Design Intelligence

Kev and I were chatting about the influence of design in marketing. He has great insights into design intelligence. Like most great insights, it's stuff that is floating in the back ground of our minds but too often we don't let it come to the forefront and really impact our work.
He sees design intelligence for marketing as one of the most critical components for impacting and motivating choice. But too often marketing teams don't use design intelligence. Some designs are totally consumed by layout. That's the technical skill behind great design: white space, typography, use of colour, clean lines, careful attention to grids. While great layout makes the piece pretty -- it's doesn't push the edges towards brand personality, marketing principals and offer insight.
On the other extreme are the marketing teams who sacrifice design intelligence for fine art. Fine art is focused on the visual experience -- not the message. The message is often subtle or determined by the viewer. It belongs on living room walls and museums.
Great marketing motivates and inspires action.
Design intelligence starts with understanding the overall goal, the underlying challenge, the audience, human motivations and, maybe most of all, takes the designer out of the picture.
As we were chatting, we were musing about a piece that we did for a client many years ago. Both of us hated it. While the offer was intact and the design intelligence was strong in understanding the overall brand and the motivations of the direct audience -- our visual minds were really turned off.
It was the second highest performing acquisition piece that year.
That taught us a lesson. Our overall goal was to communicate to the audience. Frankly, neither of us were the audience. While neither Kev or I would be motivated by this piece -- we were not the people the client wanted to motivated. The biggest mistake marketers make is to allow our own preferences to interfere with truly understanding the audience.
One more story.... when my son was about 2 years old my husband and I worked in a kid's program. One of the features of the program was a dorky beanie that had a helicopter blade on the top. On the way home I was nattering about the lack of sophistication of the premium when Chris piped up from his car seat: "I can hardly wait until I can get one of those hats!" The designer of the program was bang on in assessing the level of sophistication of the audience.
Design intelligence refuses to be tainted by personal taste. It is objective, rational and results oriented.
Barefoot Creative is looking for a designer as I write. Without a question we are looking for a designer with design intelligence!

2 billion emails sent today

I was meeting with a client about their marketing materials. It struck me as unusual that they didn't have a corporate web address -- as essential as stationary in my mind. The thinking behind the lack of a corporate web address was all about efficiency.
Then today, when I looked at a recent report from the Chief Marketing Officer Council, I read that the average individual receives 12 - 15 email messages each day.
Yes, my jaw fell into an open mouth slack position.
I've just now completed my morning jaunt through unanswered email. When I receive 10 - 12 emails at the start of the day I call the IT team to see if our email is down.
Tracking the effectiveness of mail -- digital and traditional -- is at the core of any marketing plan. We are still seeing higher overall results for traditional mail. Somehow it seems a bit easier to delete an email than toss a letter. Traditional mail has more opportunity to tempt me into opening it (I got a compass in the mail this morning!)
Here's are some stats that you might find interesting:
- Traditional junk mail accounts for over 100 billion pieces of mail each year, and 44% of this unsolicited, primarily promotional mail ends up in a landfill...unopened
- Email waste is also staggering. There is more than 200 billion email messages sent each day, yet 97% of all email sent is actually spam, according to an April, 2009 report released by Microsoft
- Cisco reports "customized" spam that is based on personal information stolen from the web has quadrupled over the last 12 months (2009)
- The average email open rate across 16 industries during Q2 of 2009 now stands at 22.2%, and has increased for the fourth quarter in a row
- About 3.3% of opt-in emails for subscribers in the US and Canada were sent to "junk" or "bulk" email bins, while 17.4% did not get delivered at all
- Forrester reports that by 2014, email marketing spend will rise to $2 billion - almost double the projected spend of $1.2 billion for 2009
- The average individual is expected to receive 25 messages a day in five years, double 10 or 12 emails received now
I have to write an e-blast....

Twitter....

I admit, I'm just playing with it (@bfootcreative if you want to follow my random 140 character tweets).
Marketing is all about getting messages to the right people at the right time. So those early adopter types who are engaged in Twitter are able to choose who they follow. They can also try to get me to follow them. That gives them a chance to get their marketing message to me.
So I get tweets like:
Free, Free, Free! These Simple Videos Will Show You How To Make Lots Of Money With Your Twitter Account. http://bit.ly/195LH8
and
A great read on the importance of Twitter and your company's use of it. http://bit.ly/2I2pm8
and
Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world.” http://bit.ly/RZu7b #quotes
and
On Oct. 24, we're walking... and building. Join us, and help build a youth centre in northern Uganda. (via @guluwalk)
OK, enough already.
Now I realize that Twitter is a mini blog. As a writer, it's a fascinating environment. The challenge to put on a meaningful (or not so meaningful but digitally coherent) message is fun. The traditional blog (I can't believe I used "traditional" to define a blog) provides a longer format for me to spew wisdom in my over verbose writer way. People can talk back to me, if they want to.
I assume that they can also talk back to me on Twitter -- where reading some entries is like listening to another conversation with my ear to the door with a glass.
But more than anything, it seems very much like millions of singular conversations -- sort of like everyone on Twitter is talking aloud to ourselves and a few others just happen to be listening in.
It's a little too early to see what the impact of Twitter is on the marketing world. Without a question my little tweets are attracting a remarkably diverse segment of people. Comparatively, @bfootcreative is naive and teeny. My few followers are not interested in what I say, but they're interested in my reading what they say.
I would be very interested in hearing what you think about the impact of Twitter in various communication contexts....

GenY

What do college students think is the most critical in their world? A new survey by SurveyU found:
81% think education is very important
68% consider child endangerment/abuse prevention critical
The next most important are: rape prevention (65%), civil/human rights (65%) and cancer (62%) round out the top five, with drunk driving prevention (61%), genocide (59%), domestic violence (57%), AIDS (57%) and environment/conservation (54%).
Poverty does not appear -- although one could argue that poverty is an issue that intersects many of these issues.
Most interestingly, GenY -- the generation where access to global information is the most ubiquitous (there is no "time before web" in their memory) -- they are most interested in issues related to their own lives, their own community and their own country.
Marketers and communicators must learn to navigate in a global world where personal takes precedence. We have the technology.... but do we have the will, the patience and the savvy?