AB: All-Round Nice Guy

Whether you sell widgets, or you service widgets, or you sell your time and skills to others who make widgets, sometimes your business is in a crowded market, and there’s not that much that differentiates your business over other business - at least, not in the eyes of your customers. Certainly, customer service, professionalism, price and quality are the cornerstones of any successful business - but let me add in one more to the mix: good design.

There are many aspects to what I mean when I say ‘good design’ (I’ll highlight some of the more pertinent ones in a second) but in general, ‘good design’ can be translated as ‘well thought out’. When you spend time thinking about your business from your customers’ point of view - by putting yourself in their shoes - you can appreciate all the things that your customers have to learn to be able to do business with you.

Sure, it’s intangible - spending time and effort making your business look better or run a little smarter doesn’t translate directly into selling any more widgets - but to put it into footy terminology, it’s simply another ‘one percenter’. Well, those one percenters win matches - so lets look at few ways for your business to kick some goals…

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Shop Design & Visual Merchandising

For businesses with shopfronts, the full range of good design practices are paramount here: clear signage out front for easy visual recognition; logical store layouts to assist your customers when searching for and comparing products (planograms, anyone?); easy to understand payment and service options; and a constant dose of your branding, whether that’s by your using corporate colours, or by adding style with your fixtures and fittings.

For businesses living in the virtual world, the exact same rules apply, albeit in different ways: clear signage translates into definitive search engine keywords and memorable names and URLs; logical store layouts translates into logical web site navigation; clear payment and service terms are doubly important when face-to-face communication is not present; and getting your branding across in the virtual world means that your customers should be able to tell that they’re dealing with the same business, even if they deal with you across email, web, phone or print advertising.

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Product (Industrial) Design

Manufacturers and builders and the like are already well aware that designing a product is not a simple affair - there’s always tradeoffs between quality and price, sturdiness and weight, and features and ease of use. The end result though, should always be a product that is purposefully designed and fit for the task intended.

Whether you’re in the ‘goods’ or ’services’ sector of ‘GST’, the same thinking applies to your business: what you do should always be purposefully designed to appeal to your target market - a well thought out offering, as opposed to the scattergun approach of ‘build it and they will come’.

Physical products need to conform to the physical world of quality and sturdiness, but virtual products and business services also need to conform to the equally rigorous demands of customer service and professionalism. In both worlds, though, the extra forethought that you can put into your products contributes to that pleasant ‘unexpected surprise’ for your customers, helping to ensure repeat custom and great word-of-mouth.

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Graphic Design

The visual look of your business is the combination of all the ways you interact with your customers - all the advertising and marketing, all the invoices and delivery dockets, as well your web site and the more traditional business cards and other stationery.

The benefits of taking the time to think through your visual ‘look and feel’ are three-fold:

Firstly, it gives you a co-ordinated attack - your customers can begin to pick up that when they see you in one place, and then another, that it’s the one and the same business both times. Sure, getting the message through that first time is hard, but it gets a little easier each subsequent time - especially if you take the time and effort to keep things consistent.

Secondly, every business has a target market, and, in general, every target market has a set of predefined expectations for the standards of the businesses that serve them. ‘Standards’ include the look and feel, the level of customer service and the relative quality/price points. By learning these expectations, your business can capitalise on the predefined notions, by standing on the shoulders of the businesses that have gone before you. The first smart thing to do is to make use of these expectations and ‘ride the wave’ - then the second smart thing to do is to go outside these expectations, and make your own waves.

Lastly, good graphic design begins to educate your customers about your business - both in the simplistic sense of providing clear and informative content about your products and services - but also by providing non-textual background information about the style and ethos of your business, so that the character of your business can be seen, giving your customers more trust in the way you operate, and in the ways you can help them.

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Essentially, good design is about good communication - giving non-verbal cues that reinforce what your business is all about. They can be perceived as visuals in the realm of graphic design, or they can be perceived as quality and value in the realm of product and industrial design. Good design can even be perceived as good business practices when all your systems and processes work *for* the good of your customer, and not against them. If something has been well thought out and well executed, then the experience is generally more pleasant for all parties involved.

By putting yourself into your customers’ shoes, you should be able to get a feel for their common needs and wants. Be careful though - it’s actually a hard thing to do - we all too easily assume that our customers already have a knowledge of ‘our side’ of our business - when in reality, not many customers ever take the time to learn everything our businesses have to offer - and nor should they have to - instead they rely on the verbal and non-verbal interactions that we give to them, either knowingly or unknowingly.

A lot of the time, however, all the merits of your good design, good planning and good forethought are not actively perceived by your customers, but instead are picked up subconsciously. Either way: tangible or intangible, the aim is the same - to make your business work smarter and look better.

AB out