create in case it requires some designs or workflows to be shown.
2. Practice by interviewing your friends
If you are entirely new to the idea of interviewing people, practice with your friends. It may feel silly, but it gets you in the groove of asking questions and recording the answers. Pick any topic your friend might know more about than you do and write a script. Harvard UX Group shares Starter Questions for User Research on their website. You can use that to get started. If you like, you can imitate user research by picking some everyday object or challenge for as the context for the “product opportunity questions” and “product reaction questions.”
Stage the practice situation with your friend as close to a real interview as possible. Try face to face interviews as well as some over the phone or an online meeting with a video camera (Google Hangouts works well enough for that). Record the audio and listen later to hear how you did. Recording is also great for checking details later as you can’t take detailed notes when you’re interviewing someone. Always remember to as permission before you record someone.
Phone interviews might be easier to start with as no one will see if you have to read from the paper at first. Try to stay in script and if you goof, don’t jump “out of the character” and start chatting with your friend but try and figure out what would you do if you messed up in a real interview.
3. Write a full script — not just questions
One of my fears about interviewing people is that I will forget what I was going to say next or just not knowing what to say in the first place. What helps me get over this fear is writing the entire script down in a conversational tone — just like I was talking. I include each and every phrase from “thank you for sharing that with me” to “ok, let’s talk a little bit about your experience.” Writing helps me remember what to say later, and it also works as practice when reading it through multiple times during the script writing process.
The great thing about writing the script this way is that if your interview takes place over the phone, you can have it in front of you the entire time. And the conversational tone ensures that if you mess up you can get back to your script by reading directly from the paper. If your interview is face to face, then you can’t really read from paper because you need to look at the interviewee in the eyes when asking questions. But you can still have notes and cheat sheets and question lists. And in both cases, it helps to have written the interview script out in full.
4. Use props for events and when soliciting interviewees at a location
Sometimes you can’t know in advance who you will be interviewing because you’re planning to solicit the subjects in an event or at a specific location. These are challenging situations because the interviewees were not expecting to participate in a research and, especially in events, there can be many distractions around. In these situations, it helps to have props to support your interview/research.
Props can be as simple as a little card that explains what the research is about. Showing this card when you introduce yourself and explain your research can help the subjects understand quickly what you are after. You can also plan your research to be more like a hands on activity than an interview. In events, people can be in more “active mode” than “let’s sit down and talk mode.” For example, you could ask targets to group cards or pin something on a large pin board. You could ask them to rate things on paper or co-create something with you quickly. Matt Cooper-Wright (Senior Design Lead at Ideo) shares a variety of helpful research activities in his blog Design Research Methods.
5. Give folks a little reward
Rewards are great for soliciting interviewees. If you have a budget for small rewards, it helps you feel more comfortable when asking someone to participate because you’re not just asking for a favor, you have something to give in return. I have given $5 Starbucks gift cards for students in an event for 30-40 minute research activity. I’ve given $20-50 Amazon gift cards for remote online interviews. Typically the amount of the reward directly correlates with the length and the level of challenge of the interview or activity.
If you’re doing an open research booth at an event where anyone walking by can pin something on a board or answer a quick survey etc., you might choose to have self service coffee available or candy and comfy chairs for resting. These small things would be cheaper than giving each participant a gift card — even a small one — and they lure people to your booth who then happily do your quick activity after a brief rest and cup of coffee.
Giving a reward as a thank you for participating in the research also helps me psychologically. I don’t feel as much like I am asking people to do me favors, instead they are working for me for a short while. I feel more confident and less awkward if I have to reschedule the interview or reach out to them again for whatever reason. If you can give a reward for an interview, mention it already during your solicitation process to encourage them to say yes. Recently, I was solicited for a user interview and they offered a dollar for each minute of my time estimating that the interview would take 60-80 minutes. That is a pretty good hourly pay for a conversation.
6. Stay focused and think of empathy
Years back, I participated in a training for performing on stage. It was an activity arranged by my employer at the time. We did all the average voice control exercises and your basic ‘where and whom to look at’ when you’re on stage. But the single most effective piece of advise I got was about empathy. We were explained that, according to studies (unfortunately I cannot remember the sources anymore) the audience typically has strong empathy for the performer. They are rooting for you. The audience wants you to be successful. This is true for the interviews, as well. They don’t know it might be your first time interviewing them. And since they agreed to do your interview or activity, it means they already have empathy for you and your cause. They want to help your project to be successful.
It also helps to remind yourself why you are doing this. You are developing empathy four the customer or user. You cannot do that if you don’t know the goals and pain points of your customer. And the best way to do that is to interact with them, ask specific questions, and observe them.
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Interviewing customers and soliciting interview subjects can feel like a daunting task. Especially if you are an introvert. Hopefully the tips above will help you get started. In addition to those, plan your research well, start scheduling early, reserve time for research analysis, and always act professional and calm. Happy interviewing!
